Bloomsbury Present Tense: A Poetics

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction. Review This book renews attention to poetics as a worthy field of literary studies by offering a thorough and systematic examination of the narrative and philosophical significance of tense. The manner of delivery is engaging even as it remains scholarly. Fresh, at times daring, in its propositions, this work will no doubt provoke interest and generate discussion. --Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary, University of London, UKHow do we account for the widespread use of the present tense in contemporary narratives? What has happened to our understanding of time if a fundamental tenet of fictionalitythe idea that narratives make present something that happened in the (real or imagined) pastseems no longer operative? Drawing on narratology, cognitive science, deconstruction and philosophy of language, Avanessian and Hennig reconceptualize the relation between time and narrative; what is more, they rethink poetics as an expanded cultural theory concerned with human world-making. An impressive tour de force. --Andreas Gailus, Associate Professor of German, University of Michigan, USA About the Author Armen Avanessian is Visiting Faculty in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, USA, and, since 2014, Visiting Lecturer at the Art Institute, FHN Academy Basel, Switzerland. Previously he has been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and in the German Department at Yale University. From 2007-2014 he taught at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Free University Berlin, Germany. He is editor in chief at Merve Verlag Berlin. In 2012 he founded a bilingual research platform on Speculative Poetics, including a series of events, translations and publications: www.spekulative-poetik.de.'