Writing Against Time

by Michael W. Clune

For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers―Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery―have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding of some of our most important literature.

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2013

About the author

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Also writes as Michael Clune .

Reviews

[Geoff Wyss]

Clunky, repetitive, inexact prose makes this one a lot harder to read than it needs to be. The chapter on Nabokov and deQuincey (in which Clune reads Nabokov's Lolita and deQuincey's heroin as literary expressions of the desire to stop time, or attempts to capture the way addictive objects seem to stop time for the addict) is worth reading.

[Mark Broadhead · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't read it any more. Trying to be philosophical but only via secondary reading. Then he randomly attacks post-structuralism. Not very wise or learned.