Time on the Pulse
Affective Encounters with the Wristwatch in the Literature of Modernism and the First World War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12917560 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cedric Van Dijck (0000-0002-7485-9921, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 161-178 |
| Publication date | 2016-06-20 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modernist Cultures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-8629 • E-ISSN: 2041-1022 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/mod.2016.0133 |
| OpenAlex | W2464261191 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Time is a constitutive feature of modernism, which developed in a period when the stability of the self was disintegrating. This paper considers the link between modernist temporality and affect by looking at the wristwatch, the first timepiece worn on the body. I focus on its emergence in World War One and go on to discuss two encounters with the timepiece in Siegfried Sassoon's ‘Attack’ (1918) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). In these texts the figure of the conflation of wristwatch/ticking and wrist/pulse articulates a loss of individual mobility and agency in the modern world. The wristwatch symbolizes the way in which oppressive systems of time were lived and internalized. Situated at the crossroads of affect studies, object studies, and the study of modernist time, my argument posits that the object informed an understanding of temporality in corporeal terms. Because of that focus on affect, the wristwatch suggests how the First World War may be seen as a vital part of the modernist timescape
Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Affect theory · Agency (philosophy · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Literature · Modernism (music · Object (grammar · Period (music · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Highly cited | No |
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