"To Feel the Flow of Time"

The article discusses the state of research on new temporality in literature and proposes that one of the more commonly used tools for describing temporal experience should become the notion of “dividual” person introduced by Jane Bennett in her book on Walt Whitman’s poetry. This subject foregrounds its divisibility while remaining open to the flows of matter through and besides this divisibility, which enables the dividual person to experience processual phenomena, hence it becomes useful for the study of literary records of experiencing time. The analysis of Artur Daniel Liskowacki’s poem allows finding dividual subjectivity in the lyrical record of the protagonist-poet’s listening to a bird’s song: the encounter with the nightingale occurs at a time called by scholars the “abyss of the Anthropocene,” supposedly catastrophic for entire bird populations. In turn, Natalia Malek’s poems from the volume Obręcze (Rims) reveal the important temporality of women’s “little strike.” Feeling the flow of time by a dividual woman begins with the “strike-like” stopping of the processes that reproduce her reality and leads to their “passage” through systems designed by herself. The article contributes to studies of literature on asynchronous environments of human life as a counterbalance to the synchronous chronological time of modernization

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Sociology · World Wide Web · American and British Literature Analysis · Computer Science · Mathematics · Philosophy