Browsing by Author "Battaglia, Andrew John"

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    Oddly Modern Times: Alternate-Temporality Clocks and Other Peculiar Modes of Access in Anglophone and German Literary Modernism
    (2022-04-20) Battaglia, Andrew John; Roof, Judith
    In 1882, Western nations convened in Washington D.C. to debate and ultimately ratify a novel proposal: world standard time. Unlike the reigning mode of temporal accountancy in which each nation calculated and enforced its own temporal schema, the Canadian Sandford Fleming’s totalizing space-time grid sought to replace the various local times with twenty-four time zones all set against a common zero meridian, located at the Greenwich Observatory in London. In place of local solar time—which determines time by the sun’s apparent motion at a specific location—the West (and ultimately the world) elected to tell time by conventional reckoning, decoupling precision clocks and other time devices from solar time’s natural relationship to planetary motion. Reading the substitution of convention for naturality to be exemplary of literary modernism, this dissertation traces how late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century literature stages the affordances and limitations of technical intervention in putatively natural relationships. Looking at the human face as the site of expressions, the railway timetable as a proxy for foreign locales, and the deep future as terra incognita for human development, this dissertation traces how various prosthetic armatures fail to satisfy the presumptive reliability of natural relationships just as the vast technical network that subtends world standard time fails to satisfy fully the reliable if limited role that local solar time once played.