Time in Variance

Arkadiusz Misztal, Ph.D. (2007), University of Gdańsk, is Professor in American Studies at that university. He has published work on contemporary fiction, narrative theory, and the philosophy of time, including Time and Vision Machines in Thomas Pynchon’s Novels (Lang, 2019). Paul A. Harris, Ph.D. (1991), University of California, Irvine, is Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He has published work on interdisciplinary study of time, literary theory, and geo-humanities, including the co-authored book Contemporary Viewing Stone Display (VSANA, 2020). Jo Alyson Parker, Ph.D. (1989), University of California, Irvine, is Professor Emerita of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She has published essays on time and narrative, including in the works of Kate Atkinson, David Mitchell, and Tom Stoppard, and the book Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner.

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors



Introduction

 Paul A. Harris, Arkadiusz Misztal, and Jo Alyson Parker



part 1: Variations on J. T. Fraser’s Hierarchical Theory of Time

1 President’s Address: Time in Variance

 Raji C. Steineck



2 Out of Plato’s Cave

 Steve Ostovich



3 From the Biotemporal to the Ecotemporal in Atilio Caballero’s La última playa

 Lucia Cash Beare



4 Founder’s Lecture: Is Time Out of Joint? Or at a New Threshold? Reflections on the Temporality of Climate Change

 David Wood



5 Slow Time: The Suspension of a Tension

 Paul A. Harris



part 2: Variant Narratives

6 Temporal Otherness and the “Gifted Child” in Fiction

 Adam Barrows



7 The Seductive Quality of Variable Time in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

 Sue Scheibler



8 In the Forest of Realities: Impossible Worlds in Film and Television Narratives

 Sonia Front



9 “Out of Repetition Comes Variation”: Varying Timelines, Invariant Time, and Dolores’s Glitch in Westworld

 Jo Alyson Parker and Thomas Weissert



10 Time in Variance and Time’s Invariance in Richard McGuire’s Here

 Arkadiusz Misztal



part 3: Measuring Time’s Variance

11 Variance in Time Morphologies in Production and Consumption of Incense in Medieval Japan

 Vroni Ammann



12 Understanding Computation Time: A Critical Discussion of Time as a Computational Performance Metric

 David Harris-Birtill and Rose Harris-Birtill



13 Variations of Narrative Temporalities in John Farrow’s 1948 Film The Big Clock

 Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard



14 Transcending Temporal Variance: Time-Specificity, Long Distance Performance and the Intersubjective Site

 Emily DiCarlo



15 Temporal Experience in George Benjamin’s Sudden Time

 Martin Scheuregger



Index