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Emerging from the 1999 meeting of the English Institute, this thoughtful and well-edited volume of essays takes as its point of departure two terms—time and the literary—commonly thought to have been obliterated by information technology. As the editors put it, “Time disappears in the supposed simultaneity of electronic communication, instant messaging, and information retrieval; the literary recedes behind multiple screens: film, television, computers, Palm organizers, and play stations” (1). Breaking with literary and cultural studies’ focus over the last decade on “space” and the “present” as dominant categories of contemporary, “postmodern” experience, and “consumption” as the postmodern subject’s dominant mode of action, Time and the Literary argues “that the literary often structures our thinking about time now,” by “join[ing] immediacy and the instantaneous with their opposite, duration and critique” (1). Indeed, the editors continue, “If the literary is the information that resists its status as information, that which escapes the progression, ossification, and erasure of temporal progress, then it necessitates a re-reading of the present,” an act in which “the present is the space of contradiction, of multiplicity and non-coincidence [ . . . ], not the present of consumption but of resistance to consumption” (5, 6).

Defining the literary as “a moment or activity inherent in all cultural forms” (3), this volume seeks not merely to describe contemporary experience of the literary, but to point to its “avant-garde potential,” its capacity to “resist,” “challenge,” and construct (3). Part I of the collection focuses precisely on this potential, drawing on a wide variety of cultural objects. Catherine Gallagher relates “undoing” plots—or attempts to alter the present by changing the past—in American movies (in particular Spielberg’s Back to the Future) to the logic of rectification governing Supreme Court decisions, arguing that the enlarged “sense of plausible chronologies” evident in popular film “correlates with a newly activist, even interventionist, relation to our collective past” (12). [End Page 273] Jay Clayton explores “genome time,” or the eternal present of the gene, in science fiction, cyberpunk novels, film, and advertisements, asserting that literature’s task should be to resist romanticizing genome time in order to render the complexity of the double temporality characterizing human existence: the small scale of individual history and the “impersonal,” “perpetual calendar” of the gene (54). Inquiring into information’s displacement of the literary, Alan Liu envisions the possibility of cultural criticism and the creative arts becoming “ethical hackers” of postindustrial “knowledge work” (68), while Jane Gallop explores how the rhetoric of e-mail “enable[s] a relation” between women “where there wasn’t one before” (107).

Part II combines Paul De Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity” with two critical articles by Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson rethinking De Man’s remarks on the literary’s relation to the present. Highlighting “the ambivalence of writing” for De Man (in that “writing is both an ‘act’ (modern) yet also an ‘interpretive process’ (history) that cannot coincide with the action it interprets” [Arac 127]), and the problem of renunciation and forgetting in his essay (Johnson 174), Part II functions as a hinge between Part I’s focus on action and Part III’s concentration on historiography. Stephen G. Nichols and L. O. Aranye Fradenburg both examine apocalyptic thinking in the staging of history, the first dealing with French Romantics’ readings of the 11th Century, and the second treating group time and catastrophe in De Certeau’s work, by way of Nietzsche and Chaucer. The volume ends with Samuel R. Delany’s discussion of marginal practices and their historicization in biographies of poet Hart Crane.

Notable for its critical acumen, impressive range, yet coherent focus, Time and the Literary is a fertile contribution to recent cultural and literary debate.