Modernist Time Ecology

An extraordinary, field-transforming book. Matz's great innovation is to change our sense of the force and meaning of modernist literary form. He gives us modernist literature as an arsenal in the war for time, an assemblage of means to resist the debasement of human time by modernity. Readers will be astonished by the boldness of his claims and procedures.

This transformative contribution to modernist studies lucidly explores narratives that represent and cultivate ways of living with and in time. It thereby opens a whole new field of inquiry: investigating how stories can be used to model, through their formal design, strategies for solving the time-problems that they thematize.

Jesse Matz’s interpretive and discursive work are equally strong. He situates his thinking in a profound context of literary and critical history, taking long and recently established understandings of modernist time and reformulating these in ways that are at once careful and bold, exciting and exact. Modernist Time Ecology is a book of exceptional quality and value.

After the spatial turn comes a return to time. Modernist Time Ecology is an invaluable rethinking of temporality through the metaphor of 'time ecology,' the study of time as an environment of its own. Matz rereads the time-crisis of modernity and aesthetic efforts of reparation in a creative range of writers and thinkers.

In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz combines sophisticated theorizing and insightful close reading to develop a brilliant case for the powerful effects of modernist aesthetic forms on the temporal environment. Matz gives new meaning to the old phrase 'practical criticism.'