As a baby, I was fascinated by shadows, how they lengthened and shortened till they disappeared, and how they moved their position around me and objects. I used to play with Barbies; I invented stories that lasted for days, progressively postponing the main events in favor of their preparation. Progressively, I became accustomed to my relatives’s death and their funerals. I realized that time connected these observations and games as much as the novels and films that I loved. In my list, you can find stimulating books where Time shyly shows itself on a stage.
I wrote
The Prison of Time: Stanley Kubrick, Adrian Lyne, Michael Bay and Quentin Tarantino
I love how the protagonist conceals the truth through his sophistication and charm. His pedophilia and rape are hidden behind an extensive network of lies about his alleged obsession with nymphets. ‘Between the age limits of nine and fourteen, there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they reveal their true nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac).’
With a simple two-faced name, Humbert Humbert is a narrator with many faces, one of the more complex and discussed in literary studies. He writes his story in prison, forever imprisoned ‘between the age limits of nine and fourteen,’ although his supposed autobiography breaks the walls of his time and that of his nymphets as a timeless flow of perverse mental and linguistic games.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all…
I adore this novel because it develops from the past to the present and future of the Buendìa family, although the past represents itself in the present and will represent itself in the future.
Generations change, but their stories remain the same in an endless loop. This timeless repetition of the same or similar misfortunes is interrupted by real historical and imaginary events that further distort the linear cause-and-effect chain.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
I love this novel because the protagonist narrator seems to have a precise aim of telling us his life, but cannot manage to write an autobiography that respects a chronological order of the events and selects those that are usually considered more relevant.
He cannot avoid spending time and sentences about apparently unremarkable events and descriptions. Moreover, he adopts graphic devices that further lengthen the progression of his story. I think Tristram Shandy’s life review is one of the most significant in the literature.
The classical temporal sequence of the more meaningful facts that should follow one another from a beginning to an end in a coherent chain towards straight aims cannot meet the requirements of an autobiography. Chaos and chance dominate.
Endlessly digressive, boundlessly imaginative and unmatched in its absurd and timeless wit, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is edited with an introduction by Melvin New and Joan New, and includes a critical essay by Christopher Ricks in Penguin Classics.
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter,…
In this novel, time becomes almost a character. It is an empty time, although so heavy and thick, to fill in all the space around the protagonist Dino and to enter into him.
Art and sex, the only Dino’s activities, are not characterized by their distinctive passion and enthusiasm that sometimes destroy and sometimes raise a man. Art and sex become a dead pastime dominated by time alone.
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
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I adore how the scholar Sternberg analyses how some of the greatest authors of all time create and play with time. His work is the example par excellence of how a comprehensive theory about time in literature should be written.
He discusses different epochs and genres, linking them to a coherent history. Sternberg’s brilliance charms me.
.."". this is one of the few books on narrative worth reading and rereading, a study that will make -- or should make -- a difference in the way we read narrative."" -- Nineteenth Century Fiction
""This is a remarkable book: original, clear-sighted, and luminously focused on a subject that has never been explored nearly so systematically or intensively.""A -- Dorrit Cohn, Harvard University
This book, long out of print, is now available in a paperback edition, providing another window into one of the most exciting minds working in the areas of literary and biblical literary criticism.
In films, as well as in our lives, time shortens or lengthens. It mixes with past memories and fantasies, with an unknown, often dreamt future, and with a present that perhaps does not even exist. Nevertheless, we can experience fleeting, intense moments during which we forget the very flow of time.
Screening and diegetic time, and narrative and stylistic techniques, determine ‘temporalities’: times within the time of our life, with their own rules and exceptions. The book analyses the overall ‘dominating’ time of Kubrick’s, Lyne’s, Bay’s, and Tarantino’s films and the moments during which this ‘ruling’ time is disrupted. The prison of time crumbles, exposing our role as spectators and our deepest relations with the film.
A retired English teacher has come home to Appalachia, a land of industrial disaster and natural beauty. He has been enticed with stories of Wildcat’s transformation: of the collective action embodied in Hotel Wildcat as well as the artisanal pursuits springing to life in the old iron mill. But in returning, he must confront his dark memories: the lost love of his hippie chic girlfriend not to mention the lost trust between his middle-class family and working-class Wildcat.
Written in the lyrical grit so characteristic of America’s Rust Belt, Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance is a testament to the redemptive potential…
Journey into Appalachia's Heart: Love, Loss, and the Resilience of a Forgotten Land
Discover the captivating allure of the Appalachian region as Jeffrey Dunn skillfully weaves a tale of love, loss, and redemption in his exquisitely crafted literary fiction masterpiece, Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance. Immerse yourself in the depths of the rust belt's rugged landscapes, where the echoes of industrial disaster intertwine with the sublime beauty of nature, all while the characters navigate the delicate dance between past and future.
In this poignant narrative, our protagonist, a retired English teacher, returns to his roots, lured back to the once-shuttered Hotel…
