While debates in literary studies and other disciplines regarding so-called “historicist” and “presentist” paradigms are ongoing, this roundtable directs its attention to the ways in which texts necessarily contain multiple “times” or require a multi-temporal approach in order fully to be understood. Drawing inspiration from cross-disciplinary studies such as Alice Dailey's How to Do Things With Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol, Jack Halberstam's In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, and Whitney Trettien's Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, this panel intervenes in a timely discussion by positing plural histories and plural presents as the rule rather than the exception.
The panel session will consist of four short papers of ten minutes each followed by ten minutes of conversation between the four presenters. Twenty-five minutes of the session will be devoted to questions from session attendees.
Therese Banks’s paper, “The Slow Time of ‘Urgent Necessity,’” investigates French Jesuit bishop Jean-Pierre Camus’s first religious novel, La mémoire de Darie, où se voit l’idée d’une dévotieuse vie et d’une religieuse mort (1622), contrasting the protracted time of writing with the urgency of Christian conversion in the budding genre of the “roman dévot.”
Nick Utzig’s “A Delicate and Tender Prince: a Wartime Hamlet on Postwar Television” considers the first American televised performance of a “complete” Hamlet (1953). Sequenced after the World War II serial documentary Victory at Sea, NBC’s live broadcast of Hamlet paired its cast’s wartime connections with military-themed programing to promote the first of many successful Shakespearean television productions.
In her paper “Allegory, Antiquity, and Apocalypse in The Virgin Martyr,” Bailey Sincox will explore the dual temporality of Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s 1622 play, which subjugates its literal, ancient narrative (the life of St Dorothea) to a patently early modern polemic in which Dorothea figures persecuted Protestants.
Carlisle Yingst’s paper, “Trans Temporalities, Anachronism, and Diurnal Form,” will read the recently edited edition of Lou Sullivan’s (1951-91) diaries alongside early modern modes of journal- and account-keeping in order to rethink the temporal forms available for narrating trans life; this rethinking will present a new approach to recovering pre-20th century trans histories, one that challenges claims of anachronism.
This panel will interest scholars working across languages, periods, and sub-fields. By highlighting emerging voices in English and French whose work spans from the medieval period to the present, the session on “Weird Time” aims to engage a large and diverse cross-section of the Modern Language Association’s membership in its discussion of the temporalities of literature and the time(s) of literary criticism.