Many Years Later: Prolepsis in Deep Time

This essay discusses the expansion of time that prolepsis produces within narrative and the enlarged time-scale of "world literature" itself. The essay explores some of the effects of this defamiliarization and tries to enlist the James of the "international theme" as a figure who both anticipates the challenge of "deep time" and struggles to maintain ethical focus within it. The essay uses prolepsis to suggest a connection between the literature of classical Greece and contemporary realism. The link between prolepsis and the representation of atrocity gives narrative form to an uncertainty about the borders of political community.