The New American Temporality Studies: Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century

In recent years, American literary studies has reevaluated the cultural politics of time in nineteenth-century texts. A spate of critical works have called for renewed attention to the role of print culture, long held to be instrumental to the consolidation of American identity through the cultivation of a shared national time characterized by both linear progress and synchronicity, in both disrupting and abetting the formation of national consciousness. A landmark intersection of this temporal turn and affect studies, Dana Luciano's Arranging Grief, winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, mines a prodigious archive to analyze the development in the nineteenth century of an "affective chronometry: the deployment of the feeling body as the index of a temporality apart from the linear paradigm of 'progress'"; that is, uses of the body as a "timepiece" (1). She argues that emotional embodiment provided a slower, nonlinear time in contrast to national time: "As a newly rational and predominantly linear understanding of time came to dominate the West, the time of feeling, deliberately aligned with the authority of the spiritual and natural worlds, was embraced as a mode of compensation for, and, to some extent, of resistance to, the perceived mechanization of society" (6).

Central to this study is Luciano's theorization of chronobiopolitics, "the sexual arrangement of the time of life" (9). Historicizing the new embrace of grief in the nineteenth century, as opposed to the previous perception of excessive mourning as disobedience to divine will, she makes the surprising claim that grief was central to the deployment of sexuality. Examining the chronobiopolitics of domesticity, especially the mother-child relationship that reproduces subjects and connects the past to the future, she identifies a "reproductive/generational orientation at the heart of" a "sexual politics of time in the nineteenth century" (62). Taking "the dream-time of the maternal-filial connection" as an example, she indicates how alternate times can ultimately reinforce rather than challenge progressive national time (126). She writes, "[T]he mother's corporealized time takes form . . . against the linear time of history, naturalizing the economy from which it projects itself as a refuge" (127).

Transporting readers into nineteenth-century grief culture, the first chapter analyzes consolation literature such as mourner's handbooks and printed sermons, which performed, according to Luciano, "the dual task of soliciting the feelings 'naturally' associated with loss and of shaping and regulating their social productivity" (32). Despite these attempts to control the disruptive potential of mourning, Luciano's reading of the poem "The Little Shroud" (1822) by Letitia Landon indicates that departures from productive time may not be so easily allayed. With characteristic expressivity, she observes, the story's "dilation on the painful pleasure of longing intimates that the sticky textures of attachment might tug against authoritative arrangements of time, pointing toward the buried traces of resistance that consolation worked to cover over" (63).

Examining the bridge between personal mourning and national memorialization, Luciano describes the pedagogical task of monuments, "not to teach history but to instruct people how to feel about it . . . [T]he monument imposes closure on historical events by declaring for all time what they mean" (174). Expertly close reading texts ranging from Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" (1855) to Horst Hoheisel's 1995 proposal to blow up Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to memorialize the Holocaust, Luciano theorizes countermonumentalism: both "the countermonumental vision—the assurance that past, present, and future are linked not in a single linear narrative but in an ever-evolving array—and the countermonumental impulse—the demand for historical memory to work through this linkage without relying on amnesia or subscribing to a redemptionist teleology" (171). In the address we know as "What to the Slave Is the 4th of...