Research groups
Research
My dissertation has the working title: "A Chronotope of Presentism: Time in the Aesthetic Imaginary of America's White Working Class."
The project argues that the 1980s work of American authors Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason represents the emergence of an entirely new chronotope - what we might call a «chronotope of presentism.» A motif that mimics the constricted and ephemeral nature of presentism (a conception of time that privileges only the present), it imposes rigid limits onto working-class storyworlds – resembling something akin to a pressure chamber. Within its time-space, the mere possibility of a future seems impossible, and the chronotope thus deprives the necessary means to formulate the aesthetics of solidarity.