---

The fleeting nature of time is a defining feature of modern and postmodern existence. This volume engages with the critical sense of time in German culture, exploring the importance of temporality for artistic and literary production since c. 1800. Topics include time and space in art, the politics of time and memory, and the poetics of time.

---

The fleeting nature of time is a defining feature of modern and postmodern existence. Identified by Reinhart Koselleck as the temporalization ("Verzeitlichung") of all areas of human knowledge and experience around 1800, the concept of critical time continues to intrigue researchers across the arts and humanities. This volume combines theoretical and critical approaches to temporality with case studies on the engagement with the modern sense of time in German literature, visual art and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Contributions explore key areas in the cultural history of time: time in art and aesthetic theory, the intellectual history of time, the relationship between time and space in literature and visual art, the politics of time and memory, and the poetics of time. Essays question the focus on acceleration in recent critical discourse by also revealing the contrapuntal fascination with slowness and ecstatic moments, notions of polyphonous time and simultaneity, the dialectic of time and space, and complex aesthetic temporalities breaking with modern time-regimes.

---

Contents: Dirk Göttsche: Introduction - Gabriele Neher/Jonathan Tallant: The Philosophy of Time and the Implications from Renaissance Art - Jerome Carroll: Acceleration and Retardation: Temporality, Modernist Poetics and Modernity in the Work of Hans Blumenberg and Viktor Shklovsky - Maike Oergel: "The Grand Poem of our Time": Carlyle, Zeitgeist and his History of the French Revolution - Brian Elliott: Revolution, History and Time in Benjamin and Sloterdijk - Dirk Oschmann: Formbewusstsein als Zeitbewusstsein. Die Anfänge moderner Zeitpoetik im 18. Jahrhundert - Eva Axer: The "inexorable law of perpetual mutation": Motherwell and Goethe on the Tradition of the Ballad - Ralf Simon: The Temporality of Hospitality - Simon Ward: "Of Time and the City": Contemporary Visual Culture and the Times of Berlin - Iulia-Karin Patrut: Eigenlogische und historische Zeit in den transmedialen Collagen Herta Müllers. Memoria nach 1989 - Ulrich Bach: On Re-describing History in Christoph Ransmayr´s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis and Lilian Faschinger´s Stadt der Verlierer - Dirk Göttsche: Zeitpoetik in Kleiner Prosa der Gegenwart - Sabine Zubarik: The Ethics of Time: Stasis and Dilation in Thomas Lehr´s 42 and Svend Age Madsen´s Days with Diam - Sascha Seiler: Das Ende der Zeit. Die Darstellung der Apokalypse in Thomas Glavinics Die Arbeit der Nacht und Cormac McCarthys The Road .

---