Time Is Many: The Anthropocene, Literary Form, And The New Contemporary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation reads contemporary Anglophone novels as a technology for managing the temporal (dis)order of the Anthropocene. I label five temporal categories that inform the four chapters and the coda making up the dissertation: 1) a speculative imperative, 2) species time, 3) geo-cosmic time, 4) the premodern contemporary, and 5) the end of time. I pay attention to certain types of novels, and I promote a specific and timely mode of writing. I read recent prose and graphic “multitemporal” novels by contemporary authors from the US (Jennifer Egan and Richard McGuire), England (David Mitchell and Jeanette Winterson), Canada (Claire Cameron), and Scotland (Ali Smith). These are neither only historical nor entirely speculative, but time-travelling, dual-narrative, multi-period, or post-era works of fiction that multiply times and scales and narratives. Collectively, they wed the present to several historical, prehistorical, cosmic, and speculative temporalities, thus manifesting ways in which the Anthropocene disrupts our experience of time, adds to our temporal imaginary, expands it, or mixes multiple temporal registers and scales, and ultimately changes the dimensions of what we deem our contemporary.\nThe Anthropocene is an ecological crisis just as it is a new geological epoch, and its temporal disorientations stand as major impediments to political, ethical, intellectual, emotional, and agential engagement with this crisis. By enlisting certain kinds of novels to navigate the Anthropocene times, this dissertation in turn promotes literary form as a mode of environmentalism, and it aims to contribute to a turn from genres and themes in ecocritical studies to an attention to time and the affordances of narrative form. Environmentalism in this dissertation goes beyond traditional environmental concerns with a specific place or problem, and it rather points to a newly urgent need for thinking differently about time and across times, including attention to evasive patterns of environmental time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".