Chronotypes: The Construction of Time

Time belongs to a handful of categories (like form, symbol, cause) that are genuinely transdisciplinary. Time touches every dimension of our being, every object of our attention - including attention itself. It therefore can belong to no single field of study. Of course, this universalist view of time is not itself universal but rather is a product of the modern age, an age that conceived of itself as the 'new' time. Time has thus gained new importance as a theme of general research with the 'post-modern turn' now manifest in many areas of intellectual endeavor, especially in the humanities and social sciences. 'Chronotypes' are models or patterns through which time assumes practical or conceptual significance. Time is not given but (as the subtitle indicates) fabricated in an ongoing process. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural, constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social, and cultural levels. They interact, they change over time, and they have histories, whose construal is itself an act of temporal construction. This book - an interdisciplinary collaboration of philosophers, historians, literary critics, and anthropologists - examines the ways individuals, societies, and cultures make sense of time by constructing it in diverse patterns. Its title intentionally echoes a concept of narrative theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'chronotype', because narrative recurs as a chief form within which we build temporality. The topics treated by these essays range from story-telling to cross-cultural communication, from epistemological debates to concepts of historical periodization, from the construction of life stories to the stratification of social time.<

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments; introduction; Part I. Thinking Time: 1. time in physical and narrative structure Bastiaan C. Van Fraassen; 2. Time and creation Cornelius Castoriadis; Part II. Temporal Frames of Inquiry: 3. A slip in time saves nine: prestigious origins again Jonathan Z. Smith; 4. The time of telling and the telling of time in written and oral cultures Jack Goody; Part III. Time and the Politics of Criticism: 5. Time and timing: law and history Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; 6. The temporality of rhetoric Dominick Lacapra; Part IV. The Temporal Order of Social Life: 7. The constitution of human life in time Thomas Luckmann; 8. Synchronizing individual time, family time, and historical time Tamara K. Hareven; Part V. Time, Narrative, and Cultural Contact: 9. Of dogs alive, birds dead, and time to tell a story Johannes Fabian; 10. La Fontaine and Wamimbi: the anthropology of 'time-present' as the substructure of historical oration David William Cohen; Notes; Index.

Review :
'An outstanding collection of essays on a significant topic of wide concern. The authors are leaders in their fields, and they provide a cross section of current advanced thinking about time in several disciplines and attempt to define common ground in a genuinely transdisciplinary category. Specialists in each of the disciplines covered should welcome the book for the original material in their areas but also, and even more eagerly, for seeing how their concerns with time intersect with those of neighboring disciplines. Everybody will find something new and valuable.'Paul Alkon, University of Southern California