“. . . makes a genuine contribution to criticism of the contemporary novel, skillfully reading a set of major writers from DeLillo and Whitehead to Lerner, Gibson, and others.” —Caren Irr, author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century— -
"Mathias Nilges refuses to afford us the luxury of assuming that fiction is incapable of grasping the nonsynchronicity and unequal development of contemporaneity. By defying the cynicism of reading the present merely as the guarantor of future ruin, his book reacquaints us with the contours of literary hope in the face of crisis, making an indispensable case for understanding how the novel today continues to imagine temporal alternatives to our capitalist moment." —David James, author of Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation— -
“In a burning world, who has time for novels? Nilges’ argument that a failure of imagination lies at the root of the planet’s lost future affirms the residual imaginative form of the novel as a spur to challenge the closure of the temporal present. Expansively researched, brilliantly periodizing, and richly observed, these supple readings show how creative fictions critically theorize temporality and history, revealing the manifold possibilities persisting amid permanent crisis.
How to Read a Moment is a crucial book for our moment indeed.” —Anna Kornbluh, author of
The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space
“This book identifies the Zeitroman, or ‘time-novel,’ as both a timeless form, in that its history is that of the novel itself, and a contemporary form, insofar as it challenges the proposition that space has now, in fiction as in life, eclipsed temporality. Nilges draws on an unusually capacious selection of American novels spanning the post-1945 period to argue that, rather than spatialization, the ‘contemporaneity’ of competing, complementary, or unrelated temporalities distinguishes the ‘contemporary’ from previous moments in the history of the novel. The takeaway for readers is at once acutely vexing and wonderfully refreshing: a renovated notion of ‘postmodernism’ that did not end so much in the late 1980s as become a reality in its own right, an already mediated reality from which novels have harvested multiple ways of framing the present.” —Nancy Armstrong, coauthor of
Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example
“Recommended.” —
CHOICE
“Nilges does not echo the common refrain that the
Zeit in which we live has exhausted itself and ‘the future may have ended.’ Instead he argues that the contemporary American time novel imagines new conceptions of time altogether and in doing so pushes us beyond the limits of crisis-driven nihilism.” —Sarah Wasserman,
Textual Practice
“As suggested by the title’s emphasis on the activity of reading, How to Read a Moment mounts a robust and valuable defense not just of the novel but of reading and, thus, of the profession that has reading at its core, literary studies. … Nilges’s theoretically rich analyses of the time novel will surely serve as a model for the books to come on the topic.” —Diletta De Cristofaro, American Literary History
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