Time to Panic: Making it Personal in a Climate of Unrest

When colleagues ask about the origins of my current project on time and the rhythm of reading in American literature, I always respond that it was born not solely from intellectual curiosity, but also from a deeply personal... [ view full abstract ]

When colleagues ask about the origins of my current project on time and the rhythm of reading in American literature, I always respond that it was born not solely from intellectual curiosity, but also from a deeply personal understanding of the jagged way that time moves in my own life as a father. While this answer always baffles my colleagues, I have discovered that my own critical investments have become increasingly personal.  In this seminar, therefore, I hope to discover a way not simply to straddle this divide—a balancing that seems to retrench these forms of experience as alien to each other—but rather to think how, in our politically fraught climate, critically-engaged personal writing may be the only viable means to effect lasting political change.  As a test case, I recount my re-watching of Steve McQueen’s 2013 film 12 Years a Slave a few months ago.  On the eve of my daughter’s going to middle school in Charlottesville, my queasy experience of the elongated time signature of the quasi-hanging scene of Solomon Northrup pushed me to appreciate the film not simply as an artistic artifact to be admired for its critical skill or deft depiction.  Rather, my experience of it, in all of the gut-wrenching ways it spoke to losing and re-losing my daughter to a sense of time at once fleeting and overwhelming, opened up unimagined and deeply personal relationships to our own troubled pasts in Charlottesville, our deeply unsettled presents, and perhaps our replenished futures.