Temporality in Life as Seen Through Literature [electronic resource] : Contributions to Phenomenology of Life / edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

Section I -- A Temporal Chora -- Literature and the Sense of the Past -- "A Moment in Timelessness": Ben Okri's Astonishing the Gods (1995; 1999) -- A Mode of Recollection in African Autobiography -- "In an Instant of Time": The Imagist Perception and the Phenomenology of the "Upsurge" of the Present in Ezra Pound's Cantos -- Ascent Patterns in the Early Poetry of Tennyson -- Section II -- Ontology and Epistemology of Time in the Stage Play: Revisiting Roman Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of Literary Work of Art -- Temporal Sequence and Permanence in Neiges by Saint-John Perse -- Non-Teleological Temporality in Philosophy and Literature: Camus, Achebe, Emerson, Ellison, Hurston, and Nietzsche -- The Conflicting World-Views of the Traditional and the Modernist Novel -- Towards the Infinite Memory -- Between the Dialectics of Time-Memory and the Dialectics of Duration-Moment: Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf in Dialogue -- Section III -- TemporalRearrangement of the Moral Cosmos: Alice Munro's Fiction -- On the Distinction of Tragedy and Pathos Through the Perusal of Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle -- Telling Time: Literature, Temporality and Trauma -- Transcendence Unbound: Existence and Temporality in Montaigne's Essays -- Translation Lost, Translation Regained - on Temporality, or on Being -- Notes on a Poetics of Time -- Camus, time and literature -- Section IV -- The "Deepening of the Present" Throughout Representation as the Temporal Condition of a Creative Process -- "My Dear Time's Waste": The Experience of Time and Creation in Proust -- Indexicalities of image, text and time -- Achieving a Human Time: What We Can Learn from Faulkner's Benjy -- Kafka's The Metamorphosis: Gregor's Da-Sein Paralyzed by Debt -- Time in Post-Modern Fiction: Time's Arrow, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and "The Alexandria Quartet".

Temporality pervades the dynamic joint of existence, and the human being as such. As human beings unfold through ontopoiesis, each move of which punctuates the temporality of life, they, whose life experience, deliberation, planning, reflection and dreaming are permeated by temporal motivations and concerns, feel that they are engaged in the spinning of a common thread. Attributing to that involvement universal laws, constant existential validity and power, they absolutise/hypostasise its rule as a cosmic/human factor: "time". Yet today technologies are transforming the temporality of our existence by accelerating, intensifying, expanding our partaking in the world of life. Human communal and social involvement is being challenged in its personal significance to the core of our being. What happens to "time"? A basic reinvestigation of the nature of temporality is called for. Human creative endeavor - especially literature - may initiate it. Having the human subject - the creator - at its center, literature is essentially engaged in temporality whether that of the mind or of the world of life through the creative process of writing, stage directing, or the reader's and viewer's reception. Out of the cross-motivations that the creative mind filters in its temporal synthesis in touch with all the perspectives of existence, there surges the deepest significance of life in humanity and culture. But, first of all, life comes to light as timing itself in its logos. (Tymieniecka)