A Time Out Of Joint

"Marvelous, terrifying fun, especially if you've ever suspected that the world is an unreal construct built solely to keep you from knowing who you really are. Which it is, of course."--"Rolling Stone" Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn't consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town in 1959. At least, that's what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet he's never heard of named Marilyn Monroe. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them like "bowl of flowers" and "soft drink stand." When Ragle skips town to try to find the cause of these bizarre occurrences, his discovery could make him question everything he has ever known.

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse. In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

The Time Is Out of Joint presents an examination of Shakespeare's distinctly modern confrontation with time and temporality, the difference between the truth of the fact, that of theory, and that of interpretation and revelatory truth, and finds that Shakespeare anticipated post-metaphysical philosophy and its central concerns at a time when modern metaphysics had not yet reached it speak. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Ragel Gumm, who earns his living entering a complex newspaper puzzle contest in 1950s California, discovers that he actually lives in the future and that his contest entries predict missile attacks from the rebel lunar colonists. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

How constructions of time shape political beliefs about what is possible--and what is inevitable To secure power in a crisis, leaders must sell deep change as a means to future good. But how could we know the future? Nomi Claire Lazar draws on stories across a range of cultures and contexts, ancient and modern, to show how leaders use constructions of time to frame events. These frames carry an implicit promise to secure or subvert an expected future, shaping belief in what is possible--and what is inevitable. "Ranging imaginatively across history and geography, this elegant book probes temporal sources of order and transformation. Its analytical wisdom discloses how calendars and representations of time shape political legitimacy, dispositions, and action."--Ira I. Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time "Great political leaders, for good or ill, seek to shape our daily lives by playing with time itself. That is the central insight of this elegant, erudite volume, one that means I will henceforth listen to speeches and manifestos with new ears and new tools to rebut them."--Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America "Nomi Lazar gives us a fascinating exploration of the political construction of time itself, as structured by calendars, dating systems, and other mechanisms used for legitimation, revolution, and a myriad of other political purposes. A memorable and endlessly interesting book."--Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School

In the last decade, the changing role of time in society has once again taken centre stage in the academic debate. A prominent, but surely not the only, aspect of this debate hinges on the so-called acceleration of time and its societal consequences. Despite the fact that time is fundamental to the way in which law and politics function, the influence of the contemporary experience of time on law and politics remains underdeveloped. How, for example, does society’s structural acceleration impact on justice? Does law actually offer stability and predictability in an ever-changing global world? How can legal and political institutions function in the wake of ever-increasing uncertainty? Both law and politics employ time to order society but they are also limited in what can be effectuated by time. It is this very tension between temporal possibilities and limitations that the contributors to this collection – drawn from different fields of law, as well as from other disciplines – examine.

Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he begins to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Contributors to this special issue investigate how queer theory might change when African texts, experiences, and concepts are placed front and center rather than treated as examples or case studies. The authors consider what the concept of customary does to the dialectic of tradition and modernity that is at the heart of much Africanist scholarship. Can queer theoretical texts travel beyond the North Atlantic world that made them without reproducing imperial ways of knowing? Can there be an African queer theory? In posing these questions, the authors encourage readers to consider queerness from and within Africa, exploring what African customary forms of gender and sexuality might do to the anti-normativity of queer theory and how presumptions within Euro-American queer scholarship contribute to Afro-pessimist and/or Afro-optimist scholarship. Contributors. Cal (Crystal) Biruk, Laura Edmondson, Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, Phoebe Kisubi, Keguro Macharia, Danai Mupotsa, Edgar Nabutanyi, Eddie Ombagi, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse