How Soon Is Now? (medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, And The Queerness Of Time)

By (author) Dinshaw Carolyn
Short description/annotation:
In this volume, medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw offers a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through a revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as the potential queerness of time itself.
Description:
How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.

Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.

Table of contents:
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. How Soon Is Now? 1
1. Asynchrony Stories: Monks, Kings, Sleepers, and Other Time Travelers 41
2. Temporally Oriented: The Book of John Mandeville, British India, Philology, and the Postcolonial Medievalist 73
3. In the Now: Margery Kempe, Hope Emily Allen, and Me 105
4. Out of Sync in the Catskills: Rip van Winkle, Geoffrey Crayon, James I, and Other Ghosts 129
Epilogue. The Lay of the Land: Amateur Medievalism and Queer Love in A Canterbury Tale 153
Notes 171
Bibliography 223
Index 245
Review quote:
"Carolyn Dinshaw writes with love, learning, and endless good humor about asynchrony, the amateur, and the complex queerness of both. How Soon Is Now? is full of asynchrony stories, both medieval and modern, stories in which time is out of joint or so full as to be irresolvable into the the narrowly sequential conception of time that remains one of the driving engines of the heteronormative imagination. Rather than rejecting the past or the future, Dinshaw argues for the asynchrony of a now in which the very distinction between past, present, and future becomes impossible to make. In a series of beautiful and moving readings, Dinshaw makes us think about what we love. "I want more life." Who can argue with that simple but extraordinary claim?"-Amy Hollywood, author of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History "Carolyn Dinshaw writes with love, learning, and endless good humor about asynchrony, the amateur, and the complex queerness of both. How Soon Is Now? is full of asynchrony stories, both medieval and modern, stories in which time is out of joint or so full as to be irresolvable into the narrowly sequential conception of time that remains one of the driving engines of the heteronormative imagination. Rather than rejecting the past or the future, Dinshaw argues for the asynchrony of a now in which the very distinction between past, present, and future becomes impossible to make. In a series of beautiful and moving readings, Dinshaw makes us think about what we love. ‘I want more life.’ Who can argue with tha