Individual temporalities and reading communities: Structures of temporality and anglophone long novels from the 1970s to the present.

复杂长篇小说作为现代主义的一种体裁，在时间和世界上提供了一个整体的文化优势。继普鲁斯特、乔伊斯和曼等作家之后，品钦和华莱士等作家创作了篇幅庞大、文脉交错、话语密集的小说。毫不奇怪，这些作品中的许多被解释为时代的标志和对当前的诊断；令人惊讶的是，尽管阅读这些长篇小说有很大的困难，但它们却产生了半专业和非学术的阅读社区。围绕长篇小说的阅读社区不是简单的解释性社区，而是培养表演的、集体的、暂时反思的阅读形式：例如，20世纪80年代流行的品琼的《重力之虹》的公开不间断阅读，以及围绕多丽丝·莱辛斯的《金色笔记本》（2008-09）和大卫·福斯特·华莱士的《无限的笑话》（无限的夏天，2009）的三个月阅读项目（都是在线记录的）。该项目认为，这些阅读项目主要回应了长篇小说对读者时间预算和认知能力的过度要求：它们组织阅读时间，使其在主体间可观察到，从而开放修改。阅读时间是根据词汇、审美结构和长篇小说中所表达的时间性问题（从科学到哲学的时间概念，再到配置时间和历史的社会模式）来构建的。为了阐述这一假设，需要结合不同的方法：长篇小说时间结构的形式美学，学术和非学术语境中对其区别的话语分析研究，以及解释和阅读社区的文学社会学。这种方法将突出长篇小说的阅读社区，作为过渡谈判的典范场所，但也是小说审美时间（特征时代）和社会配置的时间性之间的差异。

Complex long novels have consolidated as a genre in modernism by offering a cultural vantage point on time and world in their entirety. In the wake of authors like Proust, Joyce and Mann, writers like Pynchon and Wallace created voluminous, intertextually as well as interdiscursively dense novels. It is hardly surprising that many of these works were interpreted as epochal signatures and diagnoses of the present; what is surprising is the fact that they have generated semiprofessional and nonacademic reading communities, despite the massive difficulties involved in reading these long novels. The reading communities around long novels are not simply interpretive communities but cultivate performative and collective, temporally reflexive forms of reading: Examples are the public nonstop readings of Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow popular in the 1980s, and the three-monthly reading projects around Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook (2008-09) and David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest (Infinite Summer, 2009) (both documented online). The project argues that these reading projects respond chiefly to the excessive demands long novels make on the time budget and the cognitive capacities of readers: They organize reading time, render it intersubjectively observable and thus open to modification. Reading time is structured with reference to the vocabulary, the aesthetic structures, and the problematic of temporality as expressed in long novels (from scientific to philosophical concepts of time to social modes of configuring time and history). In order to elaborate this hypothesis, a combination of different methodological approaches is required: a formal aesthetics of temporal structures in long novels, a discourse analytical investigation into its distinction in academic and non-academic contexts, and a literary sociology of interpretive and reading communities. This approach will highlight reading communities of long novels as exemplary sites of negotiation for transitions but also for discrepancies between the novels aesthetic time (Eigenzeit) and socially configured temporalities.