Contingency and Contraction: Modernity and Temporality in the United States, 1880-1920

在美国，时间的重构被认为是世纪之交技术、科学和工业现代化的一个基本方面。这个时代的大部分艺术作品似乎都渴望接受现代时间的加速和同步要求，并掌握偶然性、异化和他律的条件。该项目探讨了1880年至1920年之间的时期，从而与主要商业化的大众文化和跨大西洋艺术和文学先锋出现的高峰期相结合。文化表达的这两个领域都是生产力提高的更大社会经济领域的复杂组成部分，都受到总体时间制度和不同时间体验的密切影响。该项目计划衡量大众文化和艺术时间管理的模式，这些模式在很大程度上被现有的批判性学术所忽视。该项目认为，现代性的文化工作在很大程度上包括努力将一方面规范化（工业）计时法的不同动态与另一方面的个人经验和需求联系起来（而不是分开）。虽然过去的研究已经强调了现代性的文化反应，无论是从根本上拒绝或热情地接受加速和同步的条件，本项目计划集中在调解这些极端的方法（刻意强调这个过程的“中介性”）。该项目没有利用现代主义的颠覆或抵抗实践，而是集中体现了现代性的实用方面，它能够将多种时间制度和经验转化为可管理和可导航的“个性化”实体。收缩和缩写的形式模式在现代主义表达的这一领域发挥着开创性的作用。该项目以三种新兴的媒体形式为例，这些媒体形式已经被确定，并被认为是表达现代主义美学及其时间性的工具：早期叙事电影，早期报纸漫画和现代主义小杂志。所有这些形式都通过强调其自身形式上的简洁或其模块化结构来回应时间限制的迫切要求和加速的必要性。通过调查通常与不同文化领域相关的媒体中的平行呈现策略，计划中的项目打算从不同的角度看待整个时期。因此，它有助于目前挑战周期性和时代性的既定想法的努力。

The restructuring of time has been identified as an elementary facet of technical, scientific, and industrial modernization at the turn of the 20th century in the USA. Large parts of the epoch's artistic output seem informed with the desire to come to terms with the modern temporal imperatives of acceleration and synchronization, and to gain command of the conditions of contingency, alienation and heteronomy. The project explores the period between 1880 and 1920, and thus engages with the peak period of the emergence of a largely commercialized mass culture and of trans-Atlantic artistic and literary avantgardes. Both areas of cultural expression figure as intricate parts of a larger socioeconomic terrain of increased productivity, and both are intimately affected by overarching time regimes and disparate experiences of time. The project plans to gauge modes of mass cultural and artistic time management that have been largely ignored in the established critical scholarship.The project argues that the cultural work of modernity consists to a large extent in efforts to relate (rather than pry apart) the divergent dynamics of a regularizing (industrial) chronometry on the one hand and personal experiences and needs on the other. While past research has highlighted cultural responses to modernity that either radically reject or enthusiastically embrace the conditions of acceleration and synchronization, the present project plans to focus on approaches that mediate these extremes (with a deliberate emphasis on the 'mediality' of this process). Instead of capitalizing on modernist practices of subversion or resistance, the project epitomizes the practical facets of modernity, its capacity to appropriate a multiplicity of time regimes and experiences into manageable and navigable 'personalized' entities. Formal modes of contraction and abbreviation play a seminal role in this sector of modernist articulation.The project engages exemplarily with three emergent media forms that have been identified and that identified themselves as instrumental in the expression of a modernist aesthetics and its temporality: early narrative film, early newspaper comics and modernist little magazines. All of these forms respond to the exigencies of temporal constraints and to the imperative of acceleration by emphasizing their own formal brevity or their modular structure. By investigating parallel strategies of presentation in media that are commonly associated with different cultural spheres, the planned project intends to cast a different light on the period as a whole. It thus contributes to current efforts of challenging established ideas of periodicity and epochality.