"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.

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

The dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive social trends rise (albeit at an uncertain speed) toward a relatively homogenized world. In the post-1945 period, some analysts contested this linear model, arguing that the modern world was rather one of escalating polarization. Their view was strengthened by the separate emergence within the natural sciences of complexity studies, which suggested that natural systems inevitably moved away from equilibrium, and at a certain point bifurcated radically. This book, based on a truly collaborative international research project, evaluates the empirical evidence in this debate in order to (1) give an adequate portrayal of the historical realities of the world-system, (2) draw a nuanced assessment about this debate, and (3) provide the basis on which we can not only envisage probable future trends but also draw conclusions about the policy and/or political implications of past and future research. The work of ten research clusters, based on crucial topics of overlapping nodes of social activity, provides a vantage-point with which to assess the basic issue; a clear picture emerges of "world-historical interpretations of continuing polarizations."

Publisher Description

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!

Spanning 25 years of serious writing on hip-hop by noted scholars and mainstream journalists, this comprehensive anthology includes observations and critiques on groundbreaking hip-hop recordings.