Lost in Time: The Concept of Temporality in Works of the US Lost Generation

• Thesis title in Czech: Ztracení v čase: Pojetí časovosti ve tvorbě americké ztracené generace
• Thesis title in English: Lost in Time: The Concept of Temporality in Works of the US Lost Generation
• Key words: americká ztracená generace|časovost|narativní čas|americký modernismus|Ernest Hemingway|William Faulkner|Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• English key words: the US Lost Generation|Temporality|Narrative Time|American Modernism|Ernest Hemingway|William Faulkner|Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2021/2022
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 09.12.2021
• Date of assignment: 09.12.2021
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 15.12.2021
• Date and time of defence: 07.02.2024 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 08.01.2024
• Date of proceeded defence: 07.02.2024
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Hana Ulmanová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Lost in Time: The Concept of Temporality in Works of the Lost Generation
This thesis is designed as a comprehensive study of the concept of time in the novels of three major authors of the Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Literary works to be analysed are A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. The thesis will examine the notion of temporality from the perspective of philosophy and literary criticism. It will look at the way in which this phenomenon was reflected in philosophical texts of major thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. The discussion of modernism and its novelties will be also included to provide a theoretical and historical background for the analysis of literary works.
The opening chapter of this thesis will concentrate on the philosophy of temporality and its connection to human experience as represented in influential philosophical works. The texts that will be discussed are Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, as well as Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history as introduced in his work Illuminations. The following chapter will focus on the cultural, historical, and literary context of the American and European modernism to provide a theoretical background for discussing the Lost Generation in broader terms. It will also include the analysis of the modernist novel and its conventions. This will help to trace possible cause-and-effect relationships between general trends of modernist era and authors’ choices of specific techniques for representing temporality in their work. Being stuck in time and space, they focused on the present moment. The present that was at the same time haunted by the experiences of the past. There was no perspective for a better future. As a result, authors of the Lost Generation were looking for new narrative techniques that would allow them to express this complex relationship between the three dimensions of time. Thus, within the next three chapters the notion of time will be closely examined in the selected novels to discover the solutions each of the authors devised.
The main goal of this thesis will be to compare time as a philosophical concept with time as a narrative technique to find possible connections and differences between the two phenomena. This thesis will attempt to prove that a deep sense of cultural and historical extremity of the first half of the twentieth century had pushed both thinkers and writers to reconsider the notion of temporality to find a way of coping with the new reality.

References

Primary Sources
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. London: Vintage, 1996.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Books, 1987.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books, 1994.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Collier Books, 1986.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Collier Books, 1986.


Secondary Sources
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2001.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Donaldson, Scott. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Duvall, John N. & Abadie Ann J. Faulkner and Postmodernism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Fabiny, Tibor. “What, Then, Is Time?”. Piliscsaba: Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 2001.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Jameson, Fredric. The Benjamin Files. London: Verso, 2020.
Kalaidjian, Walter. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Leary, David E. The Routledge’s Guidebook to James’s Principles of Psychology. New York:
Routledge, 2018.
Matz, Jesse. Modernist Time Ecology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018.
McKeon, Michael. Theory of the Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Prigozy, Ruth. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Roraback, Erik S. "On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald." Chapter Thirty, pp. 398-411 in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class. Editor: McMillan, Gloria. New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2022. Publication date 2 September 2021.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Pocket Books, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Literary and Philosophical Essays. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Schleifer, Ronald. Modernism and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Vesterman, William. Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Wickerson, Erica. The Architecture of Narrative Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.