Description
Book SynopsisAssuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of reading and writing history is tied to the endurance of traces of the past and their coming to legibility, allegorically, at a given time. Through attentive readings of a range of textsincluding theoretical writings, diaries, newspaper reports, and live television broadcastsIn the Event elaborates the ways in which allegory disrupts our presumptions of continuity and simultaneity between the image (whatever its medium) and what we take it to represent.
The author demonstrates that a theoretical corpus must be understood not merely as a discrete set of arguments, but as work that takes place in time and on which time itself is at work. Against the temptation to regard a text (including a text of philosophical aesthetics or critical linguistics) as explained or defined by a fixed temporal context, this book emphasizes the tex
Trade Review
“An event of real significance in contemporary criticism, this book is an elegant and lucid study of the constitutive role of time in theoretical speculation and the structure of television, in the making of journalism, and the composing of personal diaries.”—Forest Pyle, University of Oregon
Table of Contents
List of illustrations; Introduction; Part I. Journals, Theories: 1. The invasion of the corpus snatchers; 2. The work to come; Part II. In The Wake Of Television: 3. No time like the present; 4. Mission in action; 5. Fast-forward; 6. The test of time; Part III. Journals Of Survival: 7. 'Only a question of time, etc'; 8. 'The only news was then'; Notes; Index.
