2022
Alexander Creighton
Dissertation Abstract
"Fiction's Metronomes: Music, Time, and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel"
While the British novel emerges in a century increasingly governed by clocks and schedules, it not only assumes a variety of temporal shapes but also grapples with the antinomies of time as at once countable and defying calculation, present yet impossible to pin down. Following the lead of eighteenth-century novelists, readers, and scholars of music, I call on music’s intimate relationship to time to investigate an underexplored dimension of narrative theory: recursion. Tracing repeated motifs, objects, scenes, and decisions whose repetition seems to short-circuit time itself, I argue that music and novels in this period resisted nascent regimes of time-discipline linked to gender and class. Even as women and the emergent middle class are portrayed in terms of restrictive habits and routines—time as a condition of capitalist cycles of credit and debt—music and novels, by structuring recursion in different ways, together imagine alternative forms of being in and owning (or disowning) time.
While the British novel emerges in a century increasingly governed by clocks and schedules, it not only assumes a variety of temporal shapes but also grapples with the antinomies of time as at once countable and defying calculation, present yet impossible to pin down. Following the lead of eighteenth-century novelists, readers, and scholars of music, I call on music’s intimate relationship to time to investigate an underexplored dimension of narrative theory: recursion. Tracing repeated motifs, objects, scenes, and decisions whose repetition seems to short-circuit time itself, I argue that music and novels in this period resisted nascent regimes of time-discipline linked to gender and class. Even as women and the emergent middle class are portrayed in terms of restrictive habits and routines—time as a condition of capitalist cycles of credit and debt—music and novels, by structuring recursion in different ways, together imagine alternative forms of being in and owning (or disowning) time.