Is Time out of Joint? The rise and fall of time in the age of modernity

There is increasing insecurity and perplexity as far as time is concerned. Time has gone awry: out of joint, like it was for Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. The future can’t be relied on to deliver the promises it held, the present has become diffuse and complex, and the past, instead of being bygone, keeps coming back to haunt us in manifold guises. The reason for this temporal disorder is the decline of the modernist time system. Until recently we focused our sights expectantly on the future as the past slid smoothly away behind us. But the concept of temporal order has fallen into disarray. Aleida Assmann reviews our current day complex relationship with time and contrasts it with the way it once served as a social and cultural guideline drawing on examples from history and literature. She examines the causes that brought about the crisis of the modernist time regime and explains what led to its eventual demise.