Dr. Adam Barrows
2024 Keynote Information
‘The waste of the years and the perishing of stars’: Cosmic Time and Eschatology in the Modern Literary Imagination
Astrophysical research in the early twentieth-century began to reveal the age and extent of an impossibly old and unthinkably vast universe. For some, the spatiotemporal limitlessness of the cosmos bolstered hope and optimism in a longue durée of human possibility and achievement. “We are drawing plans and laying foundations for a longer future than we can well imagine,” wrote the physicist Sir James Jeans in 1929. For others, the limitlessness of the cosmos counseled despair and humiliation, rendering insignificant the potential legacies of human endeavor. This talk explores the politicized discourse of cosmological time in the modern literary imagination, and the ways in which cosmic time has both nourished and frustrated eschatological imaginations of the end of humanity.
About Dr. Adam Barrows
Adam Barrows is a Professor of English Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of two books on the subject of time and temporality: The Cosmic Time of Empire (California, 2011) and Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn (Palgrave, 2016). He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on the relationship between literature and time in such venues as James Joyce Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of Literary & Cultural Studies of Disability, and Modern Fiction Studies, which awarded him the Margaret Church Memorial Prize. His current book project investigates the temporality of madness in twentieth-century fiction.