Matter as diffracted reality a study of time in selected fiction

Abstract

Time is not an abstract measure for the material world; it is a variable, and dispersed. This research is primarily concerned with the intra-active aspects of matter and its temporalities. Admittedly, this world belongs to everyone and our conception of time must reflect that. The aim of this research is to arrive at a concentred understanding of time(s) through Karen Barad s agential realism. As there is no easy geometry for time, this project will rely on select works of fiction to capture the disruptions that are the onslaught of multiple temporalities. These multiplicities materialise via water, landscape, entropy and fictional narratives in Graham Swift s Waterland, H. P. Lovecraftand#39;s The Shadow Out of Time and Thomas Pynchon s The Crying of Lot 49. The critical argument of the proposed research is: matter engages, instantiates and solicits multiple times and durations. This time is involved in the variable textures of contemporary lives human and non-human. To articulate the experience of our lives, in an expansive way, time(s) must be theorised to explain the simultaneous presence of heterogenous moments. The task at hand, is to discover how fictional narratives can become a part of an interdisciplinary framework, with scientific and geographic approaches, to understand time. Now, the broader argument of the proposed research is, diffractive modes of thinking may contribute to time: the multiple durations of matter sustain time as a dynamic force of creativity and becoming. It is so, because materialisation with(in) the world is perpetual, not an event. newline