Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse.

In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

Aleida Assmann was until 2014 Chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. She is the author of several books that have been translated into English, including most recently, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. With her husband Jan, she was awarded the prestigious 2017 Balzan Prize for Collective Memory and the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.

Aleida Assmann's Is Time out of Joint? has already become a classic in its national academic environment (and in segments of global humanities that can access German speaking scholarship). There is little doubt that the book will now quickly become a standard reference point in a far broader conversation about the temporal constitution of present societies.

Aleida Assmann's study tells an expansive story of the shifting forms of time consciousness since the eighteenth century, representing both a culmination of her previous work on cultural memory and a bold intervention into contemporary debates on modern temporality. In doing so, Is Time Out of Joint? combines pithiness with creativity.

Assmann's book stands not only as a forensic examination of the emergence and demise of the 'Modern Time Regime', but also as a thorough survey and critique of theorizations of time predominantly in Germanophone philosophy and literature

Superbly translated by Sarah Clift, Is Time out of Joint? produces an evocative picture of the temptations and vices of modern historical time, assembled from an intriguingly wide and eclectic range of cultural sources.

Michael Rothberg, UCLA, author of The Implicated Subject:

As one of Germany's leading humanist intellectuals, Aleida Assmann is an authoritative voice on cultural and historical change.

Kirk Wetters, Yale University, author of Demonic History from Goethe to the Present:

Since the 1970s, Aleida Assmann has been one of the most distinguished and prominent figures in transatlantic academia, working at the intersections of critical theory, literary and cultural studies, and memory studies. This book in particular is timely and urgent.