Shapes of Time

Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.

Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.

Michael McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College. His work has appeared in the journals New German Critique, The Germanic Review, and Word & Image.

With wonderful erudition and lucidity, Michael McGillen's Shapes of Time leads its readers through the difficult subject of modernism's discovery of a plurality of constructed, curved, and twisted spaces. By showing that these spaces made it possible to reimagine historical trajectories, McGillen's book compels us to take seriously the relationships between mathematics and narrative and the persistence of religious thinking into modernity.

Matthew Handelman, author of The Mathematical Imagination:

Engaging with a rich and complex array of ideas, Shapes of Time brings together an impressive amount of research to illuminate a significant intellectual-historical momentwhen thinkers turned away from historicism to a modernist notion of history in which the end and the present become intertwined.

Leif Weatherby, New York University, author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ:

Arguing that non-Euclidean geometry shaped how modernist thinkers envisioned the end of time, Michael McGillen—well versed in both modernism and current debates on eschatology and messianism—moves easily between theology, critical theory, and narratology in often brilliant close readings of both familiar and unexpected texts.