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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1. Time and the Modern Baudelaire's Discovery of the Present How Long Does the Present Last? 2. Work on the Modern Myth of History Transformations in the Idea of Progress The Theory of Time Underlying Modern Historiography Modernization Theory and Theories of Modernity When Does the Modern Begin? Phases of Modernization in Western History The Golden Door of the Future: Modernization as Culture (Using the Example of the United States) 3. Five Aspects of the Modern Temporal Regime Temporal Rupture The Fiction of Beginning Creative Destruction Destroying and Preserving: The Invention of the Historical Acceleration 4. Concepts of Time in Late Modernity Compensation Theory Compensation Theory and Memory Theory: Two Different Approaches to the Past 5. Is Time out of Joint? Total Recall: The Rhetoric of Catastrophe and the Broad Present Connections between the Past, Present, and Future 6. The Past Is Not Past; or, On Repairing the Modern Time Regime Three New Categories: Culture, Identity, Memory The Past Is Not Past: Historical Wounds and the Idea of Reversible Time Identity Politics: Intersections between History and Memory Two Trends in the Politics of History Conclusion Works Cited Index