21st Century Literature and Time

Dear Sarah,                                                                                                                                     12/20/22   Hi there. I just wanted to take a moment (or perhaps several) with you and talk about time. I think, for us, time has been quite strange. We’ve been friends for over a decade now and so much, unsurprisingly and surprisingly, has changed. I think about when we talked about our futures together—how we both wanted to write stories—and where we are now. I promise I’m not just going to be too sentimental. But I’ve just been thinking.   I took a class this semester that I think you would’ve loved. Well, actually, two classes. But the one I’ll tell you about is all about time and literature. It sounds pretty abstract, right? What is there to time in literature? A lot, I’ll tell you. There’s historical time, which is pretty straightforward, and then other forms of time—like community time, queer time, environmental time, and so much more. I

  Will Pikus               Though all of the texts we read in class were exceptional, there was one that will stick with me for the rest of my life. A Tale for the Time Being was one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. Not only was the discussion of Schrodinger’s cat interesting, the fact that the theory of relativity was brought into discussion was also relevant. It’s something that I’ve really never thought about before, but now I think about it at least twice a day.              Since writing the paper on it and studying the topic, the idea of time being relative has affected my life in so many ways. My direct roommate and I have stayed up until the early hours of the morning discussing what it means for time to be relative. While he thinks time is linear and the same for everyone, I can’t help but disagree. I feel that if I slow down and observe the moment I’m in I can make that moment last much longer. I wish I could agree that time is linear. It would be easier to

  Emma Straus   21 st Century Literature and Time   Final Blog Post   December 2022     Over the course of the semester, I have grown more and more attuned to time. Specifically, time behaving in ways that we have discussed in class. We have explored the various natures of time, as it is not restricted to one depending on the context that it is examined. One quality of time that continually stood out to me was the way in which time behaves in art, whether in writing, photography, or painting. As a creator, I have gravitated toward this idea the most, and I have loved the way in which these creative outlets have become a preservation of time.   I have practiced photography for nearly six years now and I am constantly experimenting and learning. So the idea as photographs as a preservation of time has always been part of my experience. There is a sayi ng that people photograph the things they do not want to lose, or the things they love the most. And I believe this contributes to the

  Katie Roessel   21 st Century Literature and Time   12/14/22   Time and How I See It        When I read the prompt for this blog post, to tell any story about time, I began to reflect upon my recent past, how I perceived the passage of time, and the sequence of events that got me to where I am now. I don’t remember too much from when I was a young kid, perhaps deliberately; elementary school was pretty difficult for me, and middle school was torturous, as it is for most prepubescent 12-year-olds.      I think I became the most aware of the passage of time once I got into high school. High school was when life picked up for me both in and out of school. I was becoming more and more dedicated to dance, I was working hard to get good grades to get into a good university when I graduate, and I was growing more into myself, into the person that I am today. During high school everything went so fast. One day, I was sitting in my freshman orientation, and the next it was my last celebratio

  It was a wicked hot September day, about two weeks after my annual trip to see my grandmother in Florida. Typically a Labor Day excursion, my mother, brother, and father (if he was available) would fly down to sunny Jacksonville to celebrate my and my grandparents' birthdays. My birthday fell just before my grandmother's, and my grandfather followed less than a week after (the third, fourth, and ninth, respectively). That year I gifted my grandmother my most recent read and the next book in the series that we were reading together: Catching Fire. And my grandfather anticipating this got us both the following installment Mockingjay. When I read The Hunger Games (a little bit after the hype but before the movie), I told my grandmother about it on the phone. A few weeks later she was asking my mother for the title and author so that she could read it herself. We chatted about the book over the phone, as she read she would complain about the violence, swoon at the love story, a