Teaching Time: Temporal Imagination and the Late Novels of Henry James

Abstract

KRISTEN CASE is professor of English at the University of Maine, Farmington, where she teaches courses in US literature, environmental writing, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. She is the author of American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011) and two books of poetry. She is director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago I learned this fact about reading: when we encounter an individual word in a sentence, we activate all possible meanings and associations of that word at once, keeping open the whole range of semantic possibilities that word might suggest, until the syntax of the sentence narrows the field of meaning. I picture this process unfolding in time as a kind of wave: each word flaring out into its range of possible senses before gradually settling down again, each little explosion of possibility immediately followed by another, remaining active for overlapping intervals in an ongoing rhythmic unfolding. In the small town in western Maine where I live, August is exceptionally pleasant. The bugs are gone, and there are lakes and rivers and ponds to swim in five minutes away in any direction. Kids run around outside until nine at night; the ice-cream stand is open till ten. The college students who stay in town get seasonal work, and in general there is a feeling of plenty, of fullness and possibility. By the end of the fall semester, Maine winter has set in. Sometime in November the churches start opening during weekday hours for older people who can’t afford to heat their homes all day and night. The university’s classrooms and hallways are muddy from boot traffic. The students start to run out of money, and some of them stop showing up. They can’t afford to fix their car, or their boss won’t give them the hours off, or they can’t pay their tuition. By December it’s dark by four o’clock. Putting The Golden Bowl on the syllabus for my senior seminar on literature and philosophy this fall was in every way an August decision. Later on, I would remember loosely calculating the hours it would take my students to read one hundred pages of James’s prose, and while I held in my head the word difficult while making