Allegories of Modernity: Space, Time, and the Mediterranean

One of the defining historiographical gestures of the cultural criticism of the last thirty years or so has been to distinguish between early- and late-twentieth-century modernity in terms of their relations to space and time. During the first of the two phases, preoccupations with the temporal aspects of life and culture prevailed; during the second, preoccupations with space and spatial aspects. One was the age of Proust, Joyce, and stream of consciousness in literature, of Bergson and Heidegger, involuntary memory, and the ontology of temporality in philosophy; chronologically it coincided with the modernism of the first decades of the century..