The Planetary Clock

Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions

Paul Giles (Challis Professor of English, The University of Sydney)

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English

Oxford University Press
25 February 2021

Art & design styles: Postmodernism; Film & movie: styles & genres; 20th century & contemporary classical music; Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a Florentine clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into juxtaposition with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall), and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), this volume enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century.

By: Paul Giles (Challis Professor of English The University of Sydney)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 26mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 241mm
Weight: 882g
ISBN: 9780198857723
ISBN 10: 0198857721
Pages: 436
Publication Date: 25 February 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. He has worked at the Universities of Nottingham, Cambridge, Oxford, and Portland State and he is currently serving as President of the International Association of University Professors of English.

Reviews for The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions

Always challenging conventional wisdom and armed with an impressively vast archive of primary source material, Giles's work consistently expands the scope and scale of contemporary cultural analysis...The threads of reciprocal relation that Giles weaves together provocatively reframe both postmodernism and the antipodean in insightful and innovative ways...In illuminating the antipodean imaginary that runs through postmodernism, The Planetary Clock makes an important and innovative contribution to our understanding of that historical moment. * Mitchum Huehls, University of California, Los Angeles, ALH Online Review *