Eternity's Ennui: Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature

This book examines the nature of Augustinian time as the unfathomable yet permanent focus of the present. What are the implications for Augustine’s confessional discourse? How to reconcile the brevity of time’s focus with eternity’s longueur and the rhetoric of digression? Augustine articulates temporality as focus rather than duration. It encompasses the shift from the future through the present to the past. Yet this a-causal, free-floating concept of time has never been applied to the shape of Augustine’s own narrative in the Confessions, or to that other vintage Augustinian problem: predestination. This book examines Augustinian temporality by experimentally projecting it onto modern(ist) authors (Kleist, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett) who are less dependent on sequential narrative and more concerned with the fragility and sustainability of voice in time. Processed through this mill of unfamiliar readings, the poignant problem of Augustinian time is how focus can account for digression. How can one deal with an unfathomably brief notion of time while eternity’s longueur hovers over it?