Just a little longer | Sydney Review of Books

A review of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty First Century.

A book on chapters! I know. Stay with me. For this apparently technical question transforms into a historical phenomenology of literary time. In this sense The Chapter continues the inquiry Dames has been carrying out for the past quarter century in his scholarly work – the exploration of what he called, in Amnesiac Selves (2000), the ‘linguistic organization of temporal experience’, borrowing the phrase from the great German historian Reinhart Koselleck. In The Chapter, however, the scope has been radically widened, in part – one suspects – to make sense of the novel’s present fortunes. Dames declared in his previous book, The Physiology of the Novel (2007), the necessity of developing ‘nuanced and even-handed accounts of what I might call the social norms of cognition of given historical moments’, norms that are reproduced in large measure by the norms of writing. Enter the chapter. One of the basic structures of the book, the chapter is a ‘box of time’ that shapes the reader’s experience of temporality. As such, changes in chaptering present one way of exploring changes in the experience of time in literary history. How did time feel in late antiquity, or in fifteenth-century Burgundy, or to a former slave at the end of the eighteenth century? Studying the chapter might also tell us something about our experience of time now, in ‘the present’ – whatever that is – and the historical distance between our time and that of times past.