In the eleventh book of his Confessions, Augustine gives voice to the perplexity that motivates this course: "what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." In this course, we will consider the many difficulties that arise when one attempts to answer Augustine's deceptively simple question, giving special attention to the probing reflections about the experience of time that played such an important role in the development of twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Is time essentially a series of punctual and homogeneous "nows," best measured by clock and calendar? Or does this objective picture of time (which imagines it as analogous to space) exclude some essential aspects of our first-person consciousness of time? To take a basic example, when we listen to a musical melody, is it but a sequence of individual tones that we hear? Or is there a temporal duration or continuity to the series perceived as a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts? If so, how (if at all) do the subjective and objective aspects of musical time fit together And are there other types of time-consciousness that cannot easily fit into an objective picture of time but which nonetheless play an essential role in our lives? These are the kinds of questions we will ask, both of ourselves and of the many literary and philosophical works written in the last century that found time-consciousness a rich and absorbing subject. Time-related topics we will investigate include stream of consciousness, memory, haunting, the everyday, finitude and death. Literary works we will read include Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. We will also read philosophical treatments of time by St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, William James, Henri Bergson, John McTaggart, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, one 5- to 8-page paper and one 8- to 10-page paper. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference to English majors. (Criticism)

Hour: RHIE