In this episode I'm joined by Céleste Callen, who researches into time and temporal experience in 19th century literature. Specifically, we discuss her PhD which utilises the works of Henri Bergson as a lens through which to read the works of Charles Dickens. We discuss how for Bergson, time is a subjective experience rather than linear, and how this impacts on the standard novel construction, in addition to narrative voice (such as in David Copperfield). We think about how time became more standardised and important for the Victorians (and other 19th century societies), with the introduction of the railways, Greenwich Mean Time, all of which show how temporality intersected with (and impacted from) modernity. We discuss how the pandemic impacted our sense of time, and how the 19th century constructions (such as working weeks, timetables etc) endure in different ways today.
About my guest: Céleste Callen is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests revolve around time and subjective temporal experience in nineteenth-century fiction. She holds a BA in English from King’s College London, where she wrote a dissertation exploring the deconstructed boundaries between childhood and adulthood in Dickens and Barrie. Her postgraduate dissertation explored the self's relationship to time in the works of Balzac, Stevenson and Wilde, which inspired her current doctoral project. Her PhD research explores subjective temporal experience in Dickens’ fiction, and more specifically argues that Dickens anticipates modern philosophy’s conception of temporal experience by reading his fiction through the lens of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time.
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