Recessional – Or, the Time of the Hammer

Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a subliminal convention of a certain fringe of modernism that works both in and against the canon of modernist literature in works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, as well as in McCarthy's own fiction. The latest edition in Diaphanes's THINK ART series, which explores the cultural and theoretical impact of artistic processes, "Recessional: Or, the Time of the Hammer" opens with an essay by McCarthy on recessional time as an aesthetic element and literary device. This essay is followed by an interview with McCarthy, in which he further discusses his own writing process, taking his most recent novel, Satin Island, as the starting point and casting new light on both avant-garde and realist literature. Praise for "Remainder": "An avant-garde challenge... [McCarthy is] one of the great English novelists of the past ten years" – Zadie Smith.