Time on the Brink of Impasse

Brittany Murray is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the coeditor of Migration, Displacement, and Higher Education, Now What? She has also coedited special issues of South Atlantic Quarterly, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and EuropeNow.

• Introduction, Then and Now 1Time before the Seventies, 4 • Temporal Disarray, 7 •A Crisis in Historicity?, 9 • Imagining Time Otherwise, 14 • The Book’s Chapters, 151. After the Working Day 19National Planning and Chronométrage, 24 • Contesting Time in the 1970s, 26 • Le Temps incertain: "large puddlesof time", 29 • Experiments in Form, 31 • Michel Jeury andcinéma militant, 32 • Rethinking the Crisis in Historicity, 362. Women Filmmakers Take Time 39Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 44 •The Videos of Carole Roussopoulos, 51 • Sarah Maldoror,Sambizanga, 57 • What Happens When Nothing Is Happening, 633. Counter-Mapping Temporal Borders 65Proliferating Borders, 67 • Literary Cartography, 69 •Counter-Mapping Topographie idéale pour une agressioncaractérisée, 70 • French Migration Policy, Protest, andthe Page, 79 • Conclusion, 84 4. Clarity and Clutter in Urban Space 86Perec Collects Words at the Place Saint-Sulpice, 89 •The New Society and the Space of the City, 93 • Insidesand Outsides, Surfaces and Depths, 97 • Les Halles,Bidonvilles, Cités de Transit, Grands Ensembles, 103 •Forms of Resistance, 107 • Daguerréotypes, 110Conclusion 118The 1970s Now, 118 • Periodizing Postmodernism,Periodizing Postmodernity, 120 • Naissance d’un pont:Postmodernity without Postmodernism?, 123 • Cinétracts against Nostalgia, 128Acknowledgments 135Notes 137Works Cited 155Index 169

"Brittany Murray’s wonderful analyses reveal the complex mediations between the novels and films of 1970s France and the great social upheavals of that era. Her eyes are also constantly on the present, demonstrating convincingly that these aesthetic and political interventions from the 1970s help us make sense of our world." - Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies "Time on the Brink of Impasse shows what we can learn, fifty years on, about how to restore to humanity a sense of historicity, an apprehension that the past inflects the present but does not necessarily determine the future." - Jennifer Willging, Ohio State University "Murray provides a rich alternative account of the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of postmodernity. Her revisionist narrative demands that we attend to the powerful political work of artists and collectives that exists underneath or against dominant ideological formations of the era." - Christopher Breu, Illinois State University