Course Description
This course discusses the untimely image of time and its relation to literary creation. This course is in two sections: firstly it will explore the notion of time and the image that recapitulate time in Deleuze and Benjamin’s theory. The second section is devoted to discussion of the image in literary practice.

Theoretical Core: Gilles Deleuze suggests that there is time that is untimely for movement, virtual time that is expressed by but autonomous from actual movement. It is a time where past, present, and future coexist as a whole; it is also a time out-of-joint, a time that becomes crystal image(s) in itself. In his books on cinema, Deleuze proposes that art can create time-image that makes the virtual time visible/audible/readable/perceptible in a way different from usual visibility/audibility/readability/perception. Crystalized into virtual from the actual, time-image offers possibilities for a perception different from perception, a matter different from matter, and a reality different from reality. Even though Deleuze devotes the notion of time-image to cinema, time-image can shed lights on literary studies too, because imagery is also a crucial discourse and because Deleuze also often situates literature in a position between virtuality and actuality, a position similar to time-image. Walter Benjamin’s notion of dialectical image in his Arcades Project also supports that language can be the medium for an image of time in but out of time, an image that recapitulate all times. Benjamin’s literary practice of the dialectical image is both material and virtual. It is derived and never far from matter, but it is also not movable by matter.