‘Time after Time’: Trauma, Humour and Repetition

Taking the theme of iteration in Canan Tolon’s work as their starting point, Gill Partington and Dennis Duncan look at two very different literary representations of repetition: the traumatic re-enactments of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and the stylistic spree of Raymond Queneau’s mid-century classic, Exercises in Style.

Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in the English Department at Birkbeck, University of London where he convenes the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature. He has recently completed a monograph on the early years of the French avant-garde group, the Oulipo, and is currently working on a history of the English book index. He has also edited a collection of essays on Tom McCarthy, due to be published in 2014.

Gill Partington is a Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She works on theories of media, the history of reading and textual materiality. She has published work exploring the nature of Tom McCarthy’s fictional spaces, and is currently completing a monograph on the misreading of fiction as fact. She has also recently edited two collections on ‘Book Destruction’ and ‘Missing Texts’.

Image: Canan Tolon, Time After Time (detail), 2012. Oil on clayboard, 125 panels, each: 61 x 61 x 6 cm. Installation view, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco.  Photography: Canan Tolon