| By examining naturalist novels and silent films from 1895 to 1915, my dissertation projects backwards out of these representational "solutions" to identify a formal and philosophical problem: time as force. I argue that the early cinema approached the problem of time as an opportunity to demonstrate its representational capabilities as a new medium. In contrast, I suggest that naturalist novels and early narrative films registered a pervasive belief in temporal determinism on the level of narration and, as a result, frequently envisioned the passage of time as a limit to authorial freedom. Using two forms that obsessively posed and answered questions about temporal representation as a lens, I argue that conceptions of time as a force pervaded technological, aesthetic, and cultural discourses in the United States at the turn of the century. |
