Publisher's description:
Augustine articulates temporality as focus rather than duration. It encompasses the shift from the future through the present to the past. Yet this a-causal, free-floating concept of time has never been applied to the shape of Augustine’s own narrative in the Confessions, or to that other vintage Augustinian problem: predestination. This book examines Augustinian temporality by experimentally projecting it onto modern(ist) authors (Kleist, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett) who are less dependent on sequential narrative and more concerned with the fragility and sustainability of voice in time. Processed through this mill of unfamiliar readings, the poignant problem of Augustinian time is how focus can account for digression. How can one deal with an unfathomably brief notion of time while eternity’s longueur hovers over it?

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Rambling
1. Time, Focus and Narrative in Augustine’s Confessions
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Meijering, Sorbabji, Ricoeur
1.3. Time, narrative and emplotment
1.4. Long expectation, long memory
2. The Unfathomability of Sincerity: on the Seriousness of Augustine’s Confessions
2.1. Pawn, lease and promise: Stanley Cavell and the arrogation of voice
2.2. John Henry Newman: conversion and the exclusion of the non-serious
2.3. Augustine’s Confessions: the arrogation of voice and the promise of conversion
2.4. The promise of conversion and the return of voice
2.5. Jokes and poetry
3. The Gift of Destiny and the Language of Dispossession
3.1. Introduction: the aporias of Augustinian predestination
3.2. The holy sinner
3.3. Calvin’s decretum horribile
3.4. The language of possession: Calvin continued
3.5. The language of dispossession: Dante on sloth as sin
3.6. The language of dispossession: Henry James
3.7. Dante’s cantos on the moon and Belaqua’s lobster
4. The Sustainability of Voice
4.1. The epiphany of Scripture
4.2. A grief observed
4.3. Politics and finitude
4.4. The human condition as nature morte
5. Eternity’s Ennui
5.1. Distentio animi and the hinterland of grace
5.2. The logic of terror: jokes and poetry revisited
5.3. The desire to become an Indian
5.4. Late style: sero te amavi
5.5. Non-perseverance and the boundaries of love’s lateness
5.6. Endgame
Bibliography
Index of Names