The Measure of Times Past

Download or read book The Measure of Times Past written by Donald J. Wilcox and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary work, Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discover an approach to narrative and history consistent with the discontinuous, relative time of the twentieth century. He shows how our B.C./A.D. system, intimately connected to Newtonian concepts of continuous, objective, and absolute time, has affected our conception and experience of the past. He demonstrates absolute time's centrality to modern historical methodologies and the problems it has created in the selection and interpretation of facts. Inspired by contemporary fiction and Einsteinian concepts of relativity, he concludes his analysis with a comparison of our system with earlier, pre-Newtonian time schemes to create a radical new critique of historical objectivity.