How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time

The interrelations between desire, bodies, and the now create a broad framework for my concerns in this book.

My broadest goal in this book is not only to explore but also to claim the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that all sorts of theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.

rigorously delimited scholarship from any other more explicitly affective enterprise.

now has no duration, so how can you talk about its being, how can it be said to exist at all?

Time is lived; it is full of attachments and desires, histories and futures; it is not a hollow form (not a “hatful of hollow”) that is the same always.

the now is never purely there at all: it is a transition, always divided between no longer and not yet; each present now is stretched out and spanned by a past now and a future

In my theorizing of temporality I explore forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that engage heterogeneous temporalities or that precipitate out of time altogether—forms of being that I shall argue are queer by virtue of their particular engagements with time.

I offer them as provocations that will, I hope, help readers of How Soon Is Now? to develop other frameworks and find other examples.

love and knowledge are as inextricable as the links in chain mail. I