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

by Carolyn Dinshaw

How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time and the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.

Carolyn Dinshaw is Professor of English, and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, also published by Duke University Press, and Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Dinshaw is a founding coeditor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

"Entering into an elegant slipstream of generative, generous, rigorous thought, Carolyn Dinshaw proves again her exquisite power to enchant her readers. Uniquely attractive as a theorist of time, she brilliantly addresses a temporal spread, from the seeming irrationality of medieval temporality to modernity's 'stingy' outlook on the senses. As I read How Soon Is Now? I found her signal emphases—reading, temporality, non-linearity, queer historicity, and medieval mysticism—mattering to me, a queer theorist and non-medievalist, in the novel ways she said they would."—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

"How do queers relate to the distant past and experience time? Carolyn Dinshaw’s answer to this question in How Soon is Now? ranges through astute literary criticism, cogently argued theory, and snippets of autobiography. The result is a provocative essay about the value and presence of the past that is also at times profoundly moving. Her account of the amateur scholar’s privileged relation to asynchrony and affective engagement with the object of study should give all in the academy pause for thought."—Simon Gaunt, author of Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love

"Carolyn Dinshaw writes with love, learning, and endless good humor about asynchrony, the amateur, and the complex queerness of both. How Soon Is Now? is full of asynchrony stories, both medieval and modern, stories in which time is out of joint or so full as to be irresolvable into the narrowly sequential conception of time that remains one of the driving engines of the heteronormative imagination. Rather than rejecting the past or the future, Dinshaw argues for the asynchrony of a now in which the very distinction between past, present, and future becomes impossible to make. In a series of beautiful and moving readings, Dinshaw makes us think about what we love. 'I want more life.' Who can argue with that simple but extraordinary claim?"—Amy Hollywood, author of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History

Genres: Theory, Medieval, Nonfiction, Queer, History, Lit Crit, Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2012

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really incredible monograph about amateur medievalism and queer temporalities. The core of Dinshaw’s argument revolves around the relationship queerness has with time, and specifically its contrast to the timeline of reproductive heterosexual capitalism. There’s a latent argument in the vein of Ahmed’s “The Promise Of Happiness” about the queer pain of being excluded from typical life milestones (ie: reproduction, marriage etc)… but also the potential which arises from occupying a different temporality. I really enjoyed this and it make me think about my estrangement from reproduction as a positive, as extending my youthful lack of commitment toward a future where I can continue to focus on the intellectual problems which fascinate me rather than socially expected family planning.

This notion of particular archival practices occupying a space of queerness due to their relationship to time is something which directly applies to my own research interests. There’s also a spectral quality to archival work or work which inherently concerns the past. I really loved how Dinshaw drew on theorists like Latour and Serres to make this point, evoking images of time as an eddying stream at multiple points in the book. I’m less familiar with Chakrabarty’s work but I found Dinshaw’s incorporations of post-colonial temporalities to be additionally insightful. Queerness to Dinshaw takes on this additional dimension of out of placeness, of longing for worlds which no longer or never existed—and yet it’s this very condition of longing, this queerness, on which a vision of the future can be built.

I also really enjoyed the way Dinshaw discussed her own archival process and relationship to Hope Emily Allen and amateur relationships to the archive in general. As someone whose amateurish research interests are often characterised as intellectually unserious or silly pursuits, it was really heartening to read about the value amateurism can bring both in regard to unorthodox approach as well as a particular affective attachment toward one’s subject. Much in the same way rejecting heteronormative reproductive temporalities can open up new possibilities, operating outside of academic or profitability frameworks can allow for work which moves beyond formal convention in new and exciting ways.

While I’m not a medievalist myself, Dinshaw really captures how visiting an archive feels and the way time eddies around the subject you’re studying… there’s something ghostly, something queer-as-in-weird about holding documents which have had (in some cases) multiple previous lives. Having become much more involved with queer historians in the past month, seeing that feeling and that love for one’s research echoed here was incredibly gratifying.

If you’re interested in queer temporality and Serres/Latour the introduction is absolutely worth reading… the rest of the book might be of less use if you’re not interested in medievalism but I still found it to be interesting enough to stick around.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars - A fun and thoroughly argued book about the queerness of amateur readers (as opposed to professionals, like - say - professors) and their disjointed relationship to time, which is a product of over-attachment to the object of study (medieval texts, in this case) rather than the professional's "objective distance." I particularly liked how Dinshaw's work disregards the standard boundaries of periodization and greatly appreciated that translations of the Middle English were provided. Also, Dinshaw's definition of "queer" is significantly less concerned with same-sex desire than existing outside of the normal modes of reproductive time. Others have taken issue with that, but I like her more expansive use of queerness - it provides a fresh way to explore the affective relationship between the past and present, as well as how those relations to time get experienced and embodied.

[Elektra · Rating 5 out of 5]

i started reading this book last summer in anticipation of the thesis i'm now beginning work on. i read the introduction and then got distracted by the fall semester, but just picked it back up a few days ago and i haven't stopped thinking about it since. dinshaw's writing is captivating and her consideration of queer temporality is exemplary. i'm obsessed.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carolyn Dinshaw sets her book up as a history and anthropology of asynchrony – a mode of existence where multiple temporalities crisscross each other often to puzzling effect for us moderns - as it flourished full of meaning in medieval Europe, particularly Christian England; and this is in contrast with historical time which have been described by Walter Benjamin as “homogeneous, empty time” and Dipesh Chakrabarti as “godless, continuous”. Dinshaw finds Christian and Middle English Asynchrony as being anticipated in the works of Aristotle and St. Augustine of Hippo: both no doubt suitable antecedents to Catholicism. In short, while the former imagined time as the plane at which change is experienced, observed, and processed (to the conclusion that if change is not experienced, there may have been no experience of time either), the latter positively posited the being of time (as inhabiting God hence as true as God), but evidenced only by the present; the present of past things is memory, the present of present things we call ‘the present’, and the present of future things is ‘expectation’. There appear between these two constructions, radical departures: time for one is conditional, the other positive, but to both, it is experiential. The experientiality of time underpins – in my reading of Dinshaw – the availability of various temporalities, and also the potential for asynchrony. This very experientiality makes space even for the rich imaginative world that the Medievals inhabited, and forecloses that very space for us today.

After Shulman, this is the scholar that most felt like David Shulman to me. It is too early to say but I might actually end up making career out of the contributions of this book.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG. Carolyn Dinshaw is my new role model. A brilliant, beautifully written, and gloriously Smiths-themed book, one that I'm especially grateful to have read while I'm working on my own new book. I learned so much from Dinshaw about how to unspool arguments, and she gives us license to have fun in the unspooling. And, just in case this isn't obvious, you don't have to be a medievalist or a queer studies person to dig this one. I read it mainly to find out how smart peers are thinking and writing about the complexities and possibilities inherent in constructions of time (my own work homes in on spooky time traveling through and across pasts, presents, and futures).

[William_Furneaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Rachel Herschbein · Rating 3 out of 5]

highly theoretical and highly challenging, but makes interesting new points on popular medieval and contemporary literature

[Lulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

lowkey not even relevant for the thesis i'm writing this time around but ya i reread it, i'm a carolyn dinshaw 4lifer

[Mills College Library]

809.93384 D587 2012