Only Time Will Tell

Time is told by clocks and narrators, yet not in equal measure. Narration can slow time down or speed it up, it can take big chunks of time to narrate a minute or narrate a whole day in a split second. Among narrative tenses, the past takes pride of place. But how is the future told in which things are about to happen? What time, what temporal consistency or fragmentation, what counterfactual fraying emerges if narratives employ future tenses? Is there something inherently erratic in narrating futures? Is the use of future tense able to make us pause and distance ourselves from what is being told, or does it dissolve into an ever more porous actuality?

The ICI Library Event Only Time Will Tell will explore the eccentric aspects of the future tense in the context of the ICI’s current research focus Errans, in Time. It will consist of a staged reading delving into the manifold ways of literary futures and, in its second half, the opening of the exhibition Untimely Now, an art installation of former train station clocks by Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann.Programme

Welcome: Corinna Haas
Introduction to the Exhibition: Claudia Peppel

Part 1
Staged Reading: Only Time will Tell

ICI Fellows will read excerpts from Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Maurice Blanchot, Christine Brooke-Rose, Thomas Mann, and others.

Part 2
Opening of the Exhibition: Untimely Now

The artists Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann will be present.