The Extended Present

Abstract

This chapter explores one of the most widely discussed temporalties in recent critical theory: the extended present. Critics such as Fredric Jameson and Sianne Ngai have traced an increasing preoccupation with the experience of an extended present in recent cultural theory. This chapter traces the emergence of its fictional equivalent, the present-tense novel, out of mid-twentieth century forms of aesthetic primitivism, in novels like Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939). In close readings of the present-tense novels of Muriel Spark and Christine Brooke-Rose, it demonstrates that the present-tense novel stages the paradox of a historical temporality defined by the experience of present happening over and over again.