ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the importance of affect in relation to two contemporary twenty-first century writers, Ben Lerner and Ali Smith, both of whose work negotiates modernist techniques as a means to reconceiving novelistic sentiment, rejecting irony and cynicism in favour of candour and hope. In Lerner’s 10:04, a Benjaminian concern with the artistic reconfiguration of historical time and the projection of alternate futures currently unavailable enables a sense of hope or promise regarding art’s potential for social transformation, even in the context of large-scale socio-economic division and environmental catastrophe. Ali Smith’s Autumn, like Lerner’s 10:04, also pointedly addresses art’s role in responding to a contemporary climate of crisis and in endorsing hope, as opposed to irony, as a pertinent affective outlook. One particularly significant aspect of temporal awareness, shared by Smith, is T. S. Eliot’s focus on ‘timeless moments’, which reflect an appreciation of how time might conquer time through a focus on lived experience.
