Time in literature

Christopher Fry was instrumental in the early twentieth-century resurgence of plays dealing with religious themes. This movement can at first be seen as anomalous within the era of modernism, when many writers and theorists considered religious sentiment to be a barrier to the more crucial aspects of living authentically within a modern society haunted by history. Nevertheless, Fry's particular appropriation of a sacred conceptualization of time on the modern stage reveals a degree of congruity between him and his contemporaries in their varied attempts to represent transcendent value on the stage without simultaneously removing the audience from their own historical present. In The Boy with a Cart, Fry's superimposition of the life of a tenth-century saint onto modern experience infuses the temporality of the play with transcendent value. Fry shifts his focus to the question of authentic action in A Sleep of Prisoners, and uses a series of biblical dreams to stress the need for a conceptualization of eternity in the passing moment in order for one to act authentically within history.

The concept of time in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is examined from social, biological, psychological, and spiritual perspectives. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel, his version of the film, he treats the nature of time as a cyclical process. He eventually explains that the notion of physical time is non-existent or an impermanent illusion. While Clarke's novel interprets time, the film projects and manipulates the nature of space and time, which spectators may experience as reality. Time's direction can be viewed or experienced as a cycle from an Eastern philosophical perspective. However, a Western interpretation requires a compromise between two separate directions of time, one as a cycle, the other as linear. The film and novel ultimately negates the direction of linear time through the appearance of the mysterious monolith, which transcends and reincarnates human beings.

All narratives in which the human image is presented establish an interconnectedness of time and space, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the chronotope. When Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he drew upon a historical chronotope originating in the narratives that accompanied the spread of Christianity, and which found its purest distillate in the genre of hagiography---the narrating of the lives of saints. When the mode of sacred time established in the conventionally brief hagiologic narrative, which depended on a linear progression having unity with God as its end, is integrated into the extended form of the novel, it finds itself at odds with the ubiquitous adventure time---the random disjunctions of time and space without which there is no plot. The delineated spaces of roads and gardens in Les Miserables serve to concretize the mediation between these two modes of time, resulting in the ordinary time of the novel.