Planetary Clock

The theme of <em>The Planetary Clock </em>is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective with a special emphasis on issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene <em>The Planetary Clock</em> offers a wide-ranging revisionist account of postmodernism reinterpreting literature film music and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. <p/>By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives it suggests how an antipodean impulse involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a Florentine clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets <em>The Planetary Clock</em> ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler Richard Powers) while bringing the US tradition into juxtaposition with both its English (Philip Larkin Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen Ligeti Birtwistle) the visual arts (Hockney Blackman Fiona Hall) and cinema (Rohmer Haneke Tarantino) this volume enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first<br>century.<br>