UC Santa Cruz

In this M.A. thesis I comparatively look at two novels, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in order to argue that while both texts have a strongly pronounced temporal dimension, the primary concept guiding pre 20th century intellectual work vis a vis Foucault’s argument in “Of Other Spaces’, it is a temporal framework that cannot be separated from space or spatiality, in particular, the "space" of lived capitalist social relations. I look at abstract forms of capitalist social domination through the diminution of time formally in the prose or in the time of the characters’ “lived experience” in the novels’ plot as opposed to the more concrete forms of capitalist social domination that become more and more historically apparent through merely using a spatial lens, for example, the problematic of global wealth inequality. I consider the thematic of self-negation allegorically as the utopian content shared by both works as a way to respond to the expression of the experience of the phenomenon of reification that the authors reveal, that functions to negate the possibilities for authentic subjective experience and troubles the emergence of human freedom. I conclude with Moishe Postone's comments on Karl Marx's mature work as primarily a theory of temporality in order to maintain its necessity as a critical category in progressive theoretical discourse today.