Paul Huebener | Athabasca University (original) (raw)

Books by Paul Huebener

Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled slee... more Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power.

In Restless in Sleep Country Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with issues of colonialism, homelessness, consumer culture, technology and privacy, the exploitation of labour, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though it almost entirely evades direct experience, sleep is the subject of a variety of potent narratives, each of which can serve to clarify and shape its role in our lives. In Canada, cultural visions of slumber circulate through such diverse forms as mattress commercials, billboards, comic books, memoirs, experimental poetry, and bedtime story phone apps. By guiding us through this imaginative landscape, Huebener shows us how to develop a critical literacy of sleep.

Lying down and closing our eyes is an act that carries surprisingly high stakes, going beyond individual sleep troubles. Restless in Sleep Country illuminates the idea of sleep as a crucial site of inequity, struggle, and gratification.

The environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time. From the distress cries of birds tha... more The environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time. From the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, to the rapid dying of coral reefs, to the quickening pace of climate disasters, the patterns and timekeeping of ecosystems are falling apart. We have broken nature’s clocks.

Lying hidden at the root of this problem are the cultural narratives that shape our actions and horizons of thought, and as Paul Huebener shows, we can bring about change by developing a critical literacy of time. Moving from circadian rhythms and the revival of ancient frozen bacteria to camping advertisements and the politics of oil pipelines, Nature’s Broken Clocks turns to works of fiction and poetry, examining how cultural narratives of time are connected to the problems of ecological collapse and what we might do to fix them.

This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a ... more This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a variety of economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts. Since David Harvey’s influential characterization of globalization as "time-space compression", ample research has looked at the spatial aspect of the phenomenon, yet few have focused on globalization’s temporal aspects. Meanwhile, other publications have analysed problems of speed, acceleration, and the commodification of time, but while it often serves as the implicit or explicit backdrop for these studies of time, globalization is not investigated as a problem or a question in its own right. In response, this volume develops these conversations to consider how time shapes globalization, and how globalization affects our experience of time.

The interplay between varying aspects of the human experiences of time and globalization requires the type of interdisciplinary approach that this volume takes. The contributors advance an understanding of global time(s) as an arena of contestation, with social, political, ecological, and cultural implications for human and other lives. In considering the diverse valences of time and globalization, they illuminate problems as well as possibilities. Topics covered include emerging infectious diseases, temporal sovereignty, worker exploitation and resistance, chronobiology, energy politics, activism and hope, and literary and cinematic representations of counter-temporalities, offering a rich and varied account of global times.

This volume will be of great interest to students and researchers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, globalization, international relations, literary studies, political science, social theory, and sociology.

From punch clocks to prison sentences, from immigration waiting periods to controversial time-zon... more From punch clocks to prison sentences, from immigration waiting periods to controversial time-zone boundaries, from Indigenous grave markers that count time in centuries rather than years, to the fact that free time is shrinking faster for women than for men - time shapes the fabric of Canadian society every day, but in ways that are not always visible or logical.

In Timing Canada, Paul Huebener draws from cultural history, time-use surveys, political statements, literature, and visual art to craft a detailed understanding of how time operates as a form of power in Canada. Time enables everything we do - as Margaret Atwood writes, "without it we can't live." However, time also disempowers us, divides us, and escapes our control. Huebener transforms our understanding of temporal power and possibility by using examples from Canadian and Indigenous authors - including Jeannette Armstrong, Joseph Boyden, Dionne Brand, Timothy Findley, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Gabrielle Roy, and many others - who witness, question, dismantle, and reconstruct the functioning of time in their works.

As the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of time in Canada, Timing Canada develops foundational principles of critical time studies and everyday temporal literacy, and demonstrates how time functions broadly as a tool of power, privilege, and imagination within a multicultural and multi-temporal nation.

Papers by Paul Huebener

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016

Studies in Canadian Literature Etudes En Litterature Canadienne, Oct 10, 2006

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 16, Issue 1 (2017).

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 15, Issue 2 (2017).

Editorial introduction to The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Volum... more Editorial introduction to The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Volume 15, Issue 1 (2016).

Canadian Literature 223 (Winter 2014)

This article examines the tensions between subjective time and sociality in Gabrielle Roy’s short... more This article examines the tensions between subjective time and sociality in Gabrielle Roy’s short story cycle The Road Past Altamont (La Route D’Altamont, 1966), and Catherine Bush’s novel Minus Time (1993). While the two books examine strikingly different temporal circumstances – francophone settler culture in early twentieth-century Manitoba, and the implications of orbital space travel for a Torontonian family near the end of the twentieth century – both works clarify the relationship between social and subjective time. Through these readings I argue that the desire for various levels of social synchronization is a key factor in reading subjective experiences of time, that certain forms of social tension on the level of the family, the society, and even the ecosphere, can best be understood as forms of desynchronization, and that fleeting moments of partial synchronization are deeply necessary for fostering intimacy and connection between individuals, even while total synchronization remains not only elusive, but in fact impossible by definition.

This article is the introduction to a special issue of Globalizations on the topic of time and gl... more This article is the introduction to a special issue of Globalizations on the topic of time and globalization.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016

Studies in Canadian Literature Etudes En Litterature Canadienne, Oct 10, 2006

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 16, Issue 1 (2017).

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 15, Issue 2 (2017).

Canadian Literature 223 (Winter 2014)

Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America. Ed. Ryan Hediger. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Examining several texts that speak to the social history of clock time in early Canada — the earl... more Examining several texts that speak to the social history of clock time in early Canada — the early eighteenth-century maintenance records of Montreal’s Saint Sulpice Seminary clock, Joseph Howe’s 1836 poem “To the Town Clock,” and Archibald Lampman’s 1888 poem “The Railway Station” — I argue that a deep tension is visible between the idea that clock technologies embody humanity’s graduation from nature, and the idea that the natural rhythms of the earth and our bodies remain critically intertwined with everyday experience and the development of social structures. The further that clock technologies push us away from the natural clock of the sun’s path across the sky, the more they simultaneously reinforce our dependence on natural temporalities.

While theorists and activists have developed critical vocabularies to identify racism and sexism,... more While theorists and activists have developed critical vocabularies to identify racism and sexism, we are less prepared to engage in discussions about temporal discrimination, the belief that certain times are more deserving of agency, empowerment, and resource exploitation than other times. By highlighting culturally constructed temporal categories as well as particular instances of temporal power imbalances, I seek to develop a vocabulary of temporal discrimination. I argue that a critical understanding of social policy decisions and everyday consumer acts depends on the examination of temporal assumptions made possible through critical readings of cultural practices and literary texts.

Along with its recognition of racism, sexism, and speciesism, I would like to suggest that cultur... more Along with its recognition of racism, sexism, and speciesism, I would like to suggest that cultural theory in general, and ecocriticism in particular, would benefit from a more concentrated focus on another category of hierarchization: temporal discrimination, or the belief that certain times are more deserving of agency, empowerment, and resource exploitation than other times. Building on studies that link cultural models of temporality with ecological degradation (Barbara Adam, Stewart Brand, Georges Sioui), I seek to develop a vocabulary of temporal criticism to help us identify the influence of temporal privilege and the assumed categories upon which temporal discrimination relies. Drawing from Canada’s five- and ten-year forestry management plans, Haida descriptions of 800-year forestry practices, Di Brandt’s ironic ten-million-year perspective in her so-called “Optimistic thoughts,” and other examples, I demonstrate how cultural and literary texts can work to challenge, or reinforce, the dominant hierarchies of temporality that legitimize unsustainable social practices.

Various scholars have observed that hierarchies of income and social status correlate with differ... more Various scholars have observed that hierarchies of income and social status correlate with differences in the experience of time, such that materially impoverished people are perceived to have less influence over their own use of time, and to be more present-oriented than future-oriented. With these contentious issues in mind, I examine three Canadian literary texts that emphasize the connection between work and temporality: Tom Wayman’s poem “Factory Time,” Mordecai Richler’s novel Duddy Kravitz, and Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night. Highlighting these works' portrayals of very different attempts to escape temporal poverty, I argue that the texts reveal a deep desire to challenge claims of helpless present-orientedness and deficient temporal consciousness in the working classes; such works help us to recognize time itself as a category of domination and to articulate the possibilities and limits of temporal resistance.

The colonization of Canada overlaps closely with the period of time in which accurate clocks beca... more The colonization of Canada overlaps closely with the period of time in which accurate clocks became readily available – clocks that, as Robert Levine argues, result in an entirely new way of inhabiting time by manufacturing the very regularity and precision they presume to measure. Looking at three works of Canadian literature spanning the last two centuries – Thomas Haliburton’s The Clockmaker (1836), L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) – I highlight the importance of clocks in the Canadian imagination, arguing that images of clocks often reflect deep truths about Canada’s social fabric, colonial status, class divisions, and normative codes of conduct. The clock is a central icon in Canadian consciousness, and we must read its presence carefully to understand social relations of all kinds.

In this paper I look at the social construction of time in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx... more In this paper I look at the social construction of time in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake and its new companion novel The Year of the Flood. Characters in both texts struggle to maintain their familiar temporal patterns in a post-apocalyptic world, and experience fragmented and reconstructed social patterns of time-reckoning. Borrowing Robert Levine’s concept of “multitemporality,” and Daniel Coleman’s advocacy of contemporaneous chronotopes, I suggest that Atwood’s novels locate cultural resilience in the capacity of individuals to conceptualize the flow of time in multiple ways, even while they reveal deep anxieties about the incompatibility of conflicting temporalities.

Since there is no single construct or metaphor through which we understand time, but rather a clu... more Since there is no single construct or metaphor through which we understand time, but rather a cluster of overlapping, sometimes conflicting constructs, several questions arise. How do different structures of time come into existence, and why? Who decides upon the categories through which we plot our locations within social or personal frames of time? How do these patterns reinforce, or disrupt, power relations between individuals and groups, and between humanity and nature? In particular, how have these processes been shaped within Canada, and how do they shape Canada in turn? Or, to revise Northrop Frye’s famous question—“Where is here?”—as a focal point for examining Canadian identity, let us ask instead, “When is now?” In this paper I suggest that while the politics and power relations that saturate Canada’s existence are indeed tied to the usual suspects of race, class, gender, place, and settler-indigene relations, their influence is also profoundly tied to the understandings of time that have been advanced, assumed, and rejected throughout the country’s history; and that Canadian literature and other arts are inevitably tangled up in these complex relationships, and serve a vital function in both witnessing and questioning them.

Drawing examples from the writings of Archibald Lampman, E.J. Pratt, Emily Carr, Margaret Atwood,... more Drawing examples from the writings of Archibald Lampman, E.J. Pratt, Emily Carr, Margaret Atwood, and Don McKay, I suggest that Canadian writers have often been highly self-conscious about the imposition of human models of time-reckoning onto nature, and have offered methods for recalibrating the dominant cultural clocks they perceive to be ticking around and within them.

Examining several poems in Margaret Atwood’s The Door, I argue that her persistent image of desce... more Examining several poems in Margaret Atwood’s The Door, I argue that her persistent image of descent into the dark underworld of the past and the unseen – a metaphor for the writing process as well as subjectivity itself – problematizes the assumption that there can be a clear distinction between the writer and the audience; poets, like all people, engage in continuous negotiation with unseen times and places.