“The Exaggerated Death of Natural Time: Tensions Between Clock Time and Natural Time in Early Canada.” (original) (raw)

Abstract

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.

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