Abstract
Abstract: This essay reads Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) as a meditation on the system of imperial temporality that facilitated the rise of industrial resource extraction across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pushing back against studies that have interpreted the novel as a modernist critique of standardization, I seek to reveal a more dynamic cultural engagement with the idea of time. The characters' many fruitless appeals to time for meaning articulate the heterodox cultural and ideological uses of time during the period, as opposed to its imagined homogenization. By isolating extractive time as a tool and reimagining time and space as resources at the level of the planetary, the novel's confusing scenes of suffering are brought into focus as the outcome of structured sacrifice zones.
Published Version
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