What would the history of American literature look like if Edgar Allan Poe's fascinating, bizarre, depressingly racist 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were placed at its center? Such is the gambit of Cindy Weinstein's absorbing and imaginative new study, Time, Tense, and American Literature. For Weinstein, Pym's trip to the South Pole represents “a journey in and through time” as much as through space, a journey in which the boundaries between past, present, and future begin to break down (41). This collapse of temporal logic offers a template, Weinstein suggests, for a series of American novels from periods as different as the late eighteenth century and the early twenty-first. Weinstein's unlikely term for this Poe-centered tradition, tempo(e)rality, is not one I imagine being widely adopted, but her ability to find correspondences between seemingly very different novels from very different historical contexts offers an intriguing critical model for our posthistoricist times. The result is a fascinating set of close readings of novels that have certainly never been read together before and probably never will be again: Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and Edward P. Jones's The Known World. What unites these texts is what Weinstein disarmingly calls their “wobbly” hold on temporal sequence, which “usually takes the form of a character marking out units of time in the face of experiences that make that impossible” (4, 6). Weinstein's patient and subtle analysis places these various wobbles side by side in the belief that they inform and explain one another. “[W]ithout an analysis of the word ‘would’ in The Gates Ajar,” she claims, her “reading of the ubiquity of the word in Jones would not make sense” (7). Incomprehensibility is not just a risk run by Weinstein's practice of close reading, however, but a feature of the texts under the critical microscope. “[L]ingering on the strangeness and sometimes [the] incomprehensibility” of her chosen novels, Weinstein's comparatist method allows them to “assume a previously unseen shape” (11).The heart of Weinstein's study is her reading of Arthur Gordon Pym. Like many other critics, she focuses on the disturbing racial politics of Poe's novel. But her focus on temporality rather than geography allows Weinstein to turn critical thinking on its head. Crucial to her argument is Johannes Fabian's concept of chronopolitics—his term for anthropology's depiction of the supposedly static, unchanging time of “primitive” society against which the dynamic, forward-moving time of the West can be measured. Poe's portrayal of Tsalal, the southern island Pym discovers, fits seamlessly within this tradition, since he places it not just off any map but outside history. Weinstein contends, however, that “the temporal complexities of Poe's narrative undermine the ‘one way history’ that is essential to the imperial project” (41–42). The text's repetitive, at times almost incoherent structure—its infuriating repetitions, omissions, strange temporal leaps, contradictions, and habit of nesting one narrative inside another—pose a threat to chronopolitics, putting form and content at odds with one another. Weinstein discerns a less conflicted but equally complex temporal structure in Edgar Huntly, whose narrator “conflates the temporality of the story he is telling with the temporality of the telling of the story” (23). She persuasively reads Brown's novel as “an echo chamber” in which everything both happens more than once and is narrated more than once, so that “the perpetual postponement of action becomes the action” (25, 31).One of the intriguing aspects of Weinstein's opening chapters is their engagement with a somewhat unfashionable field, narratology, and in particular with the work of Gérard Genette. Unlike Genette, Weinstein is also concerned to read fiction in its historical context, a strategy that has varying results but proves most successful in her third chapter, on The Gates Ajar. Weinstein argues that Phelps's novel “transformed people's understanding of death” from something final to something ongoing, giving its readers—often grieving themselves—a sense of time as “intrinsically personal and far from standard” (56, 74). Weinstein convincingly traces this “temporal disorderliness” to the industrial-scale slaughter of the Civil War. This concern with context rather falls away in the last two chapters, where the focus is more on literary history. Her concluding discussion of The Known World neatly contends that Jones's novel rewrites the historical trajectory of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! In place of Faulkner's sense of American history as doomed from the very beginning, The Known World's experiments with tense demonstrate a concern to locate within the horror of America's slave-owning past the seeds of a future in which slavery would be abolished.Chapter 4 of Time, Tense, and American Literature, on An American Tragedy, is also partly concerned with literary history, situating Dreiser in the company of both Faulkner and another long-overlooked influence, Gertrude Stein. Its primary focus, however, is with the familiar question of Dreiser's style. Rather than dismiss Dreiser for his supposedly ungainly writing, as so many critics have been content to do, Weinstein reads his strange penchant for sentence fragments as deliberate, part of an attempt to convey what she nicely calls “present tenseness” (85). Dreiser's odd technique of eliminating verbs whenever possible is a strategy to avoid placing action in the past, as if the events described were happening “now.” What Dreiser wants, Weinstein contends, is for writing to function like photography. The chapter offers a substantial amount of evidence for this claim: Dreiser's friendship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz and, perhaps most compellingly, his curious decision to make a camera both the murder weapon and the proof that a murder has been committed. The prosecution's underhand twining of a strand of the murdered girl's hair around the camera ensures that “the camera itself functions as a photograph,” while the grammatical removal of Clyde from the sentence describing the murder makes it seem “as if the camera is killing Roberta” (101, 103).Missing from Weinstein's discussion of the relationship between Dreiser's use of the camera as plot device and the photographic nature of his style is any account of indexicality. This is all the more puzzling given the chapter's impressive demonstration of just how central the word now is to the structure of An American Tragedy. The word now is of course a deictic, one of Charles Sanders Peirce's examples of what he called indexical signs, signs that possess “a real connection” with the thing for which they stand—such as a photograph (Peirce 226). Deictics (here, there, this) refer to the time or place in which they are uttered. There is always, then, something a little troubling about the status of deictics in written language—and particularly in a work of fiction. “[W]hat a word, now, what a dumb lie,” reflects the narrator of Julio Cortázar's extraordinary short story about photography, “Blow-Up” (Cortázar 118). To write the word now is to be confronted with the gap between the moment being described and the moment in which it is described—and to anticipate a third moment (indeed an endless series of moments) in which that description will be read. Dreiser's use of the word now can indeed be seen as photographic, since for Peirce deictics signify in much the same way as a photograph; but it can also be seen in precisely the opposite manner, as giving the lie to any attempt, at least in fiction, to transfer an actual moment to the page.Weinstein concludes Time, Tense, and American Literature by suggesting an unlikely but thought-provoking link between Henry James's late novel The Golden Bowl and Poe's story about buried treasure, “The Gold-Bug.” The discussion brings Weinstein's study full circle, since the point of departure for her project is James's tribute to Arthur Gordon Pym in the opening pages of The Golden Bowl. Somewhat puzzlingly, Weinstein depicts James's work as standing outside the tradition she describes. “James always knows where his characters are going,” she contends, “and none of the characters ever forgets a thing” (142). In fact, memory plays a far more complicated role both in The Golden Bowl and in James's account of his compositional method than Weinstein allows. James describes revising his work for the New York edition of his complete works as a process of “retracing and reconstructing” (James 42). Composition was not a matter of rewriting—something James claimed to know nothing about—it was a matter of rereading, a curious, almost metaphysical experience in which the words that should have been on the page would “flower” into being before the eyes of the delighted reader (339). His present vision, that is, restores the past into what it should have been, a view of temporality as “wobbly” as could be imagined.The refusal to include James within the alternative trajectory traced in Time, Tense, and American Literature led me to wonder whether the imaginative freedom exercised by Weinstein in the end proved daring enough. What if we were to think of literature as somehow missing its context or as belonging to another one altogether? What if we were to take as the model for American literature not Poe but the work of someone inspired by him, work written from a South far deeper than any to be found in the United States, albeit not from as far south as Pym travels? I am thinking of Jorge Luis Borges, and in particular his 1939 story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which describes the achievement of a writer who sets out not to copy Don Quixote but “to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” The result, Borges's narrator reflects, transforms how we conceive of literary history. For although the two works are identical, they offer what the narrator describes as a “vivid . . . contrast in style”: “The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time” (39, 43). For Borges, the moment in which we read determines the text that we read. The breakdown of temporal logic celebrated in such astute and admirable fashion by Weinstein's study is thus, if we follow Borges, endemic to the reading of literature as such—a now to which we never cease not to belong.