Modest Temporalities: Time and Tense in Millennial Novels
Alexandra Ksenofontova – 2025
Is there such a thing as a millennial sense of time? The chapter on "Modest Temporalities" by Alexandra Ksenofontova for The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel answers with a "no, but." Rather than identifying an essential millennial temporality, it proposes to regard millennial novels as a dynamic set of texts with porous borders that share a concern with temporal relations in late capitalism. Ksenofontova examines how the novels Green Girl (2011) by Kate Zambreno and Birthday (2019) by Meredith Russo play with tense, plot, and genre to articulate social criticism while also acknowledging their own powerlessness to transcend the social structures they seek to defy.
How to cite:
Alexandra Ksenofontova. "Modest Temporalities: Time and Tense in Millennial Novels." In The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, edited by Loïc Bourdeau and Christopher Lloyd, 33–49. Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
