Abstract

This article takes a transdisciplinary approach to the exploration of time and temporality in postmodern American poetry. By combining new theories in the evolving framework of translinguistics with a critical analysis of prominent postmodern poets, the article aims to retrace and reverse-engineer the structural time–space and language–speech divide introduced by Saussurean linguistics of the early twentieth century and show that these categories are inextricable in translinguistic practice. By observing literary production of poetry alongside the translingual framework, we retrace the structural schism in language studies and identify poetry as a literary genre uniquely suited to remedying not just the structural division but also the temporal anxieties imposed on us by contemporary technological and economic conditions.