This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores how the notion of time varies across disciplines by examining variance as a defining feature of temporalities in cultural, creative, and scholarly contexts. Featuring a President's Address by philosopher David Wood, it begins with critical reassessments of J.T. Fraser's hierarchical theory of time through the lens of Anthropocene studies, philosophy, ecological theory, and ecological literature; proceeds to variant narratives in fiction, video games, film, and graphic novels; and concludes by measuring time's variance with tools as different as incense clocks and computers, and by marking variance in music, film, and performance art.

This book studies the complex relations between time and visual technologies in the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon within the general framework of the culture and politics of time. It argues that notwithstanding a postmodern tendency towards the spatialization of experience, temporality constitutes a major concern in Pynchon's novels, which explore the problematic of time-experience and temporal representation against the background of the contemporary technosphere and its temporal regimes. By examining photography, cinema, television, computers, and the Internet, this book puts Pynchon's engagement with visual technologies into a perspective that elucidates their workings as time machines in relation to both experientiality and materiality.