The Modernist Notion of Time in Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Path", Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

Abstract

The research entitled “The Modernist Notion of Time in Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Path", Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time” concerns modernism that conceives time as nonlinear and nonlocutionary phenomenon. Before modernism, time was understood as linear and fixed essence but modernist explosion has problematized the essentialist notion of time attributing time as nonlinear and disjuncture phenomenon. Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time shows how time is nonlinear. He shows neither present is succession of past nor it is followed by future. Time is a nondivisible whole: it cannot be divided into past, present and future. Salvador Dali's Painting The Persistence of Memory depicts distorted and scattered images of watches in a barren land which indicate the distorted image of time in the modern age. Jorge Luis Borges in the story The Garden of Forking Path explores time itself to be disrupted in modernism. Modern 'man' is understood as an individual who lives in infinite present without history. It is held that since time is not linear, human being cannot assemble his past in its wholeness to constitute history.