Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Perpetual Motion, Time, and Power: Christoph Ransmayr's Cox as Novel of the Anthropocene
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Perpetual Motion, Time, and Power: Christoph Ransmayr's Cox as Novel of the Anthropocene
Do you wish to request the book?
Perpetual Motion, Time, and Power: Christoph Ransmayr's Cox as Novel of the Anthropocene
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Perpetual Motion, Time, and Power: Christoph Ransmayr's Cox as Novel of the Anthropocene
2022
Overview
Christoph Ransmayr's novels are known for complex interactions with time and the reimaging of historical events. This article considers the function of historical imagination in Cox oder der Lauf der Zeit (2016). The novel's fictional transposition to China of an eighteenth‐century quest for perpetual motion serves to link the control of time to the unprecedented worldly power of the Chinese emperor, but also to the decline of that power vis‐à‐vis the rise of industrial capitalism. The novel layers together the histories of perpetual motion and renewable energy, connecting both to emergent human geological agency. By framing this agency as the expression of the power of a few individuals, the novel opens spaces in which we can imagine a kind of thinking that might confront the constraints placed upon all of humanity by the actions of small groups in the past.
