Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2006.

This dissertation presents, for the first time, a freestanding account of notions of time and temporality as seen in the visual arts of the late Archaic and Classical Greece and contextualizes it within the larger cultural history of time. There is a growing consensus among scholars regarding a societal shift in fifth-century Greek attitudes towards time, from the authority of the past to the uncertainties and the immediacy of the present. This dissertation explores such changing notions of time in the visual tradition in four different ways: firstly through the personification of the key notion of kairos, which embodies on many levels the manifestation of this new temporality; secondly by investigating the emergent interest of the "historical present" in the artistic subject matter of the so-called Historienbilder; thirdly through a detailed investigation of new pictorial strategies in Greek vase painting that carry specific temporal attributes, by focusing on the motifs of jumping, lifting and dropping; and lastly, by dissecting the anatomy of the popular motif of "erotic pursuits" in vase painting, which embodies the sensory nature of this new temporality that hinges upon the notion of suspense and delay. These investigations employ a new phenomenological framework that centers on the "embodied viewer", connecting the temporality as understood by the viewer with that which is portrayed in the object, bringing together the visible temporality in art and the experienced temporality of the society, which the viewer inhabits. This framework is first sketched out by offering a phenomenological reading of a full 3-D digital reconstruction of the Lysippan Kairos. Such changes in the notion of time in the visual arts, seen as early as the late sixth century BCE and fully manifest in the Classical period, is also put into relief by a brief examination of analogous literary techniques, with a focus on the case of Aeschylus.

Modern Americans are exposed to scientific and technical information on a daily basis that urges them to react as well as learn about new ideas. The popular science writing that circulates this information must be portrayed in a way that makes it easy for lay people to understand complicated ideas while at the same time remaining complex enough to convince readers that the information is reliable, accurate, and worth learning. In making decisions about how to accomplish this balancing act, science writers make decisions that influence the audience's opinion about new scientific ideas, how easily the audience will accept or reject these ideas, and how the audience will react to the new information. In order to be as influential as possible on their audience, science writers must take full advantage of rhetorical kairos, or opportune timing. For this, they must keep in mind not only the chronological time and physical space, but issues including political maneuverings, society's morals, popular culture, and a myriad of other considerations. Any text must be influenced by the kairos that exists both before the text is created and during the presentation. In addition, each text helps create a new kairos for texts that come after. This is especially true in the field of popular science writing. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is a useful text for analysis of this process, as he portrays scientific information to a lay audience in order to promote acceptance of a controversial idea and to encourage action based on that acceptance. Because he is working on a delicate topic for the time, Gore had to rely heavily on the kairos of the moments before and during his presentations, and he created a fertile kairos for continuation of the environmental discussion.