Timing effects, defined as the aesthetic experience of a media object that playfully alters the way we relate to the passage of time, have proliferated in twentieth century American culture. These timing effects are linked to the rapid advances in transportation and media technologies in different ways. Timing effects have proliferated in time travel narratives in popular culture, whether in films, novels, or TV shows, where the deep past or far future become accessible via machine technology, in the increasingly erratic "flash-forward" or "flashback" narratives, in the persistent desire to control the speed of the passage of time via technological affordances, or in reflective passages on the way the consciousness of time, for better or worse, has been affected by technology's presence.

This dissertation examines the history of the special uses of timing effects, beginning in the modern period, continuing through the postmodern period and ultimately pointing toward the present digital moment. The works analyzed bring a preoccupation with time to bear on the themes of transportation and media technologies. In the silent film The General, for instance, Buster Keaton's body and physical comedy are often situated between train and film technology. In Jack Kerouac's On the Road the special relation between writing by typewriter and driving by automobile is channeled into the experience of (or need for) speed. And in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaugherhouse Five, the effects of technologies involving flight, dispersed through time, leave traumatic traces that upend a linear experience of the present in favor of flattened, timeless space.

These works and more, as media objects, both exhibit the pleasure of timing effects via media and involve explorations of the relations between characters and transportation and media technologies. This dissertation contributes to the fields of media studies and twentieth century American culture an examination of the aesthetic of the timing effect, or what is described here as a poetics of out-of-stepness.