‘Stopping the flow of time’: Wonder and Writing Experience in Rachel Cusk

In Rachel Cusk's recent work, the sentence seems to exist between two poles: writing and speaking. This article examines the sentence in Cusk's Second Place to argue that her unique manner of handling the sentence highlights not only language, narrative, and storytelling, but also the experience of wonder as it factors into literature more broadly. This paper will argue that, if it is true that ‘[l]anguage is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time’, then it is incumbent upon the contingent status of the sentence in literature (rather than, in broad strokes, the plot or the characters) to render the dimension of experience communicable at all.