In this paper we build on the discussion on the conditions and constraints of teaching in the Humanities more generally and specifically the teaching of literature we have undertaken in previous presentations, most recently our discussion on the crisis of the Humanities under New Public Management. Our somewhat bleak conclusion is that the structure of Higher Education in Sweden today alongside the ever-widening achievement gap makes for a difficult challenge and it does so in the area we find most significant when it comes to teaching literature: the lack of time with our students. Time is the hard currency of any worth-while education and we now suggest how time may help solve some of the current issues within the Humanities and why time is particularly important when it comes to the study of literature. In our presentation, we willexamine three related assumptions about why the study of literature is meaningful. Firstly, fictional texts allow for the exploration of different epistemological perspectives in that they “enable us to suspend our own perspective temporarily” and for an extended period take on another perspective, a perspective that is “epistemically rewarding even if the adopted perspective is not accurate” (Elgin 2007). Secondly, and consequently, fictional texts give “context to understand the elliptical” insofar as they offer “the context of characters’ goals and plans” as well as give “a sense of how actions lead to vicissitudes” (Oatley 1999). Thirdly, in order to make sense of our future we “must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world” (Harari 2016). Our contention then is that if we take any of these assumptions seriously, time is one of the key factors. This involves time for students to read and to process reading, time to discuss their reading, and time for contact between teacher and students and, not least, time for integrating reading into writing –the latter of which involves time for feedback-giving and feedback-processing. For this reason, the current move in many Higher Education institutions in Sweden to organize teaching in five-week blocks is not conducive to the study of literature and the meaningful exploration of literary texts. Instead then of teaching practices adapting to organizational concerns, teaching practices should, we argue, be adapted to the specific requirements and concerns within the discipline. In this presentation, we demonstrate how time is at the heart of the crisis of the Humanities and what we think it takes to solve it and how we would like to do it.