Time and subjectivity in contemporary short fiction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory
Literature Compass, 2006
This essay attempts to provide a brief survey of twentieth-century constructions of narrative time in modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern works and outlines the various theoretical positions these texts have engendered. Beginning with standard modernist practices that present a temporally scrambled story for the reader to reconstitute, I go on to identify some less well known but equally experimental uses of linear temporal order. This is followed by accounts more extreme, nonrealistic constructions of time in avant-garde, postmodern, and science fiction texts. I conclude with an assessment of standard theories of narrative temporality and a brief look at current work in the field, including attempts to articulate the differing temporalities of serial, postmodern, gay, and postcolonial narratives.
Hermeneutics within the Temporal Horizon: The Problem of Time in Narrative Fiction
2022
The paper discusses the problem of time as one of the most fundamental aspects of narrative fiction. If a narrative is defined as a series of events moving in a sequential relation, then time is a matter of linearity. The chronological progression becomes the standard pattern for time and narrative alike. But if a narrative is defined instead according to the relationship between the sequence of events in a story and the representation of those events to be told—between story and discourse—then time becomes a more complex hermeneutic and phenomenological framework. Within this framework, I take a brief glance at the accounts of the relationship between time and narrative by attempting to elucidate the complex dimension of narrative temporality. My thesis assumes that if narrative time is meaningful to the extent that it becomes a condition of temporal experience (Ricoeur), then this synthesizing activity is a temporal process, which reveals the paradox of human time.
Space, Time and Narrative: Bakhtin and Ricoeur
In the preface to the second volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur's monumental study of the philosophical, historical and hermeneutic implications of the configuration of time in literature, the author describes the intrinsic paradox of examining what he refers to as the 'fictive experience of time':
This essay is for introductory classes. It includes discussions of the time of viewing and of narrative forms in art.
Time Structure in the Story: Gérard Genette, 'Narrative Discourse' (Narrative Theory, 3)
'Narrative Theory' is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The third section deals with the narrative articulation of time, taking as a guideline Gérard Genette's theory in 'Narrative Discourse', modified as required. Outline: 1. The Generation of Story Time. 2. Fabula time. 3. Story time: order. 4. Story time: duration. 4. Story time: Aspect. 6. Time and status of the narrating. Keywords: Narrative, Narratology, Representation, Time, Narrative time, Narrative structure, Gérard Genette,
About TimeNarrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time
2006
sets out to defend his claim that narrative temporality, contrary to common assumptions, is subject to the future perfect tense-the space where things will have happened, not where they will happen. In its discussion of narrative surprise and temporality, it draws on a variety of philosophical and hermeneutical sources. A highlight is Currie's discussion of Derrida in terms of the strictly philosophical, while with regards to the hermeneutic, his outline and use of Ricouer, particularly his hermeneutic circle, could hardly be ignored. Overall, the book makes for an exciting and informed read. The sources used are numerous, and the style is accessible. The reasoning and ideas behind the work are also not to be underestimated.
Time is most important ingredient for a text as for its existence; structure, meaning and understanding is concerned. It is also impossible to go beyond time. Since the time of genesis, the paradigms of time have undergone different interpretations which have resulted in equally different understandings of life and literature. In this paper, Garcia Marquez’s novel In Evil Hour (1962) has been analyzed in the light of narratological concepts of ‘story time’ and ‘narrative time’ as has been discussed by Gerard Genette in his book Narrative Discourse: Essay in Method (1983). Lilla Kopar’s concept of ‘figurative time’ enumerated in his famous paper titled “An Intellectual Dialogue Set In Stone” and Genette’s concept of ‘achrony’ best describe the timeless and temporal structure of the novel. Figuratively speaking, time in the novel is both linear and non-linear. Moreover, it would not be incorrect to say that the concept of time in the novel is above the concepts of linearity and nonlinearity. Time in the novel is circular cyclic and repetitive. A structuralist reading of the novel makes it clear that the ‘story time’ of the novel is purely and simultaneously psychological, magical, fantastic and realistic phenomenon. The ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ of the novel displays that nothing has changed since the beginning of human generation because human beings are still subject to similar pains and pleasures of life and are still possess same instincts. Structurally, the novel is an instance of ‘iterative narrative’ which uses ‘achrony’ and ‘iterative syllepsis’ as the techniques of representing its temporal and timeless paradigms playing fundamental role in its interpretation, understanding and meaning. In this way, the novel breaks away from what is logical and normal simultaneously questions the paradigms of modern constructs of time and reality. Key words: anachrony, achrony, itera
Time, Narrative, and History (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), by David Carr
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1988
Consequent upon his outstanding account of Husserl's views on temporality and history (Phenomenology and the Problem of History, Northwestern, 1974), David Carr has now given us his own reflections upon historical existence and narrative meaning. Recent discussions of narrative by authors like Hayden White, Louis Mink, and Paul Ricoeur have examined principally the relation between literary and historical texts. Carr views this discussion as important but abstract because restricted to the formal level of textual discourse. Marshalling the descriptions of temporality and historicity worked out by Husserl, Dilthey, and Heidegger, Carr defends the thesis that pre-theoretical and pre-thematic human experience, action, and life themselve~ exhibit a narrative configuration. Narrative is the tissue of life itself, not a form of reflection that distorts our living in order to organize it for cognitive or aesthetic purposes. Among those who, like himself, construe human life as story, Carr names literary critic Barbara Hardy, historian Peter Munz, a "renegade phenomenologist" Wilhelm Schapp, as well as Alasdair Macintyre and Frederick Olafson. Time, Narrative, and History unfolds in six chapters after the Introduction, and is followed by a useful Index. The book proceeds from an examination of the narrative configuration of individual experience, action, and life, which culminates in a very fine chapter on 'The Self and the Coherence of Life," to rewrite what is learned at the individual level on to group and community actions and projects. Moving from description of the retentive-protentive character of short-term passive experiences like listening to a melody and the means-ends character of short-term actions like serving in tennis, Carr quickly establishes the temporal configuration of everyday experience and action. But what does this have to do with its narrative configuration? Without a great deal of preparation, Carr says that a literary narrative is marked by temporal closure with a beginning, middle, and end, by temporal sequence, and by the intersecting temporal perspectives of author, characters, and reader. Here one could wish for a fuller discussion of narrative structure in a wider range of fiction. Carr does refer to Kafka's The Trial (85), and he does display in individual experience and action a pleasingly broad range of the temporal closures and sequences typical of narrative: departure and arrival, departure and return, means and end, suspension and resolution, problem and solution (49). Throughout, Carr stresses the "preeminently practical character of narrative structure" (70): these configurations are found originally in our experiences and actions, not only at the level of reflective attention where Alfred Schutz, for example, exclusively located them (37-38). Narrative configuration occurs in two registers, that of experience as it is undergone or action as it is performed and that of reflectively "taking stock" or Besinnung (91). What about the third feature Carr attributes to narrative, the requirement that there be authorship, characters, and audience? Here Carr's discussion is at its most original and valuable. I know of no other theorist who has faced this