20th Century & Contemporary
Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory
By , University of Maryland (March 2006)
Sections: 20th Century & Contemporary
Subjects: Literature, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature, Culture.
People: Joyce, James, Woolf, Virginia.
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1900-1999.
Key Topics: fiction, narratology, novel and novella, science fiction, prose, science, language.
Abstract
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.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00321.x
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