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How Novels play with Time











In the humanities there is often the assumption that the nature of time is as described in phenomenonology (the appearance of things).


So the novel may break away from real time but it cannot break away from configurations (arrangement of parts).
Rejecting chronology is one thing, the refusal of any substitute principle of configuration is another.
The novel purportedly may break away from real time but it cannot help but be configured in new terms of temporal organisation that are still perceived as temporal by the reader
The writer may believe he has overturned or taken liberties with time, disarticulated, ambiguated, reversed, telescoped, but this is a belief that time is only conceivable in a chronological way.
Time is infinitely more subtle than rectilinear (moving in, consisting of, bounded by, or characterized by a straight line) succession


The sentence in the novel maybe oriented beyond itself
in its desire to  say something about something, however this does not hold if the sentence is about time.

The purported freedom of the novel to roam in time is a myth if the novelist views time in a phenomonological way.

In academia the  ignoring of time litters comtemporary theory.

Cultural theorists have banned it, if not to outer space then to the very long grass.




recommended book:   About Time  Narrative Fiction and Philosophy of Time



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