ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will deal with two issues that have recently acquired some prominence in narratological discussions: person and tense. Person, classically the distinction between first-and third-person texts, has of course always been a hotly debated subject. Booth's pronouncement on this being `the most overworked distinction' in narrative theory (Booth 1961/1983: 150) was later retracted by him (1983:412), and Dorrit Cohn's recent work (especially her studies of the history vs. fiction problematics, and of first-person present tense narrative1) are perhaps the most insistent endorsement of the centrality of the concept person. The classical distinction between the first-and third-person realm, or between homo-and heterodiegesis (Genette 1980:243±9), however, can no longer satisfy theoretical requirements of comprehensiveness and stringency. Experimental writing has meanwhile produced a broad spectrum of narrative texts employing different and frequently `odd' personal pronouns, and this experimental work requires nothing short of an extensive and radical revision of the standard narratological treatment of person or voice.
