ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a summary overview of narrative theories and ‘time’. It distinguishes broadly between two orientations to temporal meaning: ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’. The ‘scientific’ assumes that the temporal sequence of ‘story’ is chronological, even if reordered in ‘discourse’; this is comparable to the biotemporality of J.T. Fraser’s world 4 of organic being (birth to death). Brief mention is made of Saussure, Russian formalism, Prague School Poetics, French structuralism, with some detail on familiar names in literary studies (Propp, Jakobson, Barthes, Genette) and more detail on William Labov’s linguistic study of spontaneous oral narrative. The ‘philosophical’ orientation includes non-chronological time, that comparable to nootemporality, the time of Fraser’s world 5 of human consciousness. Mention is made of William James, Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, with later reinterpretations, as with Elizabeth Grosz on Gilles Deleuze on Bergson. The chapter elaborates in more detail on the work of James (‘stream of consciousness’) and Bergson (durée). Finally, it notes that a different temporal orientation to narrative results in a different theoretical focus: on product (text) or on process (productive and interpretative strategies and their context).
