ABSTRACT
As well as an understanding of ‘time’, narrative theories add the assumption that narrative projects a ‘world’ (Genette’s levels of diegesis, recent work on ‘text-world theory’, on ‘storyworlds’). This chapter brings together J.T. Fraser’s model of worlds of different temporalities and M.A.K. Halliday’s model of language and construed worlds of experience to describe a model of six narrative worlds and their temporalities. Each world may be told by a story with the relevant temporality and mode of coherent narrative sequence. The texture of the one narrative is produced by the weaving together of stories/threads of different worlds. The chapter gives an overview of ‘narrative as social semiotic’: changes in texture in narratives of different social contexts identified as ‘literary periods’ (pre-printing, early modern, classic realism, modernism, postmodernism), with mention of relevant scholarly interest: e.g. Propp’s functions; Bakhtin’s chronotopes; postmodern analysis by Ursula Heise, Brian McHale. It adds a note on Fraser’s ‘collapse of ontology into epistemology’ and the possible inclusion of ‘genome time’.
