Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory

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.