
Time Matters To All Of Us. It Dominates Everyday Discourse: Diaries, Schedules, Clocks, Working Hours, Opening Times, Appointments, Weekdays And Weekends, National Holidays, Religious Festivals, Birthdays, And Anniversaries. But How Do We, As Unique Individuals, Subjectively Experience Time? The Slowness Of An Hour In A Boring Talk, The Swiftness Of A Summer Holiday, The Fleetingness Of Childhood, The Endless Wait For Pivotal News: These Are Experiences To Which We All Can Relate And Of Which We Commonly Speak. How Can A Writer Not Only Report Such Experiences But Also Conjure Them Up In Words So That Readers Share The Frustration, The Excitement, The Anticipation, Are On Tenterhooks With A Narrator Or Character, Or In Melancholic Mourning For A Time Long-since Passed, Which We Never Experienced Ourselves? Erica Wickerson Suggests That The Evocation Of Subjective Temporal Experience Occurs In Every Sentence, On Every Page, At Every Plot Turn, In Any Narrative. The Architecture Of Narrative Time Offers A New Template For Understanding Narrative Time That Combines Close Readings With Analysis Of The Structural Overview. It Enables New Ways Of Reading Thomas Mann; But Also New Ways Of Conceptualising Narrative Time In Any Literary Work, Not Only In Mann's Fiction And Not Only In Texts That Foreground The Narration Of Time. The Range Of Mann's Novels, Novellas, And Short Stories Is Compared With Other Nineteenth- And Twentieth-century Works In German And In English To Suggest A Comprehensive Approach To Considering Time In Narrative.
This book investigates how narrative structures function to evoke subjective experiences of time within literary texts. Erica Wickerson, a scholar of German literature, utilizes a comparative framework to examine the works of Thomas Mann alongside other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. By analyzing both granular sentence-level construction and broader structural patterns, she proposes a new template for understanding how authors manipulate temporal perception for the reader.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and students of narratology view this work as a rigorous contribution to the study of temporal structures in fiction. The text is noted for its academic density and its utility as a tool for both specialized Mann research and broader literary analysis.
Page Count:
240
Publication Date:
2017-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press, Incorporated
ISBN-10:
0192511718
ISBN-13:
9780192511713
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!