Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time

Rosemary Huisman is Honorary Associate Professor in English at The University of Sydney. She is the author of The Written Poem, Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English, six chapters in Narrative and Media, and numerous articles on literary and legal language; she is also a published poet.

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Acknowledgements

Preface

1 Human consciousness and the dual experience of time felt and time understood

2 ‘Spatialization’ and scientific discourse, taking time out of language: Benjamin Whorf’s ‘configuration of experience’ and M.A.K. Halliday’s ‘grammatical metaphor’

3 Levels of nature and worlds of time: J.T. Fraser’s model of five levels of natural complexity associated with six worlds of different temporalities in the extended human umwelt

4 Narrative studies and time: a summary history of ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ understandings of temporal meaning in narrative theory and narratology

5 Language and worlds of experience: the basic concepts of M.A.K Halliday’s model of functional grammar, and its system of transitivity relating meaning to worlds of experience

6 ‘Temporalization’ and narrative texts, keeping time in language: projection and narrative voice, expansion and narrative particularity

7 Narrative worlds and their temporalities: weaving the temporalities of different worlds with different modes of coherence in the texture of one narrative; dominant worlds in English literary texts, pre-printing to postmodern

8 The meaning of ‘story’: the mode of coherence of each thread/theory telling the temporality of one narrative world, with examples from different historical periods

9 Prose fiction and the texture of time: detailed study and comparison of extracts from three ‘canonical’ novels of classic realism, modernism and postmodernism

10 Poetry and the texture of time: extending the model of temporalities to the traditional, modernist and postmodern poem, and the complex poetic ‘weaving’ of temporal meanings

11 Digital culture and the texture of time, post postmodernism or …

Index