Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel
TL;DR: The authors trace the development of time travel, from H. G.G. Wells's The Time Machine to post-modern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity.
Abstract: "'Scientific people/ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space'" (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time "as a kind of space," politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in the evolutionary debate of the fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in the "spatial turn" in narrativity, which includes the topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace the development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the spa tial-temporal configuration of the narrative text, "the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (15). The
Citations
More filters
2,171 citations
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2018
18 citations
Book•
16 Jan 2020TL;DR: The authors argue that the formal disappearance of aging from the English novel parallels the ideological pressure to identify as being young by repressing the process of growing old, which corresponds to the rise of the long novel, which draws upon the temporality of the body to map progress and decline onto the plots of nineteenth-century British modernity.
Abstract: The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel argues that the formal disappearance of aging from the novel parallels the ideological pressure to identify as being young by repressing the process of growing old. The construction of aging as a shameful event that should be hidden - to improve one's chances on the job market or secure a successful marriage - corresponds to the rise of the long novel, which draws upon the temporality of the body to map progress and decline onto the plots of nineteenth-century British modernity.
18 citations
Dissertation•
01 Sep 2011
TL;DR: In this article, the transmedia franchise character is defined as a particular modality of fiction, producing particular orientations and operations of meaning and representation, and the trans-textual, trans-medial extension of a fiction can be identified and delineated as a fictional practice.
Abstract: In contemporary media landscapes characterised by technological, industrial, and cultural convergence, transmedia fictional practice, that is, the generation of multiple texts, products and experiences across multiple media outlets cohered by a common narrative reality, cast of characters, or entertainment brand, is in the ascendancy. This thesis begins from the observation that although transmedia practice is coterminously beginning to receive more and more critical attention, there remains much work to be done theorising the “total entertainment” experiences (Grainge, 2008: 11) it produces in fictional terms. It identifies a particular need for further critical investigation of how transmedia fictional practice interacts with the design, development, and representation of character.
It takes as its fundamental starting principle the assumption that transmediality can be defined and operationalised as a particular modality of fiction, producing particular orientations and operations of meaning and representation, and that the trans-textual, trans-medial extension of a fiction can be identified and delineated as a fictional practice. In dialogue with existing critical work organised by the concept of transmedia storytelling, and industrial discourses and practices of cross-platform production, I conceptualise and define the object of study of this thesis as the practice of transmedia franchising, of which transmedia storytelling is positioned as a sub-genre.
The thesis comprises an original theory of the transmedia franchise character as a fictional object, situated in a poetics of transmedia franchising as a fictional practice. It proposes conceptual tools, theoretical frameworks, and critical positions for understanding and analysing the processes of meaning and representation that build up a picture of a character as it is franchised across texts and media, and how they are shaped and influenced by key contextual factors. The six chapters map six core features of the transmedia franchise character as a fictional object, each then providing a granular elaboration of some of the formal, operational, functional, and critical implications of these features. Chapter One engages the problem of the instability of “the text” as critical concept and material artefact relative to transmedia franchise fiction; Chapter Two theorises the franchise character as extensible, designed to anticipate, sustain and generate serial development and representation across multiple texts; Chapter Three presents transmedia franchising as an art of multiplicity, and explores how it builds up a picture of character through setting in play dialogues between rewrites, reimaginings, and alternate versions; Chapter Four focuses on the multimediality of the franchise character specifically; Chapter Five discusses how paratextual material interpolates into and contributes to the actualisation of the franchise character; and Chapter Six explores the franchise character as site and technology of participation, interactivity, and immersion in the franchise world.
14 citations
Cites background from "Shapes of the Past and the Future: ..."
...Although, meanwhile, it may be expected that counterfactual thinking, in bringing to light some of the “absolute contingency of history” (Gomel, 2009: 348), “might make the world seem capricious and random” (Galinsky et al., 2005: 112), psychologists have found that it instead tends to lead people…...
[...]
26 Nov 2018
TL;DR: The authors traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, post-classical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made through a focus on space instead of time.
Abstract: Abstract Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, postclassical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made through a focus on space instead of time. It suggests that as geography and geographers have become increasingly interested in narrative approaches in dealing with concepts, visualization, and digitalization, it is perhaps (once again) time narratology itself, while continuing to focus on and explore space and place, took account of its history of treating them and looked at how geography has implemented narratological concepts in its technical and philosophical approaches.
13 citations
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: In this article, the human body can be seen as a body without a mind, as in the following: "Communication without communication" (Communication, Presentation, Unpresentable).
Abstract: Introduction: About the Human. 1. Can Thought go on without a Body?. 2. Rewriting Modernity. 3. Matter and Time. 4. Logos and Tekhne, or Telegraphy. 5. Time Today. 6. Newman: The Instant. 7. The Sublime and the Avant-Garde. 8. Something like: 'Communication ... without Communication.'. 9. Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable. 10. Speech Snapshot. 11. After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics. 12. Conservation and Colour. 13. God and the Puppet. 14. Obedience. 15. Scapeland. 16. Domus and the Megalopolis. Index.
478 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: In this paper, Ernst Mayr traces the history of Darwin's evolutionary theories, emphasizing the extraordinary originality of Darwin genius and his skills as a naturalist, biologist and philosopher.
Abstract: Darwin's theory of evolution has remained the object of continual debate and controversy throughout the last 140 years. In fact Darwin himself described his challenge to the orthodoxies of his day as "one long argument". In this book, Ernst Mayr traces the history of Darwin's evolutionary theories, emphasizing the extraordinary originality of Darwin's genius, and his skills as a naturalist, biologist and philosopher.
330 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this article, an accessible and stimulating summary of the often over-complex theories that have transformed the study of narrative in recent decades is presented, arguing that it is their inseparability which characterises postmodern fiction, criticism and culture.
Abstract: This book is an accessible and stimulating summary of the often over-complex theories that have transformed the study of narrative in recent decades. It establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world, arguing that it is their inseparability which characterises postmodern fiction, criticism and culture.
312 citations
272 citations
Book•
[...]
17 Jun 2004
TL;DR: It is as little to be doubted, that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed, in this region, for many thousand years before the coming of Cæsar; and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity, except for the intervention of man.
Abstract: IT MAY be safely assumed that, two thousand years ago, before Cæsar set foot in southern Britain, the whole country-side visible from the windows of the room in which I write, was in what is called "the state of nature". Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of the downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry. The native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse, contended with one another for the possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales which swept, with unbroken force, now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of underground and overground animal ravagers. One year with another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be doubted, that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed, in this region, for many thousand years before the coming of Cæsar; and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity, except for the intervention of man.
268 citations