Linear Narrative

5 Key excerpts on "Linear Narrative"

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  Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature

  • Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction The genealogy of linearity Despite their innumerable differences, most literary narratives have an underlying linear structure that comes to light either throughout the course of the story or at its resolution. Even many of those texts that do not follow a chronological sequence, or where the protagonists undertake a seemingly circular journey leading them back to the starting point, usually exhibit a core linear development that becomes apparent at the story’s closing. Nevertheless, narrative itself (like time) is not inherently linear. 1 The historical predilection for this structural model is actually contingent on the way in which literature has traditionally been understood and conceptualized. The reason for linearity’s prevalence lies in the original conception of narrative as serving primarily a moral or didactic purpose, rather than an aesthetic one. The optimum structure for such an end is one where the entire text works (albeit subliminally) towards presenting a certain value, theme or teaching in a gradual, coherent and unified manner. The linear form thus became the paradigmatic structure of literary narratives, not because of its ostensible adherence to the natural sequence of language but because it is inherently teleological: it presents a situation that is either subverted or reaffirmed in the text’s ending, endowing the entire sequence of events with a specific meaning. The pervasiveness of narrative linearity is therefore a direct result of the fact that literature has traditionally been understood as having a specific telos. Aristotle’s definition of literature as mimesis, Kant’s delineation of the concept into two types of ‘arts of speech’ (2007: 59) 2 or the Romantic equation of the literary art with a certain kind of personal 1 Time was not always perceived as linear.

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  Why Did Paul Go West?

  Jewish Historical Narrative and Thought

  • Doron Mendels(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Our “history” of Hamlet is so to speak installed in our minds through the Hamlet of Shakespeare; 4 the linearity of the Hebrew Bible is well conceptualized through the Linear Narrative of the Books of Genesis through Kings (1 and 2 Chronicles tried to make changes in this narrative, but to no avail; when we picture biblical history it is usually not through the eyes of the Chronicler). Thus, concentrating on historical narratives, I wish to say that by linearity I mean temporal linearity, in which there is a familiar order of events that was fixed by the authoritative text. Now, what I wish to argue is that although we are dealing here with authoritative texts, they are and remain authoritative only within certain groups whereas for later works and for other groups they have remained only crucial reference and this perhaps diminishes their absolute authority. In other words, I would distinguish here between three (chronological) phases which I will later clarify: a given narrative condition (the basic [authoritative] narrative); the mental transformation of this narrative in later generations (how people remember the narrative and its temporal linearity, usually in a more or less fixed sequence dictated by the basic authoritative text); and the narrative as altered by “sub-narrators.” These processes – moving from the basic written narrative through mental frameworks of the narrative (preserved in people’s minds) to the altered (re-written) narrative – exploited several strategies, some explicit and others implicit. A re-written text in the sense used here has to have one or more of the following elements in order to be included in our discussion: 1. Hidden or explicit polemics against the original authoritative text. This can be defined as the polemical stance of the narrator of the rewritten text. 2. Change in the order of the original narrative and its temporal linearity (as defined above).

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  The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

  • H. Porter Abbott(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2) Loose and generally recognizable: These are the longer structures that we call narratives, even though they may contain much nonnarrative material. Most of these come in recognizable genres: tragedy, comedy, epic, short story; and an abundance of other genres of film, drama, poetry, and prose, either fictional or nonfictional. No one has yet come Defining Narrative 14 up with a precise way of determining when any long text no longer qualifies as narrative in this larger sense and should be called something else. But usually the defining characteristic we look for at this level is narrative coherence. You could say that, for such a text, narrative is the dominant, a concept that Roman Jacobson defined as “the focusing component of a work of art” that allows us to respond to it as, in this case, a narrative (1935: 41). 2 But here, too, there can be fuzziness, since there are texts, as Brian McHale argues, that can “yield different dominants” depending on how we read them (1987: 6). 3 Going back to the compact form of narrative, the definition that I have chosen is controversial in yet another way, since there are scholars who would also dispute my other term – “representation” – as much too broad. In the first edition of Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology (1987), he wrote that “[A] dramatic performance representing (many fascinating) events does not constitute a narrative …, since these events, rather than being recounted, occur directly on stage.

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  Between Law and Narrative

  The Method and Function of Abstraction

  • Bernon P. Lee(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  The literary piece seeks to lead a reader’s perception away from normative modes of comprehension in order to attend to the form of the presentation: the devices, for example, of repetition, tautological parallelism, and the retardation of action in narrative. R EADING N ARRATIVE AND L AW 17 action may be withheld in order to create the element of surprise for the reader. Such a device plays with the order of time and cause; the latter is related to theme in that the ultimate goal of the cause-effect sequence exemplifies the theme of the narrative unit. 20 The thematic component receives its full definition at the conclusion of the narrative sequence. As such, causality is the bond that holds each component captive to the full definition of the theme in the narrative sequence. In other words, the causal link between the various events is nothing less than the manifestation of theme through the narrative sequence. While Tomashevsky’s distinction between ‘plot’ and ‘story’ allows for lapses in the representation of chronological sequence in the presentation of events in narrative texts, it is his identification of causality in narrative sequences that clarifies the syntagmatic expression of theme in narrative sequences. Chronological sequence and theme become mutually dependent when they intersect in narrative. Causality is the bond between the two elements. Narrative sequences, thus, are by definition teleological. If it is the case in narrative sequences that chronologically sequential actions exemplify themes, then themes impose limits on the sequences. The addition of other actions to a narrative sequence could change the theme of the unit by subsuming the original theme under a wider descriptive term to account for the additional events. In light of such observation, it is easy to see why Scholes and Kellogg, following Aristotle’s lead, state that narrative plots require “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (1966, 211).

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  1 & 2 Samuel: An Introduction and Study Guide

  A Kingdom Comes

  • David Firth(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Samuel employs a sophisticated understanding of chronology as it draws on these possibilities in construct-ing its narrative world. We therefore need to consider how Samuel tells its stories because exploring how a story is told is a vital element in under-standing what it is striving to communicate. Chronology within a Narrative A Linear Narrative – 1 Samuel 1.1-2.10 If we begin with internal narrative dynamics, we can consider the use of linear and non-linear chronology. The simplest way to tell a story is to start at the beginning and then recount the elements which make it up in the sequence in which they occurred. In this way, the real world and the story world match up to one another. Samuel does narrate some of its stories this way, though it will often do so in ways that play with the process. We can consider, as an example, Samuel’s birth story (1 Sam. 1). Here, the narrative moves through the main events in order, starting with Hannah’s arrival at the sanctuary with her family before recounting her time of prayer in the temple and Eli’s blessing before she returned to her home. Then we are told that Yahweh remembered her (1 Sam. 1.19b-20) and she conceived and gave birth to a son whom she named Samuel. Finally, in fulfilment of her earlier vow, Hannah returned to the temple where she left Samuel as one dedicated to Yahweh. Read this way, it is clear that the story is narrated so that it follows events as they would have happened. But the narrative also plays with its chronology along the way in terms of its frequency and the speed at which it passes. In terms of frequency, an event might be narrated only once or it might be repeated a number of times (Genette 1980: 113-14). So, it is 6 . Chronology as a Literary Feature of Samuel 69 clear as we read 1 Sam.

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