Perceiving and Telling: A Study of Iterative Discourse

BACK IN PRINT from the original publisher, San Diego State University Press.

Pointed, timely, and engaging, Daniele Chatelain's PERCEIVING AND TELLING: A STUDY OF ITERATIVE DISCOURSE is a comparatist study exploring verbal conventions that create the illusion of time. It also investigates how these conventions have operated in the works of various authors.

In terms of story versus narrative, the separation of space and time is, in a sense, built into the very terms in which that distinction is traditionally formulated. In Gerald Prince's A Dictionary of Narratology, "story" is the content of the narrative; it is a succession of events "with an emphasis on chronology" (91). On the other hand, "narrative"is the recounting of this chronology; it is a "structuration," that is, a mental spatialization of this presumed flow of events. Underlying modern theory of narrative, in fact, is both a separation of time and space (story = chronology; narrative = structuration), and a sense of rivalry between these two dimensions. The result, it seems, is a valorization of the latter over the former." In her study, Chatelain seeks to show how these dimensions exist on a "spacetime continuum." The book is provided with a glossary of terms.

Danièle Chatelain is Professor of French at the University of Redlands, California.