Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader

The present volume is targeted at an interdisciplinary audience, i.e. partly at literary scholars/narratologists interested in time theory outside their field, and partly at scholars outside literary studies who in turn would like to learn more about such concepts created in narrative theory. The anthology assembles both English-speaking and German contributions to a narrative theory of time constructs which have thus far not been translated into English, but have – directly or indirectly – inspired the theoretical discourse across disciplines.

The common methodological focus of the articles assembled here concerns the way in which the experience of chronological structure and ordering in (experienced or imagined) phenomena can be traced back to a logic of time “constructs”. Narrative time constructs – that is: models of chronological ordering which we generate while processing narratively encoded information – constitute a particularly rich body of examples. How we experience time is directly linked to how we narrate information, and how we re-construct principles of temporal ordering in the narrated content. The logic of narrative time constructs has therefore been of interest not only to narrative theory, but also to philosophy and cognitive science, and more recently to computational approaches toward modelling human time experience.

Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus, University of Hamburg, Germany.