Catching Time

Temporality, Interaction, and Cognition in the Novel

Isabelle Wentworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032577692
• eBook ISBN: 9781003859222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.' Shakespeare's oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to Catching Time
• 2 Lived and Literary Narratives: From Embodiment to Emplotment
• 3 ‘Body Time’: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
• 4 The Flow of Time: Lía Chara’s Agua
• 5 ‘Home wasn’t built in a day’: The Temporality of Place in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses
• 6 Bodies and Technologies: Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano
• 7 Postface
• Index