Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time

Rosemary Huisman is Honorary Associate Professor in English at The University of Sydney. She is the author of The Written Poem, Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English, six chapters in Narrative and Media, and numerous articles on literary and legal language; she is also a published poet.

• List of figures List of tablesAcknowledgementsPreface1 Human consciousness and the dual experience of time felt and time understood2 ‘Spatialization’ and scientific discourse, taking time out of language: Benjamin Whorf’s ‘configuration of experience’ and M.A.K. Halliday’s ‘grammatical metaphor’3 Levels of nature and worlds of time: J.T. Fraser’s model of five levels of natural complexity associated with six worlds of different temporalities in the extended human umwelt4 Narrative studies and time: a summary history of ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ understandings of temporal meaning in narrative theory and narratology5 Language and worlds of experience: the basic concepts of M.A.K Halliday’s model of functional grammar, and its system of transitivity relating meaning to worlds of experience6 ‘Temporalization’ and narrative texts, keeping time in language: projection and narrative voice, expansion and narrative particularity7 Narrative worlds and their temporalities: weaving the temporalities of different worlds with different modes of coherence in the texture of one narrative; dominant worlds in English literary texts, pre-printing to postmodern8 The meaning of ‘story’: the mode of coherence of each thread/theory telling the temporality of one narrative world, with examples from different historical periods9 Prose fiction and the texture of time: detailed study and comparison of extracts from three ‘canonical’ novels of classic realism, modernism and postmodernism 10 Poetry and the texture of time: extending the model of temporalities to the traditional, modernist and postmodern poem, and the complex poetic ‘weaving’ of temporal meanings11 Digital culture and the texture of time, post postmodernism or …Index

"Rosemary Huisman's absorbingstudy draws on a wide and eclectic range of thinkers, to construct her own account of how people and their narratives experience or negotiate time: its texture, its passing, its inexorable force. Her commentary is in fruitful dialogue with the likes of Whorf, Edelman, William James, and the systemic functional linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday. Central to the discussion is J. T. Fraser's thesis that 'time felt' and 'time understood' are profoundly distinct but interacting phenomena. Along the narrative arc of this study, we meet interesting commentaries on the temporal texture of some great narrative literature, including Middlemarch and 'Frost at Midnight', and contemporary poems by Louis Armand and Antigone Kefala." -Prof. Michael Toolan, Emeritus Professor of English Language, University of Birmingham, UKRosemary Huisman’s Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time, a social-semiotic perspective is a very timely gift to social-semiotic scholarship — a brilliant, erudite transdisciplinary investigation of how we construe our experience of time by modelling it as meaning — including its manifestation as the texture of time in stories. This investigation is grounded in insights into the theoretical conceptions of different modes of time in an ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms, with reference to the pioneering work by J.T. Fraser on different orders of time but also to studies by other leading scholars from different disciplines concerned with aspects of temporality, including M.A.K. Halliday, B.L. Whorf., Vladimir Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gerald Edelman. -Prof. Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Distinguished Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University