Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction

Writing Slowness in J. M. Coetzee’s <i>Slow Man</i>

“…Delaying and replenishing devices like soliloquies, dialogues, confabulations, multilingualism, fragmentation, letter writing, and multiplicity of stories appear as retardation ploys whereby the novel evolves slowly. Actually, negative actantial roles marked by a pathological slowness, direct discourse, polyglotism, fragmentariness, epistolarity, and "the framing of tales within tales" (Hume, 2005), are narrative slowdowns meant for slowing down the reading of Slow Man. In this way, Coetzee promotes "slow reading", an "adventurous reading" (Defleaux, 1987: p. 152), an innovative reading in which the "readers [launch themselves]…”

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

“…Among the story makers of film—the scriptwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, editors, and more—the first fabula is a socially, but not wholly, shared complex web of ideas; it is not completely in the head of any single individual 1. Within the story consumer, the second fabula could be represented as a mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983), or better, as a network of situation models (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Moreover, it might be assembled through a structure-building framework (Gernsbacher, 1995) or through any number of other approaches (for a review, see McNamara & Magliano, 2009).…”

The speed of plot

“…Perhaps the most detailed account of narrative speed is Kathryn Hume’s article 'Narrative speed in contemporary fiction' () and the shared response she wrote together with Jan Baetens (Baetens & Hume, ). Hume distinguishes between four traditional approaches to narrative speed: (1) 'descriptions' of physical speed; (2) retardation, connected to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of 'defamiliarisation' (Shklovsky [1917] ); (3) Genette’s () relation between the time passed in the storyworld and the number of pages turned; and (4) reflections and thematisations on cultural speed, for example, in connection with contemporary notions of 'acceleration' or in the modernist admiration for technologically generated speed.…”

“…Hume distinguishes between four traditional approaches to narrative speed: (1) 'descriptions' of physical speed; (2) retardation, connected to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of 'defamiliarisation' (Shklovsky [1917] ); (3) Genette’s () relation between the time passed in the storyworld and the number of pages turned; and (4) reflections and thematisations on cultural speed, for example, in connection with contemporary notions of 'acceleration' or in the modernist admiration for technologically generated speed. Hume herself proposes to think of narrative speed as a 'feeling of excessive rapidity' and 'a sense of the narrative being accelerated beyond safe comprehension‐limit ' (Hume, , 105–106, emphasis in original). Speed for Hume relates to a loss of sense of readerly control, which she considers typical of contemporary fiction (see also Hume, ).…”

“… Packard also argues that Genette’s abstract definition of story time in terms of duration in the storyworld and discourse time in terms of pages covered is insufficient. He proposes, referring to Hume (), rather to consider repetitions (indicating several things happening at the same time), and grammatical markers for the discussion of speed in narrative. …”