Space, time, narrative

from Thomas Hardy to Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee

Jakob Lothe

pp. 1-18

in: Attiede Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Jakob Lothe, Attie de Lange (eds), Literary landscapes, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

It is part of the singularity of literature to dramatize fictional narrators' and characters' attempts to understand, accommodate, and finally perhaps resign themselves to the complexities of space and time. The ways in which they do so actualize an accompanying dimension of literature's singularity: its ability to change the perspective, to defamiliarize, to represent a different and yet recognizable otherness (see Attridge, 2004, p. 19; cf. Miller, 2000, pp. 18–19). As readers, we tend to sympathize with the attempts of narrators and characters to come to terms with these problems, because they echo our own. Although the relationship between narrators and characters on the one hand, and space and time on the other, can assume a variety of forms, this essay will argue that the narrative presentations of space in the novels under consideration are interestingly related to each other, thus indicating significant points of connection between early modernist and postcolonial literature. Adopting a tripartite structure, I will first make some theoretical comments on space — particularly narrative space.

Cited authors

Kafka Franz

Coetzee John Maxwell

Hardy Thomas