Title | : | Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 0300068751 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9780300068757 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 348 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 1994 |
Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.
Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time Reviews
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Been reading and re-reading this one for a few months and expect to keep returning to its pages frequently as it is a challenging and fascinating study of narrative time, which is a grossly simplified label for such a far reaching book, as Morson links questions about narrative time to fundamental questions about human life as they are represented in fiction. That Realism represents a closing off of truth, a reduction of life's possibilities, is just one of his contentious threads. Most enlightening was his explication of Dostoevsky's battle with determinism; that a core purpose in the big D's art was to establish indeterminism and all its possibilities in his novelistic worlds. That insight has dramatically expanded my appreciation of Dostoevsky's work. The key term that Morson lobbies for is sideshadowing, which, (in it's simplest definition,) is "an open sense of temporality and a set of devices used to convey that sense." An open sense of possibilities (as reflected in the structural representation of time) is equated with human freedom and a closed sense of possibilities equates with repression. Sideshadowing is contrasted with foreshadowing. When a writer uses foreshadowing, the outcome is known ahead of time, the eventualities are predetermined, the world of the characters is closed down. Though there may be an illusion of openness in the plot, once you get to the end and recognize the foreshadowing that occurred, you realize the outcome was in fact predetermined. That is what, in Morson's analysis, Doestoevesky was fighting against and his weapon of choice was sideshadowing, essentially an overloading of possible outcomes layered throughout the text that are designed to undermine the notion that any one outcome can be known to be true. Expanding on that line of argument is Morson's primary mission in the book, and to do so he digs into Bahktin's concept of indeterminism and moves beyond foreshadows and sideshadows to discuss backshadows and paraludes. A short review doesn't really do this book justice. If you have any interest in narrative structure at all, this is a book you need to spend some time with.
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Also sounds very interesting. I've always felt that a world of possibilities exists at every moment, and would want to write that way.
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I've used this for several assignments. It's fascinating stuff.