Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (American Studies Series) - Hardcover

Fleischman, Suzanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292780907 ISBN 13: 9780292780903

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1990

Synopsis

. . . Fleischman's book takes the study of medieval literature to new hermeneutic horizons. . . . Furthermore, through the use of sociolinguistics she connects the modern and medieval worlds in a way that will make the medieval world less alien to us, and thus her perspective gives us another means by which we can make medieval literature more relevant to our students. --Studies in the Age of Chaucer In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language. Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for natural narrative to explicate the organizational structure of artificial narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions--pragmatic as well as grammatical--that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.

About this title

Review

"...Fleischman's book takes the study of medieval literature to new hermeneutic horizons.... Furthermore, through the use of sociolinguistics she connects the modern and medieval worlds in a way that will make the medieval world less alien to us, and thus her perspective gives us another means by which we can make medieval literature more relevant to our students." * Studies in the Age of Chaucer *

From the Back Cover

Tense and Narrativity is an investigation into the linguistic foundation of narrative discourse, the goal of which is to arrive at an understanding of certain linguistic strategies used by story-tellers to structure experience, real or invented. The focus is on the functions of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect, and on the strategic ways in which these categories operate in narrative.

A further goal is a re-assessment of a long-standing problem of Romance philology: the seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses found in much of the narrative literature of the Middle Ages: the problem of why medieval writers 'couldn't get their tenses straight'.

The progress towards these two goals provides a springboard for exploring a number of broader theoretical questions: about the differences between spoken and written language, the relationship of pragmatics to grammar, narrative typology, and the status of narrative as a special category of linguistic performance.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0292780907
• ISBN 13: 9780292780903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 459