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Abstract The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.
Keywords time, narratology, postmodernism, reading, phenomenology. Postmodern,
Postmodernity, Postmodernism
David Lodge showed that postmodernity typically includes a vast range of cultural styles, attitudes, and arguments: deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-industrialism, consumerism, quantum physics, or cybernetics (amongst others).1 It is an event or set of events (some of these events include: the universalism of technology, the collapse of spatial distinctiveness and identity, and the uncontrolled acceleration of temporal processes)2 which dramatically alter the ways in which we view the world, calling our ideological assumptions into question.3 Richard Rorty's pragmatism, the work of philosophical scientists, Michel Foucault's genealogies, catastrophe and chaos theories, Jean-François Lytorad's war on totality, fractal geometry, Jean Baudrillard's simulations, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes - all of these add up to what postmodernity feverishly celebrates: pluralism and the rejection of all cultural certainties (anti-foundationalism and anti-authoritarianism). 4
Indeed, Hayden White convincingly argued that the rejection of history was the result of the tension between a series of conceptual, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetical oppositions: fact and fiction, subject and object, form and content, surface and depth, sense and reference.5 The collapse of time horizons and the loss of temporality led to the disappearance of depth, bringing about a constant preoccupation with the problem of instantaneity. Jörn Rüsen argued that postmodernity's orientation towards the past reveals a desire to understand the present.6 Nevertheless, this relationship is intentionally blurred because, as Fredric Jameson has shown, the 'truth of experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place'.7
Consequently, postmodernity marks a shift in representation and the ways in which knowledge - as commodity - is produced, distributed, and consumed. Postmodern novels customarily show us dazed and confused characters having serious ontological doubts (being aware of their own status as characters)....