Week 6 SS - Time, Space and Meaning - 1&2 April

TIME SPACE & MEANING

Study the handout for this week and Teresa Bridgeman’s chapter ‘Time and Space’ from the Cambridge Companion to Narrative. (The chapter offers a very useful introduction into the problematic; read pages 52-6 and 63-4).

Read 
An extract from Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (up to page 82; it’s a quick read)
and
Chapter 1 from A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
and answer the questions below.

Questions on Life after Life by Atkinson

Make notes on your reading of the extract, considering the following points (ideally, come up with a brief account of 150 to 250 words to gain practice for the essay and the test):

• Think about how the order of events and duration of scenes on the discourse level of the narrative correspond with the story line.
• Consider if the frequency and repetition of events in the narrative plays a role in the temporal dimension of the narrative.
• Apply as many of the following terms as you can:
  story time, discourse time, repetition, iteration, narrative past, narrative present, gnomic present, ellipsis, narrator, prolepsis, point of attack (you'll find these defined in the handout and/or the chapter by Bridgeman)
  

Questions on A Passage to India by Forster

• Think about how the description of space and the idea of perspective affect the way we read the text. Consider how the setting and its presentation lays out the general power relations in the novel.
• Make notes on the following questions:
  - How can the setting description be considered to be part of (group) characterisation (look up a summary of the novel’s plot if you aren’t familiar with the latter)?
  - How is the atmosphere described and how is it significant for the scene setting?
  - Can any aspects of the setting be considered symbolic?