| This dissertation analyzes the temporal and causal structures of postmodern narrative texts in their relation to contemporary changes in the experience of time. Part One, "Chronoschisms," argues that socio-economic developments and technological innovations in the last four decades have led to the emergence of a new time sense in Western cultures. Diachronically, this "posthistorical" perspective focuses on the short-term present, severed from both past and future. Synchronically, it arises out of the public awareness of widely divergent time scales from the "big bang" of cosmological evolution to the "nanosecond culture" of computer technology. Both tendencies replace the high-modernist focus on psychological temporality with the emphasis on the loss of social time in an intensely experienced but fractured present.;Part Two, "Time Loops," shows that postmodern narrative responds to these temporal schisms with texts which analyze a particular moment by retelling it in multiple versions, framing it in complex structures of embedding, and breaking it up visually through experimental typographies. Barth's "Menelaiad," Cortazar's Rayuela, Robbe-Grillet's Topologie d'une cite fantome and Beckett's How It Is use these strategies to distance the reader from the narrative present. By preventing any coherent construction of the "now," these texts open up a space of resistance to the relentless immediacy of Western consumer and media culture.;Part Three, "Posthistories," examines two novels which address the loss of historically conceived temporality and causation in their structure as well as their content. When causal coherence is displaced to the macroscopic scale of international corporate operations, as in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or to the microscopic scale of molecular biology, as in Brooke-Rose's Out, human time turns into a playfield of contingency. The impossibility of inducing causes from effects emerges through an inextricably complex plot in Gravity's Rainbow and through contradictory variations on a minimal narrative and linguistic inventory in Out. Both types of structure suspend the reading process between determinism and randomness.;The Epilogue examines a recent attempt to mediate narrative causation and contingency in an innovative temporal model derived from Ilya Prigogine's chaos theory. Bruce Sterling's novel Schismatrix deploys this model in a science fiction text which through its content rather than its form points the way toward possible future developments in narrative structure. |
