I delivered a talk about time at the English Institute yesterday. Since it could easily be a year before the print version comes out, I thought I would share the draft as a working paper.
The argument has two layers. On one level it’s about the tension between distant reading and New Historicism. The New Historical anecdote fuses history with literary representation in a vivid, influential way, by compressing a large theme into a brief episode. Can quantitative arguments about the past aspire to the same kind of compression and vividness?
Inside that metacritical frame, there’s a history of narrative pace, based on evidence I gathered in collaboration with Sabrina Lee and Jessica Mercado. (We’re also working on a separate co-authored piece that will dive more deeply into this data.)
We ask how much fictional time is narrated, on average, in 250 words. We discover some dramatic changes across a timeline of 300 years, and I’m tempted to include our results as an illustration here. But I’ve decided not to, because I want to explore whether scholars already, intuitively know how the representation of duration has changed, by asking readers to reflect for a moment on what they expect to see.
So instead of illustrating this post with real evidence, I’ve provided a plausible, counterfactual illustration based on an account of duration that one might extract from influential narratological works by Gérard Genette or Seymour Chatman.
To find out what the real story is, you’ll have to read the paper, “Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes.”
(Open data and code aren’t out yet, but they will be released with our co-authored essay.)
The Stone and the Shell 