By Irmtraud Huber
In this booklet, Irmtraud Huber considers a variety of modern novels to discover the range of percentages and results of using the current annoying, in addition to investigating the explanations for its reputation. by means of illustrating the complexity and class of 4 types of modern utilization, Huber’s dialogue is going a way in the direction of refuting these severe voices which reflect on present-tense narration a passing fad and stylistic affectation. As a annoying of narration, the current can serve to inform diversified tales than the previous annoying, or can inform them otherwise. on no account a passing fad, it's an incredible attribute of latest literature.
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Additional resources for Present Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction: A Narratological Overview
Sample text
While the novel treats historical and autobiographical material, its narrative situation is therefore located sometime in the future. In this combination of historical material and a future narrative point of view the novel creates a sustained tension between fact and fiction throughout. In addition to the interviews, the novel opens and closes with extracts from what purports to be notebook entries, made by Coetzee in the 1970s. These notebook entries talk about Coetzee in the third person as ‘he’ and do so in the present tense.
They recount events in her current life, her interactions with other people and her plans for the future. While explicitly providing a scenario for the narration of Yun Ling’s past, the developments in her present are narrated in a simultaneous present for which no mimetically recuperable narrative situation emerges. This creates a certain tension, since the novel’s usage of a deictic present tense draws explicit attention to the act of narration and the failure of the novel to account for the narration of the present-tense plot thus becomes even more strongly conspicuous.
CONCLUDING REMARKS In contemporary usage, deictic present-tense references often go beyond their traditionally marginal and mostly non-narrative status. The moment of narration itself turns into a narrative event—frequently even a pivotal one. If deictic references always foreground the moment of narration and serve to comment on the narrative events, such narrative deictic usage goes beyond this to reflect on the act of narration and the role and effect it has in the narrator’s present. At the same time, a tension may arise between the self-awareness of narration on the level of the story and the obfuscation of the narrative circumstances for a novel’s discourse, as was the case in Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists.