Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 14:28:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: 


On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Stacey Maxine Armstrong wrote:

> i am putting together an application for a sshrc grant concerning the use
> of time as a metaphor. Does anyone know of any texts which attempt to move
> outside a teological narrative/progressionist time schema? i am interested
> in catastrophe fiction,
> time travel............
> stacey


I don't know if this is quite what you are after, but a number of Beckett
novels come to mind. The trilogy--Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable.
Also Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

The Beckett stuff does not so much move outside the teleological narrative
progression as problematize it in ways which make it cease to function
adequately or at least in a trustworthy fashion. 
E.g., in Malone dies, the main character of the second part of the novel
appears to become the vagabond presented in the first part.


 Plays like  Waiting  for
Godot and Happy Days also do this.  E.g. references to time passing in WFG
are confounded by the characters' inability to situated themselves in
any kind of measurable or discernable chonology.  Repetition of the same
plot elements in the first and second act makes the discernement of time
and change difficult, even as change and the passage of time are
registered in a constantly passing present.

hh
.....................................................................



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