Chronoschisms : time, narrative, and postmodernism

In Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Ursula Heise explores the way in which developments in transportation, communication, and information technologies have led to the emergence of a new culture of time in Western societies. The radical transformation in our understanding and experience of time has also profoundly affected the structure of the novel. Heise argues that postmodern novels are centrally concerned with the possibility of experiencing time in an age when temporal horizons have been drastically foreshortened. Drawing on theories of postmodernism and narratology, she shows how postmodern narratives break up plot into a spectrum of contradictory story lines. The coexistence of these competing experiences of time allows new conceptions of history and posthistory to emerge, and opens up comparisons with recent scientific approaches to temporality. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of postmodernist theory and fresh insights into the often vexed relationship between literature and science.