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Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time
Gary Saul Morson
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In this important and controversial book, one of our leading literary theorists presents a major philosophical statement about the meaning of literature and the shape of literary texts. Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles, Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould, and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience. Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and backshadowing (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls sideshadowing. Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.
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Cover Page
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
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Note on Punctuation
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Abbreviations
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Introduction
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Part I: The Shape of Narrative and the Shape of Experience
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Chapter One. Prelude: Process and Product
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Time out
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Eventness
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Creative process
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The pun of creativity
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Temporal vacuum
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Logarithms and sea battles
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Double determination
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Narrative isomorphism and anisomorphism
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Escape from structure
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Chapter Two. Foreshadowing
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The essential surplus
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Foreshadowing
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The gathering storm
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The future that has happened
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Prophetic history
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Types of the socialist future
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The art of the known future
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Oedipus the King
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Omens
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Destiny and determinism
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Exemption from inevitability
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"The Fatalist,"
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Eluctable destiny
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Anna Karenina's omens: Narcissism and stories
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Anna: Who is to blame?
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Anna: Omens and their causes
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Anna: Loose ends
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The surplus against itself
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Chapter Three. Interlude: Bakhtin's Indeterminism
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"The Dilemma of Determinism": Time's "loose play,"
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Novels as forms of thought
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The lateness of the author
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Bakhtin's second stage: Characters break free
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The heteroverse
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God subjected to time
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Creating freedom by provocation and torture
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Strange synchronies
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Bakhtin's third stage: Wisdom of the chronotope
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"Real historical time,"
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Time in the historical novel
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Many realities, and the surplus of humanness
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Part II: Sideshadowing and Its Possibilities
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Chapter Four. Sideshadowing
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The possibility of possibility, and the middle realm
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Time as a field
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The extraordinary number of facts, if only they are facts
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Rumor as hero
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The workers rebel, or do they?
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Twice Possessed
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The past as "an indistinct abstraction,"
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Gaps in the text
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Pseudo-foreshadowing
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Karamazov: "Both versions were true,"
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Karamazov: Responsibility and the middle realm
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Kairova time and processual intentionality
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The devil's potentials: The coordinates of the other world
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The hunger for possibilities
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Paraquels and parodies
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Resurrections
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Tolstoy and contingency
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Aesthetic potentiality
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Vortex time
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The end of time
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After the vortex
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Aperture
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Chapter Five. Paralude: Presentness and Its Diseases
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Sports time
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Sports time: Synchronizing public and private
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"Longing for the present,"
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Genre painting and memory
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Prosaics and the presentness of the past
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Present and sequence. The happiest moment and four diseases of presentness
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Disease #1, the desiccated present. Epic time and epilogue time
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Disease #1, the desiccated present. Epilogue time and the generations
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Disease #1, the desiccated present. Eschatology and utopia
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Disease #2, the isolated present
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Disease #2, the isolated present. Gambling with history
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Disease #2, the isolated present. The mutable past
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Disease #2, the isolated present. The dialogue of times, and a strange catastrophism
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Disease #2, the isolated present. Commemoration
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Disease #3, hypothetical time. Edited life
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Disease #3, hypothetical time. The impurity of freedom
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Disease #3, hypothetical time. Crime and chronicity
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Disease #4, Multiple time. The garden of forking paths
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Disease #4, multiple time. Multiple-universe determinism
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Conclusion
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Chapter Six. Backshadowing
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Backshadowing defined and characterized
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"He should have known": Premises of backshadowing
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Retrospection and reciprocity
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Whiggism
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Time line: The progressive
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Arthropodic whiggism: Wonderful life
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Two fallacies: Hyperselectionism and inferring history from current utility
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Three principles: Anthropic, misanthropic, and brassicic
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Looking backward
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The single truth and society as artwork
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Time and opinion
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Vagrant philosophy and the script of time
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Chapter Seven. Opinion and the World of Possibilities
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Crooked timber
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Dialogue and final solutions
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The church of Philadelphia
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Epilogue . . .
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. . . and beyond
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Notes
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 1984
Publisher: Yale University Press
- 9780300161779 (ebook)