Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity

What's Become of Narrativity? Reasons and Reasonings about Temporal Order A poem, according to Coleridge, reconciles the delights of the whole with those located in each component part. Delights apart, the present series aims at a comparable balance in developing its argument, especially as we now turn from empirical coverage to logical and teleological cogency in accounts of narrative time. This turn-whereby we approach the heart of the matter: narrativity in narrative, narrative in its narrativity-involves a shift of focus amidst continuity. For we have been puzzling over the logic (as well as the accidentals) behind the exclusion of chronological practice by theorists from the map of narrative, and our findings largely carry over to its dismissive mention. It is a fine line that separates denials of chronology's existence in narrative from denials of its value or efficacy as narrative: the latter, normative belittling even sanctions and radicalizes the former, quantitative belittling. (Who, as it were, except possibly one who doesn't know any better or cannot practice what he does know, would burden himself with such a poor thing as an icon of clock-time?) But that line, hence our crossing it, still makes a difference, if only because claims about efficacy bring to the fore reasons and reasonings: arguments for disorder and/or against order, which supposedly explain the facts