On Asynchronous Concurrence: Synchronicity, Simultaneity and Superposition in Contemporary Novels and Films

这个研究项目位于比较文学和文化研究，关注的是同时的非同步性：它调查当代叙事小说和电影，它们使用不同的手段来表现叙事过程中同时发生的事件或替代的可能性。尽管这些小说的安排是连续的，但它们代表了共时性和重叠性，并使平行和多维的时间概念在阅读或观看的过程中得以感知。虽然这些小说打破了作为故事顺序原则的线性和时间顺序，但这种打破本身只是代表性的，因为它们在内容之外的层面上利用了线性和时间顺序的连续性。可以肯定的是，偶然性是作为叙事连贯性的一个反程序出现的，因为故事没有结束，章节没有遵循预定的因果关系，开始和结束没有在彼此中找到满足;然而，叙事的时间性并没有被简单地扬弃，任意性和混乱似乎只是取代了继承和秩序。在有意的非线性叙事中，历时性也弥漫在共时性的经验场所，因为每个接受者都通过自我选择或媒介暗示的顺序安排来建立审美反应的生产时间。除了时间顺序或非时间顺序的决定之外，时间性的处理方式并不排除任何一个，而是允许在非时间顺序中体验时间顺序，反之亦然。在这个过程中，所选择的表现形式试图创造性地耗尽以及背叛他们的媒介（纸张，书籍，电影，系列），破坏了通常的机制和惯例，如按方向翻页，章节或剧集的编号，以及对连续性的要求。

This research project is situated in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and is concerned with non-simultaneity of the simultaneous: It investigates contemporary narrative fiction and film which uses different means to represent simultaneously occurring events or alternative possibilities in the course of the narration. In spite of the arrangement of a succession, these fictions represent synchronicity and overlap and render concepts of parallel and multidimensional time perceptible in processes of reading or seeing. While these fictions break with linearity and chronology as ordering principles of a story, this break itself is only representable because they utilize processes of linearity and chronological succession on a level other than that of content. To be sure, contingency emerges as a counterprogram to narrative coherency in that stories do not conclude, chapters do not follow a predetermined causality, beginning and end do not find fulfillment in one another; nevertheless, the temporality of the narration is not simply sublated, arbitrariness and chaos only seem to replace succession and order. In intentionally nonlinear narration, too, diachronicity pervades the experiential site of the synchronic in that every recipient establishes a productive time of aesthetic response through a sequential arrangement that is either self-selected or suggested by the medium. Beyond the decision for chronology or achronology, temporality gets handled in a manner which does not exclude either one but allows chronology to be experienced in the non-chronological and vice versa. In the process, the selected forms of representation attempt to creatively exhaust as well as to betray their medium (paper, book, film, series) by undermining such usual mechanisms and conventions as the turning of pages in a direction, the numbering of chapters or episodes of a series, and the demand for continuity.