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

本研究项目位于比较文学与文化研究中，关注同时者的非同时性：它调查了当代叙事小说和电影，这些小说和电影使用不同的手段来表现同时发生的事件或叙事过程中的其他可能性。尽管顺序排列，但这些小说表现出同步性和重叠性，并在阅读或观看过程中呈现平行和多维时间的概念。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，但这种打破本身是可表征的，因为它们在内容层面之外利用了线性和时间顺序的过程。可以肯定的是，偶然性作为叙事连贯性的反程序出现，因为故事没有结束，章节没有遵循预先确定的因果关系，开始和结束没有相互实现；然而，叙事的时间性并没有被简单地扬弃，随意性和混乱似乎只是取代了连续性和秩序。在有意的非线性叙事中，历时性也渗透到共时性的体验场所，因为每个接受者都通过自我选择或媒介暗示的顺序安排建立了审美反应的生产时间。除了决定是按时间顺序还是按时间顺序，时间性的处理方式不排除任何一种，而是允许按时间顺序在非时间顺序中体验，反之亦然。在这个过程中，选择的表现形式试图创造性地耗尽和背叛他们的媒介（纸，书，电影，系列），破坏通常的机制和惯例，如按方向翻页，一个系列的章节或剧集的编号，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.