The Imagined Moment: Time, Narrative, and Computation
Time is a key aspect of narrative. It can
advance a story, illuminate its role in our daily lives, and help us
understand how events unfold. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary
work, Inderjeet Mani uses recent developments in linguistics and
computer science to analyze the use of time in narrative form. The Imagined Moment
outlines directions for an emerging discipline of “corpus narratology,”
an approach involving the computer analysis and interpretation of
multimillion-word collections of narrative text. This approach, Mani
explains, could alter the very foundations of narrative theory.
Accordingly, he develops a computer representation for timelines and
applies it to a variety of literary works. Among these are such
classics as One Hundred Years
of Solitude, “A Hunger Artist,” Swann’s Way, Jealousy,
Candide, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Along
the way, Mani considers stories embedded in temporal cycles; the
cognitive processes involved in the construal of events in time; the
modeling of narrative progression in terms of changes in readers’
evaluation of characters; the study of variations of tempo in fiction;
and time in computer-mediated forms of storytelling. Click here to read an excerpt . To purchase: Amazon Barnes and Noble University of Nebraska Press Click here for computational analyses of literary fragments discussed in the book Visit The Imagined Moment at Wordpress Author: Inderjeet Mani has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis University, and senior principal scientist at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts. He has also been a visiting fellow of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and an associate professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. He is the author or coeditor of several books, including The Language of Time and Automatic Summarization. |
