Present Tense

de Armen Avanessian, Anke Hennig

"The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first present-tense novels shaped by interior monologues and avant-garde factography (e.g. in Arthur Schnitzler or James Joyce) and the use of the present-tense in the tradition of modernism, the history of present-tense narration has changed the conditions of fictional narration over the course of its century-long development, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, for an understanding of the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers (J. M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon to name only a few) it is both necessary to understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its (historical) transformation to a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling.For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of an epochal evolution in 20th- and 21st-century fiction."-- "Describes how the present tense was invented and why the poetics of the present tense novel is essential for an understanding of contemporary literature and the evolution of the novel since modernism"--