Annotated, grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.
15.1 On narrative time and order
- ★ Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse (1972; Eng. 1980). The indispensable book for this chapter and the one whose apparatus underlies almost everything in §3 and §6. The chapter on Order is short, demanding and worth reading twice; reach, extent, and the completing/repeating distinction are all set out there. Genette’s corpus is Proust throughout, which makes it double as a critical study of the novel §9.1 discusses.
- ★ Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978). Formidable and unrivalled. The suspense/curiosity/surprise triad alone reorganises how a writer thinks about withholding. Read chapters 1–3 if not the whole.
- Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (1983–85; Eng. 1984–88). Philosophical rather than technical, and slow going. Read the first volume’s treatment of Augustine and of emplotment for the argument that narrative is how time becomes intelligible — the deepest available answer to the question of why fiction rearranges chronology at all.
- Mendilow, A. A. Time and the Novel (1952). The earliest systematic English treatment, and still a useful historical survey. Dated in its critical vocabulary; valuable for its account of the fictive present and of the novel’s changing relation to chronology.
- Bal, Mieke. Narratology (4th ed., 2017). The most usable classroom systematisation of Genette’s apparatus, with clearer terminology and worked examples. The book to put in front of a student who has bounced off Narrative Discourse.
15.2 On the flashback as a form with a history
- ★ Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (1989). The standard study of the device in cinema, and the necessary corrective to any assumption that the prose flashback is a natural form. Its account of how the conventions were standardised — the marked entry, the marked exit, the return to a face — reads, for a novelist, as an account of where their own default habits came from.
- Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis (1946; Eng. 1953), chapter 1. Twenty pages on the scar of Odysseus and the sacrifice of Isaac that establish the distinction between a narrative with background and one without. Outside Genette, the reading that does most for this chapter, because it shows that the suspended background has a history.
- Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse (1978). Useful for the story/discourse distinction in its clearest English form, and for the treatment of gaps.
15.3 On trauma and the unavailable past
- Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience (1996). Short, influential, and the source of the belatedness model. Read it with its critics rather than alone.
- Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy (2000). The major critique. Rigorous, historical, and unsparing about the theoretical foundations of the literalist account.
- LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). The acting-out / working-through distinction, and a more historically careful account than Caruth’s.
- Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing (2013). Argues that the canonical paradigm is Eurocentric and inadequate to collective and continuing traumas. The necessary corrective for anyone applying this literature to Beloved.
15.4 On the reader
- Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension (1997). Contextual frames, frame switching and frame recall — the best available account of what a reader is actually doing when a narrative relocates.
- Zwaan and Radvansky (1998). The review article; the clearest statement of the dimensions readers monitor and the costs of shifting them.
- Ohtsuka and Brewer (1992). A short empirical paper on the comprehension of temporal order; the direct evidence for the chronology test at §7.1.
- Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot (1984). For the argument that narrative desire is a dynamic of delay and discharge — the theoretical relative of the interest deficit, arrived at from psychoanalysis rather than from economics.
15.5 Craft literature, used critically
- Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction (1921). The original English statement of the scene/picture distinction that §6.1 rewrites as the backstory/flashback fork. Read for the terms; disagree with the hierarchy.
- James, Henry. The Art of the Novel (1934). The prefaces, especially on the “foreshortening” of antecedents — James’s own name for the problem this chapter calls the register of the past.
- Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction. The standard university textbook; useful for exercises and for a wide range of quoted examples.
15.6 Within this textbook
- Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the base four domains, and the standard any flashback must meet once it becomes a scene.
- Chapter 4 (The Descriptive Detail) — denotation and connotation; the alternative to the cutaway for delivering a past through objects.
- Chapter 5 (The Transition) — the mechanics of crossing the gap this chapter decides whether to cross: the orientation budget, the anchor, the drift.
- Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — where gaps are placed in a book’s segmentation; proposition and payoff.
- Chapter 13 (The Viewpoint Shift) — for cutaways to material the present viewpoint did not witness.
- Chapter 14 (The Subplot) — the braided structure in the present; the attention tax, of which the interest deficit is the temporal form.
- Chapter 9 (The Opening Pages) — §6.2 there, on Sternberg and the distribution of exposition, is this chapter’s direct predecessor.
- Chapter 10 (The Prologue) — the separated unit before the narrative; the inverse criteria described at §1.3 and §8.11.
- Chapter 16 (The Ending) — where a novel’s past is finally settled, or refused.