Meir Sternberg, Telling in Time II: Chronology, Theleology, Narrativity

Abstract

The central section of Telling in Time II directs the attention to the consequences coming from the meeting between time and narrative considered in the first part of this essay: rhetorical strategies, narratives effects, teleological dynamic of surprise are all questions that belong to the pragmatic dimension of Sternberg’s critical perspective. The first chapters concern these narratives effects that took part in the critical debate since Aristotle and they are developed beginning from theoretical premises (pragmatical and teleological) that enable to examine them from a renew point of view: if the Aristotelian concept of «discovery» (anagnorisis) and «reversal» (peripeteia) went in the modern narrative theorizations without facing any alteration, keeping their anchorage to the narrated world and not to the narrative modalities, Telling in Time II on the contrary, suggest to consider them in relation of their «communicative functioning» and in the so-called Proteus Principle. In the last chapters of the essay, Sternberg, after having explained such theoretical setting, takes these narrative dynamics – with the addition of “curiosity” and “surprise” – as constant element of the narrative genre, placing them at the base of the relations between the teleological level and the representative one that constitutes the central point of Sternberg’s critical purpose.