Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: It takes a brave scholar to tackle such a slippery topic as pace, an omnipresent but somehow underexamined phenomenon of narrative.Brian Gingrich, with immense critical erudition, has begun to address that gap with The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel.A formal history of pace in the novel, as well as a history of critical discourses on pace, The Pace of Fiction is densely packed: it introduces and historicizes the concept of pace, examines the structural techniques of scene and summary by which pace has been managed in fiction, and considers how those structural techniques have evolved over the history of the novel.It is a major scholarly contribution.Gingrich defines pace as "large-forward-rhythmic-shifting-dynamictemporal narrative movement," a definition he finds "appropriately impressionistic" and generally open to revision-especially the term "large," which he revises as "midsized" (2).Thus, Gingrich tries to point to our ongoing experience of a narrative, integrating at "midsize" scale the "constant exchange" between the "micro and macro" levels of a text that drive it forward.Pace is not meter or syntax; it is also not plot; instead, is it the propulsive forward momentum by which a text "moves forward toward senses of endings, projected moments of closure, climax, or nonnarratable resolution; it is uneven, affective, pulsing with will and desire" (4).If the full formal history of pace in the novel seems like an impossibly large project for a book of just over two hundred pages, it is.After his short but substantial theoretical introduction, Gingrich focuses on a specific structuring element of pacing-the division between scene and summary-explicating novel history as an unfolding of the tension and interplay between them.
Source: Modern Philology
DOI: 10.1086/729904
Author: Yonina Hoffman
Institution: United States Merchant Marine Academy
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4392229318