ATLAS OF LANGUAGE

AT-CORE-242-019 · ATLAS 260

Story time

The duration and temporal order of the events recounted by a narrative.

Part of the subject path Poetics, Narrative and Representation

Why is this entry in the Atlas?

G · Foundational concept R2 · Necessary foundation

Story time supplies the event-level baseline required to analyse analepsis and narrative frequency. Reconstructing its duration and chronology distinguishes it from the time occupied by telling or reading the narrative.

Colours and admission grounds

The rectangular label identifies the entry function: F – linguistic figure or procedure; A – analytical concept; G – foundational concept; E – selected concrete case. The rounded badge indicates the admission ground: R1 – distinctive contribution; R2 – necessary foundation; R3 – justified illustrative case. This editorial rationale explains the current selection rather than claiming an undocumented original selection history.

Explanation

Story time denotes the duration and order of events recounted by a narrative. It may encompass seconds, generations, or imaginary epochs and is not identical with the time required to narrate or read them. Narratives expand brief moments, skip years, repeat events from another perspective, or anticipate what comes later. Chronology thus becomes shaped material. Reconstructing story time combines explicit dates, causal sequences, and inferred intervals; contradictions may indicate unreliable narration or distinct temporal levels. The conceptual movement releases events from the order of presentation, provisionally rearranges them, and asks what effect is produced by the difference between what happens and how it is told.

Movement of thought

1. A text first presents events in the order and at the speed of its own linguistic progression. 2. Temporal markers, causes, and changes of state permit a provisional chronology of the represented world. 3. Analepsis, anticipation, pause, and omission reveal the difference between event time and presentation. 4. A counter-test asks which temporal connections are textually supported and which are supplied only by expectation. 5. Story time returns as a shaped landscape of events whose organisation changes the meaning of what happens.

Scientific use case

Narratology maps the order, duration, and frequency of narrated events. Digital text analysis can detect temporal markers but requires interpretive review for flashbacks, embedded levels, and unreliable chronologies.

Example

One chapter narrates three breaths across twelve pages, while the next sentence skips twenty years; story time contains both although narrative time weights them oppositely.

Counterexample

A novel's page count or a performance's duration is not its story time. Any proposed chronology must also be grounded in textual signals and defensible relations.

Distinction

Distinguish story time from narrative time as the duration or extent of presentation and from anticipation as a specific proleptic move. Chronology names order; story time also includes duration and temporal structure within the event world.

Effect on thought and perception

The shaping of story time guides attention, generates suspense, and determines what appears consequential. Omission may accelerate, while expansion enlarges one moment existentially.

Resonance

Past and future events stand beside one another in the text and answer each other. Narrative makes time not only measurable but formable and retrospectively meaningful.

Etymology

Technical core term; individual etymological review pending

Provenance

ATLAS 241 residual-case triage → profile candidate 241-A → source and neighbourhood cross-check → ATLAS 242

Cite this entry

Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Story time“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-CORE-242-019. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-CORE-242-019

https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-CORE-242-019

The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.

Historical background

Aristotle’s comparison of tragic and epic action remains a distant background, not the origin of the modern terminology. At the beginning of Discours du récit in Figures III (1972), Genette explicitly adopts the German distinction between erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit and cites Günther Müller’s 1948 essay. His temps de l’histoire concerns the time span within the represented story, not the extent of the narrative text. Story time provides an English analytical counterpart, without establishing an identical lexical genealogy. Scheffel, Weixler and Werner’s historical survey situates this distinction among German morphological and Russian formalist approaches; Müller’s original essay was not directly collated here. The Atlas application is to separate the measures: a brief passage may cover years, while a long passage represents an instant. Textual extent alone cannot determine the duration of the represented events.

How conceptual history changes the analysis

Name the clock being measured. Duration within the story is not the same as reading or performance duration.

References for the historical section

Historical source evidence and Atlas applications remain separate; this import does not assert new first attestations or a fresh exhaustive source verification.