Contemporary present-tense fiction: Crossing boundaries in narrative

Abstract

The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, however, have not yet been fully explored. This paper first reviews how the use of tenses contributes to constructing narrative worlds, focusing on three facets of narrative: the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, time frames within the narrative and characters’ discourse embedded in narrative. Then, using corpus data which includes both present- and past-tense fiction, I will show that the boundaries and distinctions which are consistently taken for granted in past-tense narrative can be blurred, crossed within narratorial structures and partly expanded at a meta-textual level from written discourse to spoken discourse.