Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

2.2.The Evolution of the Notion of Time in Literary Discourse
 
There is enough evidence to claim that in their works, modernist writers formulated a 
completely new approach to the treatment of the notion of time and temporality. Consequently, it 
seems wise to overview the development of the notion of time over centuries in the spheres of 
science, art, religion, and philosophy in order to see what new unexplored challenging dimensions 
and layers of this wide entity have been discovered and described so far. Indeed, according to 
Stevenson (1998:106), modernists believed that conventional understanding of time does not reflect 
the way in which time actually influences and is influenced by human lives. Indeed, time seems to 
be incapable of being measured by such symbolic representations as hours, days, or months. 
Consequently, a writer cannot refer accurately to such arbitrary divisions as past, present, and 
future. Time flows in uninterrupted chain; yet the individual carried along by time is not restricted 
to one dimension; with the help of memory, a person can travel back and exist in the past before 
being swept along toward the future. Since modernists felt that the real understanding of the depth 
of time exists only within the individual, they often chose experimental patterns of time for their 
literary works. 
Baldic (1996:86) complements Stevenson’s thoughts by adhering to the opinion that the 
traditional method of handling time sequence in literature was followed by centuries of writers 
before Virginia Woolf and other modernist authors introduced their own understanding and 
interpretation of this issue. According to the traditional view of time, the past, present, and future 
exist in a succession, along which man moves the whole his or her life, because the present moment 
is moving steadily forward, revealing what once was the future. Baldic develops his ideas by 

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claiming that these meaningful present moments discovered by man’s successive motion, form the 
medium that runs regularly from birth to death for the traditionalist. It is, therefore, of necessity to 
him that fiction expresses this orderly progression of time. In the traditional novel, the structure is 
based on the chronological order of events. Interestingly enough, Lee (1977:56) notices that the 
most popular images that express the traditional view of time in art are the descriptions of nature: 
natural phenomena such as rain or snow or water bodies such as rivers as if comparing passing time 
and flowing streams of water. For instance, in the novels of Woolf, in particular in To the 
Lighthouse, Lee treats water as a symbol a steady, regular, and inevitable passing of hours, days, 
and years.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the majority of scientific experiments were 
based on practical observation. Besides, many thinkers and writers contributed to the methods of 
science and argued that knowledge can only be gained from experience. For instance, according to 
Gore (2005:34), the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes claimed convincingly 
that “world was made up of two basic things: mind and matter”. He considered mathematics to be 
the supreme science, and calculations of numbers were named the best way of investigating and 
understanding things. Naturally, under the influence of these scientific ideas, people were 
concerned with time as a measure of duration as to other conventional thinkers; time has but one 
dimension, a linear order from an indefinitely stretching past to an indefinitely stretching future. By 
comparison, Baldic shares his view with Gore and declares that in the seventeenth century, 
scientists measured and analyzed time by means of experimental methods as an entity that can be 
limited, divided, and, in a way, even controlled. Isaac Newton supported this concept of time in his 
the scientific theories of the seventeenth century. Indeed, philosophers and writers always face 
undeniable influence of the events and changes occurring in the world in the fields of science and 
art; thus, it is possible to achieve the conclusion that the same attitudes shape the scientist the writer 
of literature. (Baldic 1996:205) 
Genienė (2007:256) complements Gore and Baldic’s study by stating that the seventeenth 
century marked the emergence of the modern world with its scientific and technological advances. 
Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers and writers were, however, still interested in the 
past only as the history leading up to the present moment, rather than as a part of the human history 
that is a continuous process, or a chain of experiences and events. Stevenson (1998:11) calls this 
new understanding of time “a kind of epistemological shift, from relative confidence towards a