Signs of time

narratives of social experiments

Abstract

Time is a fundamental category of prose texts that combine the real historical status of the subject with the fictional world. How can time presents itself in the text is often decisive for the aesthetic quality and for the ideological message of narration. Philosophical statements and stylistic moments combine to create a specific potential for fiction, which in contemporary postmodern narratives – mostly indirectly and conveyed in strikingly original metonymies – is an opaque structural challenge for the interpreters. In the following, German-writing authors of Bulgarian origin will be observed to see how these indirect ways of conveying signs of the time as narratives are carried out inconspicuously and yet essentially.