The story time of narratives is uniform and chronological. Text time is the modification of story time in the telling. Four major aspects of it vary in the modernist period – orientation, pace, continuity, and order.

Realist novels situate events in a time that moves in a sequence of present moments that recede into the past and advance into the future. Past-tense verbs knit the story together as a completed and knowable history. These novels pace events through considerable lengths of characters' lives with summaries and scenes, punctuated by gaps over time intervals and pauses that expand on moments. Although the summaries cover different time periods at different paces, and narratives are interrupted by gaps and pauses, their underlying time frames are continuous. Realist text time follows chronological order with occasional disordering analepses and prolepses. Modernists rework these four main aspects of text time and in so doing rework the temporal foundation of the master narratives.

ORIENTATION: VALORIZING THE PRESENT

In contrast to the realists' fluid movement of stories from past to present to future, modernists often focus on the present. In 1906, while writing The Making of Americans, Stein reconfigured realists' tracking of the story across the entire time span by replacing past-tense verbs with gerunds and present participles and by repeatedly returning to the beginning of story lines – as she put it, by “beginning again.” The gerund in her title is ironic.