Since James, narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman have studied the differences between story time (how long an event in the storyworld takes) and text time (how long the telling on the page takes) and have named speeds according to the ratio between the two. There have been more refinements since (see Brian Richardson’s Narrative Dynamics for many essays on this, or Anežka Kuzmičová). But here’s a basic menu drawn from Genette and Chatman: gap fastest no text/much story time summary fast little text/much story time scene “real time” text time = story time dilation
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