My New Definition of Nonlinearity and Literature

After my research, I was confused with the different aspects and approaches to nonlinearity, since the results were ramifying towards many fields such as philosophy, screen narration, and learning methodology.

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According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of nonlinear;

used to describe a process, series of events etc. in which one thing does not clearly or directly follow from another.

Therefore, I infer that it's related to the chronological or hierarchical order. I first focus on the perception of time and how we order and disorder things. What constitutes the past, present and future? Where to begin and where to end? 

As a non-hierarchical concept, I associate it with a rhizome, which epitomizes multiplicities. Derived from the botanical rhizome, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose ''a mode of knowledge and a model for society'' that opposes this tree-like conception. While the arborescent archetype renders dualist categories and multiple choices, the nonlinear model has neither a beginning nor an end. Nonlinearity not only disrupts the order of things, but also rotates our track of time. How is it possible to apply this to literature, which conveys a series of events in time and space? Regardless, nonlinearity has an impetus in its organization, yet an indefinite one, I dare to say that it may encourage being nomadic in thinking and practice.

TedTalk by Hannah Kaihovirta about practice based learning- rhizome as a 21st century learning strategy:

21st-century practices have the motivation of focusing on fragments and pieces. Albums to singles in music or TV series to a movies in filming confirm this trend. The narrative technics in films use nonlinearity as a method for narration. For example, Memento by Christoper Nolan reverses the its narrative. We also see a combination of various stories that occur at different times in the film Cloud Atlas. Nam Wook Kim created a website called Story Curves that visualize the nonlinear narrative of a movie by showing the order in which events are told and comparing them to their actual chronological order.

http://storyexplorer.namwkim.org

In literature, nonlinearity appears in the complexity and the irregularity of the narrative. In Narrative Discorces, Gerard Genette asserts that Proust's story structure opens up the first debates on order, time, and narration. Genette says; ''According to this model, events necessarily take place both in a particular order and a definable number of times. A speaker has certain kinds of information about events and lacks other kinds. He either experienced them or he did not, and generally, he stands in a definable relationship to the events he recounts. However true this model may be, there is nothing to prevent narratives from violating it and producing texts which involve impossible combinations...Proust upsets the whole logic of narrative representation.''1 On the contrary, free-roaming in non-sequential narration counters Proustian repetition and particular order structures; and it includes a patchwork of stories, flashbacks, sub-narratives, and layered and dispersed timelines.

1 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourses- An Essay in Method, Cornell University Press, syf. 12