Publications

Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorie und Praxis ist von einer bislang kaum wahrgenommenen Asymmetrie gekennzeichnet: demKontrast zwischen den intensiven Bemühungen, Rezeptionsforschung und -theorie als Disziplin wissenschaftlich zu fundieren, und den unzulänglichenVersuchen, die aus diesen Positionen hervorgehenden Lesermodelle systematisch zu erfassen. Eine solche Systematisierung steht im Zentrum dieser wissenschaftstheoretischen Arbeit.

Ein ähnliches Ungleichgewicht besteht zwischen dem großen Aufwand, mit dem Editionsphilologien eine standardisierte Sicherung von Primärtexten als Vorbereitung der Textinterpretation betreiben, und der limitierten Aufmerksamkeit, die dabei historischen Rezeptionstexten eingeräumt wird. Während der erste Teil der Arbeit Lesermodelle systematisiert und hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalisierbarkeit für eine historisierende Literaturwissenschaft prüft, formuliert der zweite Teil eine theoretische Begründung und einen methodischen Entwurf der historisierenden Rezeptionsanalyse. Sie sichtet und sichert Rezeptionszeugnisse realer Leser zur Stützung der interpretativ-hermeneutischen, sozialhistorischen und im weitesten Sinne empirischen Argumentation literaturwissenschaftlicher Historisierung.

• combines narratological analysis with historical exploration of graphic narrative
• investigates the development of narrative styles across genres
• covers graphic narrative beyond single national traditions

This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative – realized in various different formats, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels – as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. The contributions assembled in this volume test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the ‘single work,’ consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.

The term ‘narrativity’ has gained considerable currency. But what does it actually mean? This is the question considered in the articles by linguists, media scholars, psychologists and other specialist academics that are compiled in this volume. They reveal the diversity of ways in which this term is used and describe various methods of delineation. The results indicate that narrativity is an umbrella term with a content that ranges from a philological (structure related) orientation to an anthropological (interpretation related) orientation.

How do we internalize literary characters and their fictional consciousness when we are reading? How does multi-perspectivity function? Drawing on modern cognitive research, this study addresses how the perspectives of different characters interact, and demonstrates that this interaction plays a critical role in our understanding and interpretation of literary texts. Using the English novel as an example, the author develops a general theory of perspectival interaction and demonstrates its explanatory power through detailed illustrative analyses.

Tales are told everywhere, not only in literature. Also other media, especially film, increasingly come into the focus of narrative theory. With his film narratology, Markus Kuhn provides the hitherto most comprehensive approach to the narrative analysis of the feature film and presents for the first time a systematic and theoretically coherent model of narratological film analysis. The practical and scholarly use lies both in the concise appraisal of the research situation as well as in the development of an application-oriented analysis model, which is illustrated by numerous examples of film.

When readers become victims of the murder mysteries they are immersed in, when superheroes embark on a quest to challenge their authors or when the fictional rock band Gorillaz flirt with Madonna during their performance, then metalepsis in popular culture occurs. Metalepsis describes the transgression of the boundary between the fictional world and (a representation of) the real world. This volume establishes a transmedial definition of metalepsis and explores the phenomenon in twelve case studies across media and genres of popular culture: from film, TV series, animated cartoons, graphic novels and popular fiction to pop music, music videos, holographic projections and fan cultures. Narrative studies have considered metalepsis so far largely as a phenomenon of postmodern or avant-garde literature. Metalepsis in Popular Culture investigates metalepsis’ ties to the popular and traces its transmedial importance through a wealth of examples from the turn of the 20th century to this day. The articles also address larger issues such as readerly immersion, the appeal of complexity in popular culture, or the negotiation of fiction and reality in media, and invite readers to rethink these issues through the prism of metalepsis.

This collective volume undertakes an appraisal and literary-historical localization of German-language pop literature of the 1990s, which is associated with such writers as Joachim Bessing, Rainald Goetz, Alexa Hennig von Lange, Christian Kracht, Joachim Lottmann, Thomas Meinecke, Andreas Neumeister and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. One focus of the volume is on performativity? how authors of pop literature staged themselves. In addition, the book explores the narrative, intertextual and intermedial strategies of pop-literature texts and their contexts.

An event, defined as the decisive turn, the surprising point in the plot of a narrative, constitutes its tellability, the motivation for reading it. This book describes a framework for a narratological definition of eventfulness and its dependence on the historical, socio-cultural and literary context. A series of fifteen analyses of British novels and tales, from late medieval and early modern times to the late 20th century, demonstrates how this concept can be put into practice for a new, specifically contextual interpretation of the central relevance of these texts. The examples include Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”, Behn’s “Oroonoko”, Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”, Richardson’s “Pamela”, Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, Hardy's “On the Western Circuit”, James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”, Joyce’s “Grace”, Conrad’s “Shadow-Line”, Woolf’s “Unwritten Novel”, Lawrence’s “Fanny and Annie”, Mansfield’s “At the Bay”, Fowles’s “Enigma” and Swift’s “Last Orders”. This selection is focused on the transitional period from 19th-century realism to 20th-century modernism because during these decades traditional concepts of what counts as an event were variously problematized; therefore, these texts provide a particularly interesting field for testing the analytical capacity of the term of eventfulness.

Narrative Research, once the domain of structuralist literary theory, has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. It is now commonly agreed that storytelling functions as a fundamental cognitive tool for sense-making and meaning production, and that human beings structure and communicate lived experience through oral, written and visual stories. Entitled Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, this volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermediality, as well as memory studies, musicology, theology and psychology. The topics touch on a wide range of issues, such as the current state of narratology and its potential for development, narrativity in visual and auditive art forms, the cultural functions of narrative, and the role of narrative concepts across the disciplines. The volume introduces interested newcomers to the ongoing debate, reflecting the diversity of research questions and methodological approaches involved. It takes a critical, yet cautiously optimistic stance with regard to the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between narrative researchers, and invites experienced readers from any discipline interested in narrative to join this important debate, which promotes the exchange of ideas, concepts and methods between the humanities and the social sciences.

This collected volume contains German translations with commentaries and annotations of 12 theoretical texts from the Russian pre-history of narratology. The texts, all of pre-formalistic, formalistic, or structuralist provenance or from sources close to formalism, are devoted to two key topics in Russian proto-narratology, the “sujet” and the work-immanent abstract author. The selection, translation, commentary and annotations were carried out by members of a sub-project within the Hamburg Narratology Research Group, which is funded by the German Research Foundation.

This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional ‘canon’ of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the ‘case’ of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.

Lyric poetry is usually regarded as a genre in its own right, delineated from narrative and dramatic texts. This publication intends to use categories from narrative theory to develop the argument that poems also display basic characteristics seen as indicative of the narrative (in particular, the perspectivized presentation of sequentially ordered events). The results are firstly significant revisions of genre-theory, and secondly a considerable extension and precision in processes of textual analysis - including the use of scheme theory as used in cognitive psychology.

The volume sounds out the methodological potential of the central narratological category of 'voice' in its relation to 'person' and specifies this category principally against the background of Genette and Bachtin. In addition to papers with a theoretical orientation, there are also case studies, these always being linked with more general methodological concerns. The main focus is on borderline cases for unequivocally determining the position of the speaker or speech in texts. The papers examine, for example, the position and function of the text itself as a literary 'voice', and whether polyphony can be described as a variety of 'autonomous voices' without recourse to the concept of 'person'. The authors draw up new concepts of 'voice' in narrative theory, discuss the phenomenon of 'multiple voices' in literary texts and examine the category of 'voice' for its relevance as an instrument of textual analysis. The volume investigates all aspects of the relationship between the narrator's speech and that of the narrative figures within the triad of author, narrator and figure, drawing in historical aspects and insights from the psychology of cognition and reception. In this it presents innovative fundamental research on central questions of modern narrative theory.

In Lichačev’s dichotomous model of the epoch Modernity is defined as a secondary style-formation. According to Lichačev, a simple, rational, and norm-establishing primary-style (Romanticism, Renaissance, Classicism) is followed by a secondary-style (Gothic, Baroque, Romanticism). The latter takes up the devices of the primary-style and forms them. Following Žirmunskij (1967), Flaker (1976), Gumbrecht (1978), Buerger (1992) and such modern writers as Merežkovskij, Belyj, and Zamjatin Modernity (including the Avant-garde) can be understood ex negativo as a disintegration of Realism according to the following aspects:

1. critique of rationalism and of the rationalistic worldview
2. rejection of the moral codex
3. shifting of the subject-object-relation in favor of the subject
4. decontextualization of the writer as a citizen and as an author
5. extension of the cultural field towards the exotic and the primitive
6. literalization and semioticalization of reality
7. declarative character of art
8. hybridization of genre
9. retarded reception (prose)
10. self-referential language (synaesthesia, the break with the norm of the literary language, extension of the language-register, speech-immanent
11. means of reference to the author)
12. focalization of the ‘demiurgical’ author as a central factor of text-coherence
13. dissolution of the fable
14. dissolution of the hierarchical perspective and of the versatile interior monologue
15. metaphorization and universalization of the reality of the text
16. noticeable recurrence
17. punctuation as an expression of changed intonation.

This overview is followed by the analysis of two text-excerpts (the beginnings of Belyj’s Peterburg and Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina) under the forementioned aspects.

The paper proposes a model that distinguishes between three dimensions of perspective in computer games, drawing on models of perspective developed within classical narratology, film theory and computer game studies. The first dimension is that of spatial perspective, which is determined by the point of view, i.e. the spatial position from which the game space is presented audiovisually. The second dimension is that of actional perspective, which is determined by the point of action, i.e. the position from which the player can interact with the game space. The third and most complex dimension is that of the ideological perspective structure, which is determined by the various positions from which the events in the game are evaluated. Although we mainly discuss the question of how characters in computer games evaluate events and situations, this dimension also refers to other instances within the game, namely that of the player and the implied game designer. With reference to the spatial perspective determined by the point of view and the actional perspective determined by the point of action, we propose to speak here of an ideological perspective that is determined by the point of evaluation.

This anthology presents the results of the Second International Colloquium of the Narratology Research Group (Hamburg University). It engages in the exploration of approaches that broaden Narratology's realm. The contributions illustrate the transcendence of traditional models common to Narratology. They also reflect on the relevance of such a 'going beyond' as seen in more general terms: What interrelation can be observed between re-definition of object domain and re-definition of method? What potential interfaces with other methods and disciplines does the proposed innovation offer? Finally, what are the repercussions of the proposed innovation in terms of Narratology's self-definition? The innovative volume facilitates the inter-methodological debate between Narratology and other disciplines, enabling the conceptualization of a Narratology beyond traditional Literary Criticism.

The term ‘lyrical I (persona)’ was introduced by Margarete Susman in 1910 to raise doubts in literary criticism about the widespread categorical identification of the first-person-speaker of a poem with the actual author. During the following decades, the scope of the term was increased, so that in numerous case-studies the ‘lyrical I (persona)’ served as a leading idea for a history of ‘lyrical subjectivity’. This approach, however, is challenged today by attempts to define the phenomenon in a more precise as well as restrictive way. In this notion, the term ‘lyrical I (persona)’ is applicable only to modes of representation where the speaker either actually uses the form of first person singular/plural or is referrable by his addressing a ‘You’. So-called ‘unmediated speech acts’ of a character outlined in the text, usually noted as indicator for the ‘dramatic monologue’ or the ‘Rollengedicht’, should not be accounted for as ‘lyrical I (persona)’.

After a review of several influential theories of narrative perspective, point of view, and focalization (Stanzel, Genette, Bal, Uspenskij, Lintvelt, Rimmon), a new way of modelling perspective is proposed. It is based on the hypothesis, drawn from Uspenskij’s four-level model of pont of view, that perspective operates on several distinct levels. Perspective is defined as a set of conditions, bound to a particular standpoint and shaped by internal and external factors, that determine how events are conceptualized and related. Perspective operates on five levels, identified in a thought experiment involving witnesses in court.

The levels are (1) perceptual perspective, (2) ideological perspective, (3) spatial perspective, (4) temporal perspective, and (5) linguistic perspective. On each of these levels, the narrator chooses between narratorial and figural modes. (The existence of a third, neutral form of perspective is rejected, as are the concepts of zero focalization and the perspective-free story.) The narratorial/figural and non-diegetic /diegetic (‘he’/‘I’) dichotomies are combined to yield a set of four basic types. Of these, figural perspective in diegetic narration is analysed in more detail. The forms taken by narratorial and figural perspective on all five levels are illustrated with examples, and feature sets provided for compact and distributive perspectives (i.e. the perspectives produced when the dichotomous poles selected are the same or different respectively across the five levels). The study concludes with a consideration of key issues that must be borne in mind when constructing a simplified approach to the analysis of perspective.

Computing Action takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised in the light of constructivist theories. In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and action constructs they contain. The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Here, the practical application of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of Goethe's famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative construction of action - an experiment intended to demonstrate not only Goethe's aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his epistemological convictions.

The following list includes research reports as well as overviews of the history of research on narrative theory/narratology. Such texts can be found in monographs, essays and articles in anthologies. References to the delevopment or the state of narratology also appear in introductions (for instance) of anthologies or essay collections, which were therefore also taken into account.

The titels refer to publications of the modern languages (entries from the field of Slavic Studies will be added in the near future). The list should not be considered as complete; it is to be amplified and expanded.

Narrating and narrativity are the object of several academic disciplines. Literary criticism is one of it, but it deals not only with narrating. Therefore narrating is the object of interdisciplinary research, in which Narratology is involved, but Narratology is not per se interdisciplinary. In this paper I try to explain this statement from a linguistic point of view.

The article discusses the philosophical, narratological and technological tenets of the computer-based approach towards modelling narrated time in the Temporality Effect. This project is aimed at developing a new model of narrative time, or more precisely: a model that will enable us to describe how and on the basis of which textual cues readers of narrative texts build the complex mental image of a temporally structured world.

Our narratological project equally falls into the domain of humanities computing in that the methodology of textual mark-up, data modelling, combinatorial data analysis and computer aided visualization of time constructs play a crucial role in it. What sets our model apart from other approaches is its foundation in a particular philosophy of time (McTaggart) which integrates non-temporal (sequential and logic) as well temporal principles of ordering in phenomena. This perspective holds three important advantages. One, it allows for the joint modelling of subjective time experience and objective time structures. Two, it provides a strong conceptual basis for a computational analysis of the temporality effect triggered by narratives. And thirdly, seen in combination these two characteristics of our project’s philosophical foundation open up the possibility of a dynamic visualisation of time experience.

The system complex e-port/NarrPort developed for the FGN is to support and strengthen cooperative research activities by information technologies (IT), in order to use the possibilities of these modern technologies, in particular the WWW, in a prototypic effort for the humanities. Thus 'traditional' communication is not to be replaced but extended and intensified.

The system complex includes the internet portal NarrPort, based on a web content management system (WCMS), the groupware-system e-Port and modules for internal communication and the working processes of the FGN. The components and tools of e-Port/NarrPort had been developed for the specific needs in the humanities.

The project is described as a model for internet and intranet-supported communication and cooperative research in the humanities; the conception and the structure of e-Port/NarrPort are outlined also by means of diagrams. The authors give a report of the realization of the project, in order to make up a preliminary balance of the experiences in handling e-Port/NarrPort.

In: Kugler, Hartmut et al. (ed.): www.germanistik2001.de. Vorträge des Erlanger Germanistentags, Bielefeld 2002, pp. 769–782.