Online Articles

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.

After the publication in 2005 of „The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry” by the publishing house of de Gruyter, there is now available a companion volume on German poetry („Lyrik und Narratologie“, cf. German-language version of this item). Time to remember the English antecedant:

Peter Hühn and Jens Kiefer: The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry. Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century. Translated by Alastair Matthews. (Narratologia, vol. 7). Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 2005. ISBN 3-11-018407-9.

According to the introduction of the volume by Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert, the essays on English Poetry „are a practical demonstration of how the analytical methods and concepts of narratology can be used to provide detailed descriptions and interpretations of poems.“

In addition, the introduction attached as PDF-File above talks about the intersection of narrativity and lyric poetry, the status of the lyric in genre theory, and the narratological framework of the authors.

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)’.

This study considers the status of the abstract author and the abstract reader, two semantic entities which, although not confined solely to narrative environments, are discussed primarily in the context of narrative theory. We begin by examining the semiotic features of these two anthropomorphic hypostatizations, survey their development in the Slavonic (primarily Russian, Czechoslovakian, and Polish), then Western theoretical literature, and propose a systematic definition of both concepts. We respond to the well-known doubts concerning the narratological relevance of these notions with arguments which suggest it is perfectly sensible for narratologists to employ such entities even though they are not unique to narrative texts.

The abstract author is defined as the semantic correlate of all index signs in the text which refer to the sender. The abstract author is treated neither as a fictive (i.e. represented) instance nor as an intentional creation of the concrete author. He is not identical with the narrator but embodies the principle which informs the fabrication of a narrator and every aspect of the represented world. He has no voice of his own, no text. His word is the entire text with all its levels, the entire work in its totality.

The abstract author is real but not concrete. His existence in the work is no more than implicit and virtual; the traces left by the original creative acts are the only indication of his presence in the work, and only with the reader’s intervention does he become concrete. He therefore exists in two ways. On the one hand, he is objectively present in the text as a virtual symptomatic complex; on the other hand, his nature depends on the subjective acts of reading, comprehension, and interpretation which bring him into being. The abstract author is constructed, or rather reconstructed, by the reader on the basis of how he reads the work.

Every creative act which produces the work can be a symptom of the abstract author’s presence: the invention of a story with its situations, characters, and plots; the design of a specific plot logic with a more or less substantial philosophical component; the instantiation of a narrator; the transformation of the story into a narrative with the help of specific methods such as flattening simultaneous happenings into a linear sequence and rearranging the original historical order; and last of all the presentation of the narrative in its final linguistic form.

The abstract reader should be understood as the content of the author’s conception of the recipient as set out by particular index signs in the text. However, our two abstract entities do not have the diametrically opposing compositions that this might suggest. The abstract reader (i.e. the hypostatized concept of the target of the text) is ultimately an attribute of the abstract author reconstructed by the concrete reader. The abstract reader is therefore just as dependent as the abstract author on the individual reading and comprehension with which the concrete reader internalizes the text.

In contrast to many other contemporary theories, we make a clear distinction between the abstract reader and the fictive reader (narrataire), the narrator’s addressee. Two hypostatizations of the abstract reader must be distinguished on the basis of the functions which he can perform as the target of the text. First, the abstract reader can be an assumed, postulated addressee at whom the work is aimed and whose linguistic codes, ideological norms, and aesthetic concepts are adopted by the work in such a way that it is comprehensible to him. In this role, the abstract reader represents the codes and norms assumed to prevail among the factual audience. Second, the abstract reader can function as an image of the ideal recipient, whose understanding of the work is closest to the original and who accepts the interpretation which the work calls on him to adopt.

We conclude our discussion by considering the objections which narratologists have raised to the construction of the ideal recipient.

A constant factor in the discussion of 'narrativity' has been the search for a functional definition of narrativity as the constitutive feature of a narrative text, as a specific form of the symbolic representation of events. This study argues that narrativity is not something which is simply either present or absent, but rather a question of the gradual realisation of specific logical conditions which can be defined in terms of what might be called a 'matrix of events'. Everything that meets the conditions of the 'matrix of events' qualifies as a 'construct of events', but only those constructs of events (and consequently underlying texts) can truly be described as narrative in which the temporal order is not simply reduced to the sequentiality of symbolic signs.