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.

This handbook in English provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate 34 central terms. The articles present original research contributions and are all structured in a similar manner. Each contains a concise definition and a detailed explanation of the term in question. In a main section they present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research; they conclude with selected bibliographical references.

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 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.

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.

This book addresses itself to the concept of the implied author, which has been the cause of controversy in cultural studies for some fifty years. The opening chapters examine the introduction of the concept in Wayne C. Booth’s “Rhetoric of Fiction” and the discussion of the concept in narratology and in the theory and practice of interpretation.The final chapter develops proposals for clarifying or replacing the concept.

This book is a standard work for modern narrative theory. It is a German translation and expansion of the Russian work Narratologija (Moscow 2003) and presents a comprehensive foundation for narratology. The author explains and discusses in detail problems of communication structure and instances, narrative perspective, the relationship between narrator's text and character's text, and the narrativity of literary texts and the texts as events. The focus is formed by the constitutive structures of fictional narrative texts. The book postulates a theory of narration and analyses central narratological categories such as fiction, mimesis, author, reader, narrator, narrative perspective, text, story, narrative time etc. against the background of the history of narrative research. The result is a fundamental definition of the constitutive characteristics of narrative texts which provides a terminological and theoretical system of reference for future research in narrative theory. A detailed bibliography and glossary of narratological terms make this book a compendium of narrative theory which is of relevance for scholars and students of all literary disciplines.

The study broadens the perspective of narratology to include the objects and methods of historiography, in particular those of the famous French Annales School (rejection of history as events etc). The question is one of the extent to which historiography itself 'creates' history in its narration and of whether, given the inherent narrative character of every historiography, any progress at all can be made in historical knowledge. Rüth not only develops the theoretical backgrounds and discourses of his enquiry, but also uses texts from the Annales School to undertake a detailed study of the narrative element in historiography.

By redefining established topics of narratology, research has become highly diversified. The contributions to this volume neither synthesize developments nor work from shared postulates, but represent a fresh look at ongoing issues. Some scrutinize focalisation in a linguistic framework or in a poststructuralist vein; others take on reliable and unreliable narration in a pronominal perspective or the "unaddressed" reader who upsets the tidy schemes of narrative communication. Also outlined are a possible worlds approach to narrative time, a systematic treatment of metanarrative and a transgeneric application of narratology to poetry. The sequential ordering of narratives as a way of controlling reader response is examined in one article and in another is seen to elicit intertextual configurations. Both divergent and complementary, the contributions seek to integrate into narratological categories and methods the dynamic processes of narrative itself.

What Is Narratology? sees itself as contributing to the intensive international discussion and controversy on the structure and function of narrative theory. The 14 papers in the volume advance proposals for determining the object of narratology, modelling its concepts and characterising its status within cultural studies.