Narratology, M. Fludernik

7/27/2019 Narratology, M. Fludernik

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Monika F'ludernikUniversity of Freiburg

Uri MargolinUniversity of Alberta

Introduction1. Background and Purpose of These IssuesTheoretical work on literary narrative formsthat is. enquiry about

narrative's basic elements or components, constructive principles, structures,techniques, modes of composition, and methods of portrayalhas had a long andrich history in German-language (i.e., German, Austrian, and Swiss) scholarship,and has traditionally proceeded under three different headings or labels:Narratologie or Narrativik, Erzahlforschung/Erzahltheorie (narrative research/theory), and Romantheorie, or "theory of the no vel." (For an excellent survey of thehistorical relations between the three, see Cornils and Schernus). Obviously,num erous studies could be placed under m ore than one heading, and contributionsto all three areas have always been made by linguists and philosophers as well.

Romantheorie began in the eighteenth century with Christian Friedrich vonBlanckenburg's Versuch uber den Roman (1774) and had several majorachievements in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century,associated with the classical studies of Otto Ludwig, Friedrich Spielhagen,Wilhelm Dibelius, and Rafael Koskimies. Some of this work looked for theuniversals or invariables of the novel, and studied systematically its basiccom ponen ts and modes of construction and functioning, while other work focusedon generic typology and historical variability.

Erzahlforschung presents a more variegated and complex field of studies.Since the end of the eighteenth century (the Goethe-Schiller correspondence,1794-1805), German scholarship has employed the broad category of Epik todesignate all artistic narrative, regardless of its length, generic affiliation, orhistorical period, and has sought to define in a relative and contrastive manner itsbasic construc tive princ iples and its specificity in the context of the three pre sum edfundamental, transhistorical types of literary discourse: the epic, the dram atic, andthe Tw o major co ntributions in this area are Kate Friede m ann 's Die


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Introduction 149

Erzdhlers in der Epik (1910) and Robert Petsch's Wesen und Formen derErzahlkunst (1934), both of which anticipated current narratological models andoffered a systematics of all major components of narrative from motifs throughactions, characters, space, and time to composition, order of presentation andspeech varieties, including free indirect discourse and interior monologue. ButErzdhiforschung also tackled the exploration of one or more individualcomponents, techniques, or artistic issues of narrative form from a definedtheoretical perspective. It then typically utilized a corpus that may vary greatly inscope as regards genre and pe riods. Research in the area of folklore or sim ple forms(Andr6 Jolles's Einfache Formen [1930]) and philosophically oriented enquiriesinto the nature of fictionality and the worlds of the imagination round off thespectrum of work in this area.

Narratology as a distinct integrated, and self aware discipline emerged, orrather burst upon the scene , in Germ any as in the rest of the West in the late 1960s,following the structuralist revolution and the academ ic crisis of 1968. This work,which typically transcends linguistic borders and often also the oral/written,literary/nonliterary demarcation is anchored in a shared and explicitly formulatedbasic theoretical paradigm (structuralism, semiotics, discourse linguistics), andproduced its own institutional manifestations. But it would be wrong to assume thatnarratology's birth was a conception ex nihilo. Much preceding work in the othertwo areas had anticipated current narratological m odels and w as, or at least couldbe, integrated into them once it was made more explicit and rigorous, especially inthe case of individual aspects of narrative. Many of the classical distinctions m adeby Romantheorie turn out to be generalizable to other kinds at least of literarynarrative as well. One telling example of such a crossover involves the doyen ofGerm an n arratology, Franz S tanzel, whose first book , entitled Narrative Situationsin the Novel (1955), was later expanded in the light of structuralism to becom e ATheory of Narrative (1979)

The universally acknowledged immediate precursors of current Germannarratology are four, and they all flourished in the 1950s. They are, first, GtintherMuller and his follower Eberhardt Lammert, both of whom focused on thesuccessivity or sequentiality of narration and the narrated alike, and explored thecomplex relations between these two temporal series (Gerard Genette's order,frequency, dura tion, and the layering of temp oral perspectives). The other two areW olfgang Kayser and Kate Ham burger. Kayser asked the pertinent question "W hotells the novel?" (Wer erzdhlt den Roman?), thereby reviving Friedemann's


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150 M onika Fludernik and Uri M argolin

primarily to the linguistic barrier. While currently active German narratologistsread English and try to keep abreast of English-language publications, the reverseis not true. The net result is an intellectual asymmetry. While both English- andGerman-language narratologists are working more and more on the same issuesand within the same global framework, the German less narratologist m isses out onmuch that is relevant and potentially valuable to his own work, ranging all the wayfrom unreliable narration to narrative across the media. It is true that some Germ annarratologists (such as Manfred Jahn or Monika Fludernik) publish primarily inEnglish, while others (like Wolfgang Iser) publish their major works in bothlanguages; yet there is still a considerable number of narratological workspublished exclusively in German, and, in view of the large German-speakingacademic audience and the relevance of narratological work for critics indepartm ents of German , Rom ance, or Slavic studies, this situation is not going tochange any time soon. This two-part issue of Style is meant to redress in some smallmeasure this asymm etry.

Severe limitations of space have forced us to make some radical editorialdecisions. The first was to include in our selection of the translations collected inthis issue only independen t articles, not chapters in boo ks, and only works hithertounavailable in English. The other was to begin with the first generation ofnarratologists proper, that is , around 1970. M oreover, the essays chosen had to beof current relevance and value, not merely classical landm arks. In several cases thearticles printed in these special issues provide an overview of extensive researchand publication by their authors over many years. We sought to include work fromseveral generations since the 1970s, as well as research dealing with a w ide rangeof issues. This last criterion forced us to exc lude work, some of it exce llent, by theyoungest academic generation. Still, for every piece included, several of equalvalue had to be left out. W e are painfully aware that we are here offering the readera mere sampler or foretaste, not the full intellectual feast we would have liked tooffer had we butspace enough and time.

Anglo-American and German narratology each emerged against a differenthistorical background and research tradition. While an ever-increasingconve rgence between them in terms of issues and methods can be discerned, thereare still pronounced differences in terms of relative emphasis and orientation. Inthe first place, almost all German narratologists feel the need for an explicitmetatheoretical component to accompany their work and a philosophicalframework to underpin it. An acute awareness of the problems involved in theory


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Introduction 151

phenomenological work of Roman Ingarden played a significant role in thiscontext, as is attested by the publications of Iser and his disciples. The notions offictionality and the fictive, and the need to include them as an indispensablecomponent of any adequate theory of literary narrative, are another hallmark ofGerman narratology. There is finally a high degree of methodological awareness,reflected in the felt need for explicit formulation of one's method or procedure andthe steps it involves, and its justification in the light of a more basic model ofcultural, linguistic, or symbolic enquiry.

All literary training in German universities includes the study of generallinguistics and of the linguistics and stylistics of on e's chosen literature(s). G ermannarratologists thus tend to emphasize discursive and stylistic patterns and theirsemantic impact as well as their potential for distinguishing fictional from factualdiscourse, especially as regards the representation of mental activities.Furthermore, narratological work, no matter how theoretical, is expected to drawon a wide variety of texts from different periods, and even languages whereapprop riate, to form both the basis and the testing ground for the the ory 's gen eralconcepts and claims. This insistence on wide historical coverage is clearly in thespirit of the traditional Epik category. On the other hand, German narratologycontains far fewer Bakhtinian studies than the Anglo-Am erican tradition, has onlyrecently begun to employ possible-worlds sem antics and cognitive models, and hasnot dealt consistently with the challenge posed to standard narratological mode lsby postmodernist narrative. Work on the plot and action level has beendiscontinuous. In the 1970s it was associated with narrative deep structures ingenerative text-grammars, and then fell into oblivion until its recent revival in thework of Hilary D annenberg and the narratology research group at the University ofHamburg. Studies of narrative as emplotted, that is, of syuzhet and compositionissues, are also infrequent.Let us now move from crosscultural comparison to a brief survey of someprom inent areas of research in which German narratology has excelled or in whichGerm an scholars were and still are particularly active.

2. Major Themes and Issues in German Narratological W orkGerman narratology has by and large focused on discourse and narration for

which the plot level serves merely as a foil.' As regards the level of the narrativediscourse, G erman narratology has had a continuou s, keen interest in the modes ofspeech and thought representation, and especially in free indirect discourse


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(sources of FID in the oral languag e; medieval instances of FID) emerged early inGerman work on speech and thought representation.^At the same time, German narratological scholarship has had a curiouspredilec tion for the historical p resent tense and the analysis of tense in narrative ingene ral. Besides Harald W einr ich's seminal Tempus (1964), which, on the basis ofthe tense system of the Rom ance languag es, developed a model of narrating versusdiscussing tenses and introduced the concept of temporal m etaphor, a wh ole rangeof philologists, linguists, and narratologists h ave been concerned with temporalityand tense-patterns in narrative.'

A third major area of research has been (and still is) narrative perspective.Clearly, Stanzel's categoriesreflector-mode narrative and the figural narrativesituationcontinue to be prominent concepts in German academic discourse, butalternative discussions of focalization by Jahn, Goran Nieragden, and BurkhardNiederhoff, and of perspective structure by Ansga r Nunning com plement the rangeof approaches.

Germ an narratological research has additionally emphasized the com mu nica-tional model of narrative popular in the 1970s (Janik) which, in its update byNunning, is still popular. In connection with the communicational approach tonarrative, German scholars have been particularly interested in the various playersin this communicational game, studying the implied author, the various readerfigures and roles in literary fiction, and discussing the process of reading bothspeculatively (the implied reader) and empirically (e.g., Hans Robert Jauss andSiegfried J. Schm idt). Am ong the essays reprinted here in translation two deal w iththe reader-side of the literary com mu nication, one (by Paul G oetsch) focusing onextra- and intrafictional narratees, the other (by Stanzel) on the actual reader'sspeculative intervention in the story. Many scholars expanded their interest in theprocesses of address and reader roles to cover second-person fiction.''From the interest in narrative comm unication and the process of reading, it isbut a short step to general issues of literary pragm atics. Interest in reader-respon secriticism (particularly in the work of Iser) and reader-focused, cognitive, andconstructivist models of narrative have been extremely popular among Germannarratologists. Recent work on unreliability by Niinnnig and others also has astrong pragmatic orientation.

Another area of literary pragmatics concerns studies of fictionality and thecom parison between h istoriographic and literary narratives. Although this becam ea topic of some p rominence in Anglo-Am erican narrative study, especially in the


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Introduction

which result in an awareness of historical change as well as familiarity with a widerange of texts from different periods. The historical emphasis may also be theconsequence of Stanzel's historical interests and the predominance of histheoretical model in German university education. Whatever the reason, even intheoretically-oriented studies many German narratologists feel it incumben t uponthem to extend their analysis to questions of historical dev elopm ent. Th us, Ba rbaraKorte's dissertation and habilitation (tenure) books do not merely, in theirtheoretical chapters, provide inventories of, respectively, techniques of novelendings and representations of the body, but go on to focus on historical shifts ofemphasis (see Techniken, Body Language). Fludernik's work likewise isextensively concerned with diachronic issues; and Werner Wolf's study oftechniques of (anti-)illusionism required a substantial diachronic section to beacceptab le as a habilitation book. This em phasis on historical developm ent couldbe regarded as a latter-day continuation of the earlier interest in narrative"morphology" and organic models of narrative that behave "like plants" and aresubject to analysis in terms of ontogeny and phy logeny.

3 . Narratological Work in English and American Studies(Anglistik)A substantial amount of the narratological work don e in Germany in the field

oi Anglistik is available in English, but much else is not. Our presentation in thissection will include both German- and English-language publications, and willconcentrate on major figures whose names are probably familiar to English-language read ers. W olfgang Ise r's work w ill not be discussed in our survey, sinceit has been part and parcel of English-language narratology since the 1970s.3.1. F. K. Stanzel: The Classical Period of German NarratologyFranz Karl Stanzel (19 23 -) cam e to dominate German narrative theory sincethe publication of his 1955 study. Die typischen Erzdhlsituationen im Roman,which was his habilitation bo ok. After teaching in Gottingen and Erlangen, Stanzelwas recalled to his alma m ater, the University of Graz, in 1962, where he has beenactive ever since. Stanzel brought to his research a background of rich historicaland philological know ledge not easily available to present-day academ ics. Besidesthe usual influences from the German academic scene, during a year at HarvardStanzel also absorbed the theoretical mode ls of Henry Jam es, Percy L ubboc k, andRene Wellek and Austin Warren. His oeuvre is notable for combining categories


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Monika Fludernik and Uri Margolin

should be arranged on, rather than in, a typological circle since items are arrangedon the cricumference of the circle. The English translation of this book. NarrativeSituations in the Novel (1971), was to take a long time to appear. MeanwhileStanzel had produced another, more precise reformulation of the theory in 1964(Typische Formen des Romans), and he was to revise the theory even moreextensively in 1979 in Theorie des Erzahlens with reference to Genette and new erdevelopments in linguistics (e.g., theme-rheme distribution, Roland Harweg'semic versus etic distinction for text beginnings, Charles Fillmore's work onindexicals, Roger Fowler's applied linguistics, Harald Weinrich's tempus theory)as well as in response to insights from the Prague School of structuralism. WhileStanzel's theories had mean while becom e standard for curricula in literary studiesin German-speaking countries, it was the English translation of Theorie desErzahlens by Cambridge University Press {A Theory of Narrative, based on therevised second edition of 1982) that ensured Stanzel's model an internationalaudience.''

Stanzel established his prominence in the field early on by engaging in adispute with the leading theoretical scholar of the day, Kate Hamburger. In DieLogik der Dichtung (1957, transl. 1973) Hamburger started out from a rigiddifferentiation between epic, lyric, and dramatic texts. She argued that the first-person novel had a real-world reference (Wirklichkeitsbezug), whereas the third-person novel did not, as could be seen from its use of the "epic preterite," whichsignaled fictionality rather than pastness. Hamburger moreover characterized therepresentation of figural consciousness as the crucial defining feature of epicliterature: only in fiction can the "I-originarity" of a third person be representedor, put more simply, only in fiction do we get to look into other peo ple 's m inds.Stanzel's major bone of contention in the debate with Hamburger was herdenial of fictionality to the first-person novel, but the debate more specificallycentered on the epic preterite. Hamburger's proof for her theory of the epicpreterite lay in the possible combination of verbal preterite forms with proximaldeictics (/, here, now, tomorrow, etc.) as in the key sentence from Mann'sBuddenbrooks, "Tomorrow was Christmas" (Morgen war Weihnachten). Bydemonstrating that Ham burger's examples of epic preterite were in fact sentencesof free indirect thought and by proving that first-person novels displayedanalogou s sentences co mb ining the deictics referable to the experiencing self w itha past tense deictically anchored in the act of narration of the narrating self, Stanzelwas able to disprove Ham burger's theory and rose to unchallenged prom inence in


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Introduction 155

narrator and his discourse andby analogycould give rise to differentmanifestations in a variety of media (performance for dram a; the dire ctor 's choicesor the cutting device for film). Sta nze l's focus on the representation of speech andthought derives precisely from the opposition between epic and drama.

Secondly, Stanzel bases his theory on the distinction between telling andshowing (origniating with Lubbock) and utilizes Henry James's notion of a"reflector" for a character through whose ey es the story is being presented. In thefinal setup ofthe theory, these two crucial aspects feed into the opposition betweenthe teller mode (the narrative is mediated by a prominent teller figure, i.e., anarrator persona), and the reflector mode in which "showing" prevails and wherethe focus ison acharacter's consciousness to such an extent that the narrative

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156 M onika Fludernik and Uri Margolin

seems to render events imm ediately (without perceptible narratorial med iation), asif directly through that charac ter's mind. This effect of "immediacy"accordingto Stanzelis an illusion, since the covert narrator merely slips into thebackground.

Stanzel's central theoretical thrust concerns the existence of three narrativesituations (NRSs) that he claims will, in their typological arrangement around acontinuou s circle, cover all possible types of narrative. As fiction becam e m ore andmore innovative in the twentieth century, more and more of the hitherto emptyspaces on the continuum became filled. For instance, the invention of the figural(reflector mode) novel filled the lower (reflector mode) half of the typologicalcircle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The three narrativesituations can be characterized as follows."

The authorial NRS, exemplified by Fielding's Tom Jones, combines an"omniscient" i.e., omnicommunicative narratorial presence above the world offiction (extradiegetic and heterodiegetic with zero focalization) with a panoramicview of the fictional world and easy access to characters' thoughts and emotions.The narrator is typically intrusive and indulges in much metanarrative comment.By contrast, in the prototypical/jgMra/ NRS (example: Joyce's A Portrait of theArtist as a Young Man) the narrative conveys the illusion of unmediated access tothe mind of the main protagonist(s) and there is no foregrounded narrator persona.Finally, there is i\\cfirst-person NRS (e.g. Dickens's David Copperfield), in whichthe narrator looks back on his previous experience, ev aluating it in his function asa narrating self, but often immersing himself and the reader in his past,experiencing self.

Since the three NRSs are merely prototypes, individual texts may combinecharacteristics of these NRSs. In particular, nineteenth-century fiction displayswhat Stanzel calls the authorial-figural continuum, the frequent move of thenarrative between external and internal perspectives in a given section of thenarrative. In his revision of the original typology in 1979, Stanzel grounded thethree NR Ss on three axes. The category person (hom o-/heterodiegesis) is foundedon the identity versus nonidentity of narratorial and fictional worlds w ith the first-person NR S prototypical ly situated at the pole of identity; the category perspective(external versus internal) defines the authorial NRS as prototypically dom inated byexternal perspective; and the category m ode (teller versus refiector mo de) definesthe figural NRS as constituted by the refiector pole. Stanzel placed these NRSs ona typological circle that is supposed to illustrate the continua between the three


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Introduction 157

like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) to increasingly prominent authorialnarrators as personae on the narratorial level of the fiction makes good sense andtends to render the existential boundary between hom odiegetic and heterodiegeticnarratives permeable and transgressible. Even more convincingly, the authorial-figural continuum on the east side of the typological circle characterizes a largecorpus of mid- to late-nineteenth-century novels that precisely keep shiftingbetween an authorial evaluative presentation of the story on the one hand andextended submerging into characters' psyche on the other {Tess of thed'Urbervilles is a good exam ple of this). It is the historical relevance of such nove lsthat speaks for the model.On the other hand, Stanzel has been less successful in peopling the westernhalf of the typolog ical cyc le at the point wh ere teller mode transforms into reflectormode within the first-person narrative situation and interior-monologue novels sitside by side with purely "fig ural" texts. Such transitions rarely occur w ithin a singlenovel, and although the positioning of texts in this area (the southwest and south)is astute from a typological perspective, it has sparked extensive criticism insidethe academic comm unity.'"

Another drawback of Stanzel's model has been the complexity of histheoretical propo sals, which have given rise to a num ber of misun derstanding s. Inparticular, the notion of prototypicality has been dismissed again and again, andcritics took um brage at the placing of texts on the typological circle which seemedto freeze a heterogeneous narrative on one specific spot. It is only with theinfluence of cognitive studies in literary theory in the past fifteen years that whatused to be the stumbling block for an appreciation of Stanze l's theory now appearsas a visionary anticipation of current cognitive m odels.

Ano ther aspect of narrative that Stan zel's theory has been unable to deal withsatisfactorily is the so-called "neutral" type of narrative typically associated withthe work of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler. In his original theoryStanzel had included a "neutral" narrative situation (see also Broich), only toeliminate it from the model later on and to introduce dialogue-only texts as a typeof narrative to be fitted in practically anywhere on the typological circle. SinceHemingway and Chandler use external focalization both in first- and in third-person texts, this genre cannot easily be fitted on the typological circle. HereGenette' s analytic approach is much more adeq uate to defining this type of writing.However, if one looks at more experimental types of narrative, even the Genetteantypology fails, e.g., with regard to second-person fiction w hich canno t be fitted into


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anticipating m any recent constructivist approaches to narrative (esp. Nun ning, "Onthe Perspective"). This focus on the reading process can be noted particularlyclearly in the essay reprinted here in translation.

Stanzellike Seymour Chatmanis a narratologist who concentrates on thediscourse level of narrative. His work therefore deals less with plot structure,suspense, or the construction of character. To that extent, he is indeed a "low-structuralist" (as he dubbed himself in 1990 ["Low-Structuralist"]), one not somuch interested in the deep structure of narrative as in the fascinating variety of itssurface. In the 1980s and 90s Stanzel added considerably to specific problems ofnarrative. We would particularly like to mention here his superb study of the first-person/third-person oscillation in contemporary German prose ("Wandlungen desnarrativen"), recently reprinted in his Unterw egs: Erzdhltheorie fUr Leser {2002),but still not translated into English, as well as his fine study of the autho r's revision sin Henry James's "The Liar" ("Wandlung und Verwandlung"). Since the 1980sStanzel has also increasingly turned to other fields, with work on nationalstereotypes (Europder), on the Hungarian connections of Bloom in Joyce'sUlysses, and on procreation from a distance ("Telego ny"). In this collection w e arereprinting in translation one of Stanzel's classic essays which uses RomanIngarden's work as a starting point for a discussion of the reader's activeengagement with the narrative text.3.2. Anglistic Contributions to Narratology since the 1980s: The NewGeneration

In this section we wish to present a brief introduction to the narratologicalwork of six scholars whose publications have been especially infiuential inGerman-speaking countries and, to the extent that they were written in English,have also had extensive international resonance. We regret that limits of spaceconstrain us to elide discussion of numerous other important scholars and theirwork.

Helmut Bonheim (1930- ), formerly Chair of American Literature at theEnglish Dep artment of Cologne University, made an indelible mark on the Germannarratolog ical scene with his infiuential Narrative M odes: Techniques of the ShortStory (1982 ), which w as one of the first properly narratological studies of the shortstory (see also Goetsch, ed .). Bonheim focused on the surface structure of narrativetexts, where he described a succession of what he called narrative modes. Heisolated four modes of which every narrative discourse is made up: report, speech,


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Introduction 159

English (ESSE), which had its first convention in 1991 and for which he servedboth as Chair (1995-2000) and editor of its newsletter. The M essenger (1992-1994). In addition to his publications and promotional work, Bonheim was asought-after dissertation supervisor, and am ong his former P h.D. and habilitationcandidates are some of the best-known German narratologists of the 1990s andbeyond.'^

On e of these students of Bo nhe im 's is the second person on our list. ManfredJahn (1 94 3- ) has been a faculty mem ber of the Cologne department since 1971.He has published a series of important articles in m ajor narratological journ als andis coeditor of the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory(Herman et al., eds.). Jahn's special interest lies in the issue of focalization, forwhich he has proposed an alternative model ("W indows," "M ore A spe cts")" ; he isadditiona lly very interested in cognitive issues, and has published several essay s inthis area ("Fram es," "'S pe ak ,'" "Stanley Fish," "He Op ened"). Moreover, togetherwith Ansgar Nunning, Jahn has been very active in producing introductorymaterial for M. A. students. Besides the essay "A Survey of NarratologicalM ode ls," coauthored with Nunning, which com pares the typologies of Stanzel andGen ette and discusses their usefulness for interpretative purp oses, Jahn has set upa homepage with a guide to narratology (alongside introductions to film, poetryand drama) which contains explanations, definitions of key terms, and evenexercises for students ("PPP").

Another Cologne graduate, Ansgar Niinning (1959- ), now professor ofEnglish at the University of Giessen, is Germ any 's m ost prolific narratologist anda major force behind a number of narratological projects. Nunning started hisacademic career with a dissertation on the narrator in George Eliot's fiction. Hepresented a model of the various levels of narrative communication andemphasized the numerous functions of narratorial comment. Nunning has shownthat narratorial discourse need not be intrusive and anti-illusionistic and paidparticular attention to the self-reflexive (metanarrative) aspects of the narrator'slanguag e. These aspects of the narrative text have continued to be a major focus ofN unn ing's w ork. N unn ing's m ost innovative research, however, developed fromhis critique of W ayne C. Bo oth 's concept of the "implied au thor," which Nunningdemolished in an essay in 1993 (see "Renaissance" and [in translation]"Deconstructing"). Having replaced the implied author with the "meaning of thework as a w hole ," Nunn ing w ent on to present a new theory of unreliable n arration(Unreliable Narration, "Reconceptualizing"); that shifted the responsibility for


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160 Monika Fludernik and Uri Margolin

influential drama theory (The Theory and Analysis of Drama), was then expandedby Ansgar and Vera Nunning in the introductory essay to their collectionMultiperspektivisches Erzahlen.

On another track, Nunning pursued his interest in narratological discourse notin the direction of self-disclosure but in the direction of metanarrative self-reflection ("Mimesis"). Nunning here probes a large spectrum of forms andfunctions of metanarrativity that are not synonymous w ith metafictional uses of theintrusive narrator, but frequently serve to enhance the reade r's immersion in thenarrative. In contrast, Nu nnin g's habilitation book had been much m ore concernedwith postmodernist phenomena. The two volumes of Von historischer Fiktion zuhistoriographischer M etafiktion deal with the relation between history and fictionin the postwar British novel, particularly in what has come to be calledhistoriographical metafiction. One section of Nunning's contribution to the two-part special issues (to appear in Style 38.3) is a summary of this important study.

Last but not least, Nunning has considerably influenced the Germannarratological landscape by a series of textbooks and, more recently, a series ofsurveys edited together with his wife, Vera Nunning. Am ong these surveys there isa volume called NeueAnsdtze in der Erzahltheorie (2002), a collection of essays onnew developments in narrative theory that expands Nunning's 2000 article"Tow ards a Cultural and Historical Narratology." A second collection provides asurvey of transgeneric and transmedia narratologies focusing on narratologicalapproaches to drama, poetry, painting, music, hypertext, etc. (Erzahltheorietransgenerisch). Finally, a volume of essays on feminist narratology appeared in2004 (Erzahltextanalyse und Gender Studies).

N unn ing's oeuvre, in development for only a little more than a decade, alreadyspans an incredibly w ide range of subjects which are focused on the narrator figure,the read er's sense-making activity, and on a variety of textual issues. Nunning hassignificantly extended the traditional German reader-response framework and alsosubscribes to literary constructivism. Besides his narratological oeuvre, Nunninghas recently moved into cultural studies and has done extensive work onstereotypes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature as well as writingnumerous articles on a wide variety of subjects from the eighteenth century toliterary modernism and postwar British fiction. H is article in the sequel to this issueputs the case for a cultural narratology.

Outside C ologne, Wilhelm Fiiger (1936-) represents the work that grew outof the application of structuralism to narrative studies. Fuger completed his


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Introduction 161

grammar approaches. A listing of his most important essays is included in thebibliography compiled by Jan Alber.Monika F ludernik's work shares some similarities with Nu nn ing 's. She, too,has adopted a constructivist position and concentrates on narrative discourse ratherthan the story level. Fludernik (1957-) studied under Stanzel in Graz, where shecom pleted a doctoral dissertation on Ulysses in t9 82 . From 1984 she was assistantprofessor of American literature at the University of Vienna, where she receivedher tenure in 1992 for The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction(t 99 3). This study of speech and thought representation criticized Ann Ba nfield'sUnspeakable Sentences and argued that free indirect discourse w as not com pletelydescribable in linguistic terms but required a conscious interpretative act on thepart of the reader. Flude rnik 's trademarks already show in this book: a very closeanalysis of the linguistic surface structure of narrative texts, a linguisticme thodology , a wide range of texts (spanning English and Am erican fiction fromChaucer onwards as well as including nonfiction and oral discourse), and apredilection for reading traditional theories against the grain and proposingcontroversial solutions.

Fludernik then wen t on to expand the theses first discussed with reference tospeech and thoug ht representation and to generalize them as a theoretical approachto narrative tout court. Her follow-up volume. Towards a "Natural" Narratology(1996), which won the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the Society for theStudy of Narrative Literature (SSNL), proposes a new theoretical model thatextends Stanzel's notion of mediacy to argue that all narrative is mediated byconsciousness, that of a teller, an experiencer, and a viewer or a reflectingconsciousness, and that these frames rely on cognitive bases by means of whichhum ans perce ive their world and act in it. She goes on to posit a revised definitionof narrativity that marginalizes plot and instead focuses on experientialitytheconjunction of a narrative's tellability and point. For Rudernik, conversationalnarrative serves as the prototype of all narrative.

The theory was designed to accommodate all narrative from oral tales topostmodernist texts. The central part ofthe study therefore concentrated on the wayin which substrates of conversational narrative structure can be located in m edievaland early modern texts and how m odifications of these patterns led to the inventionof the novel. This important historical thrust in her work continues to dominateFludernik's current narratological work ("Diachronization"). Fludernik has alsodone work on second-person texts {Style special issue [1994]) and gender issues


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literature. Work in progress on narrative structure from 1250-1750 will, however,return her to the narratological fold.Our final representative in this section is Werner Wolf (1955- ). Wolfcompleted his habilitation, enlitied Asthetische Illusion undlllusionsdurchbrechungin der Erzdhlkunst {199?)), in Munich and shortly after becam e Stan zel's successorat the University of Graz. Asthetische Illusion, whose theoretical outline isprovided by Wolf in the essay included in these issues (in Style 38.3), was a m ajorachievement in at least two respects. On the one hand, it served to redefine thevague notion of "realism " and "realistic" by targeting precisely what in narrativetexts tends to enhance the read er's illusion of being confronted with a "real world."By ca lling this effect aesthetic illusion. Wolf is able to skirt the problem s of rea lity,I'effetde reel, etc., which plague most analyses of literary realism . He can thereforerestrict the use of the term Realism to the nineteenth-century literary movement.Second ly, by contrasting the creation of aesthetic illusion with its shattering in anti-illusionistic texts and by following these passages on a continuous diachronicplane. Wolf sketches a tradition of anti-illusionistic writing from the Renaissanceonw ards which, though know n in its elem ents, has not been treated as a tradition inits own right before. The m ost important and practical aspect of W olf's magnumopus concerns its scheme of categorization for types of illusionistc and anti-illusionistic techniques, including, for instance, the insight that both too little andtoo much plot in a narrative occasion anti-illusionist effects. W o lf s studysignificantly complements Brian McHale's narratological enquiries intopostmodernist techniques and provides a systematic grid for deviations fromillusionistic norms.

In his more recent work Wolf has extended the discussion of aestheticillusionism to the realm of lyric poetry, arguing for poetry's lack of narrativity butproposing that it displays an openness to the evocation of aesthetic illusion("Aesthetic"). Most recently. Wolf has moved on to consider narrativity moreclosely by com bining insigh ts from Prince and Fludernik in an attractive model thatallows for a cross-medial application of the concept of narrativity ("Narrative,""Das Problem "). W o lf s other main line of research concerns intermediality,especially the interface between music, painting, and fiction. Besides some finestudies in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Wolf has turned to the consideration of anumber of writers particularly interested in music and the arts, among them GabrielJosipovici {Musicalization, "Role"). Wolfs work thus links up with Nunning'sconcern for transgeneric and transmedial narratology.


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Introduction 163

4.1. Linguistic and Structuralist Developmen ts in the 1970sThe em ergence of modern German narratology in the early 1970s was by andlarge a product of the structuralist revolution of the 1960s and the rise of textlinguistics w ith the developm ent of text gramm ars. The current rhe toric was one of

a new beginning and of a radical break with the historical-hermeneutic tradition;the methodological ethos was that of a striving for maximum explicitness andformalization, of turning narratology into a scientific discipline and seeking tointegrate it into a unified science of texts, a universal co mm unicative model or ageneral semiology. Many of these lofty ambitions have turned out to be eitherunrealizable or excessively reductive, but have nevertheless left an enduringlegacy in terms of intellectual rigor and global narrative models. Moreover, thenarra tologists of the 1970s were the first to define a large numb er of key aspects andissues, which still domina te narrative research. Many of their specific claims m ayindeed appear self-evident today, having become the common coin ofnarratological discourse, but one should not forget that at the time they wereinnovative, and often quite controversial.

The stormy growth of narratology in the 1970s and the ensuing debates arebest documented in several collections of essays published during this period.Between 1976 and 1978 Wolfgang Hau brichs published a three-volume collectionof articles entitled Erzdhlforschung in which he noted the "flood of publications onnarrative in recent years" (1:7), compiled a bibliography of about 2400 (!) itemspublished between 1956-1976, and sought to present new articles by manyscholars representing all current perspectives and approaches to narrative invarious disciplines. In his view, narratological research could be subsumed underthree catego ries in terms of levels of generality: (a) basic problems and ap proach es;(b) specific issues such as fictionality, narrative attitudes and positions, narrativeinference, sem antics and pragm atics of narrative, text gramm atical m odels; and (c)narrative strategies in specific g enres and text types. Haubrichs d istinguishes threemajor approaches to narrative in the 1970s. The first is the quest for plot models,looking for invariant patterns or gramm ars of narrative. This approach started outfrom Vladim ir Propp , A. J. Greim as, and Claude Brem ond. Secon d, text linguisticslooks for a coherent method to describe linguistic and logical connections beyondthe individual sentence. The third approach might be called d escriptive poetics. Itdeals with such issues as point of view, characters' discourse, and the like.Haubrichs expresses the hope for the emergence of an integrated mo del, which willinclude and interrelate all of these areas. The collection itself contains 38 articles


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com mu nicative transaction and its levels and aspects, including the functioning ofdeic tics, self-reflexivity and seman tic equ ivalen ces; (b) basic structures of specifictypes of narrative such as the story cycle or novel; (c) narrative features that areperiod or mo vem ent specific; and (d) contrasts and interrelations between fictionaland factual narratives, including historiographic discourse. T opics discussed u nderthis last heading include the use of cliches by historians, referring expressionsevoke a fictional domain, and the functions of narratives of diverse kinds. In thiscollection the text-linguistic side is minor, and most contributors could bedescribed as moderate structuralists seeking to marry the structural and diachron ic/historic perspectives.Several scholars of the period sought to present comprehensive integratedm odels of narrative, com bining the stratificational and com mu nicative m odels oflinguistics. In their 1977 book on linguistic text models {LinguistischeTextmodetle) Elisabeth Gulich and Wolfgang Raible, for exam ple, devote a m ajorchapter to the description of narrative texts on the levels of action, textualmacrostructures and communicative activity, both inside the text and betweenauthor, text, and reader. Their guiding m ethodological principles are the distinctionof several levels of textual analysis narrated, narration, and textand the questfor invariant textual macrostructures specific to each text type. The sam e attem ptis made in a textbook written by various hands, Hans-Werner Ludwig's 1982Arbeitsbuch Romananalyse, the theoretical claims of which actually apply tonarratives of all kinds. The analysis starts with author-reader communicationthrough the medium of the book, followed by a discussion of communicationinside the narrative, the three levels of event, story, and discourse, the narrator,character and action, space and time, kinds of speech situations portrayed innarrative, including diary, epistolarity, free indirect discourse, and interiormonologue, and fmally novel and reality, that is, the construction of a reality innarrative and its relations to actuality. Even though the different chapters arewritten by different scholars and draw on different paradigms, a satisfactorycom posite picture of both object and field em erges at the end. A similar pattern isprovided by Erzdhltextanatysc edited by Cordula Kahrmann et al. (1977).

In addition to global models, numerous studies were devoted to thetheorization of individual narrative components or aspects, beginning withnarrative communication and its levels. A well-formulated communicativemod el of narrative, based on sem iotics and comm unication theory, is presented inDieter Janik's Die Kom mun ikationsstrukturdesErzdhlw erkes {1913,1985). In this


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Introduction 165

narra tor, narra tive, and narrated dom ain alike are all equally feigned, since they arethe products of concurrent textual creation by the author and observation by thereader. Thuesen goes on to discuss degrees of individuation of narrators, fromanonymous speech position to person and the narrator's disappearance incharacters' inner monologues. He introduces the term "poetic intelligence " (for theimplied or abstract author) to designate the instance that chooses all means ofportrayal and defines the shifting relation between narrator and characters. Thepoetic intelligence is therefore responsible for the text's alternation betweencharacters' perspectives or for the narrator's temporary adoption of thespatiotemporal, perceptual, and epistemic perspective of a character, asexemplified in free indirect discourse.

The story/plot/action level was also the object of som e detailed stud ies. In her1979 book Erzahlstruktur und Texttheorie, Hannelore Donner-Bachmann startsout from Propp's invariant fabula scheme for the Russian wondertale, a primeexample of structuralist analysis, and then uses the formalism of text linguistics tooffer a general method for abstracting from narrative discourse its underlyingcontent u nits (motifemes) and their sequence. She claims that her method can serveas a powerful tool for discovering isomo rphisms, divergenc es, and transformationsbetween the narrative syntaxes of different genres, such as the Russian won dertaleand the Gothic novel. Likewise starting from the fairy tale, oral and artistic,Bernha rd P auk stad t's Para^ii'gmen der Erzdhltheorie (1979) analyzes a wide rangeof paradigms of narrative theory, both traditional and structuralist, and tests theirusefulness for describing the regularities of the genre. He accepts the (French)structuralist claim that the logic of action is the most basic aspect here, but rejectsits rage for complex formal models, taxonomy, and abstract and deductiveprocedures as m issing the main task of any na rrative theory, n amely, to elucidateliterary structures for the reader.Structuralist (text)linguistics has inspired numerous detailed studies ofspecific textual phenomena and their impact on the reader's creation of thenarrated dom ain. One such outstanding study, drawing on both west European andSlavic structuralist literary and linguistic theories, is Wolf Schmid's DerTextaufbau in den Erzahlungen Dostoevskijs (1973 ). For Schm id, a narrative is atext consisting of two kinds of speech: that of the narrator and that of the chara cters ,each with its own I-here-now point of origin. Th e author goes on to propose ninepairs of features according to which a text segment can be relegated to one or theother, and points out that some segments of the narrative report (that is, the text


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narratives and its different forms in first- and third-person narratives. He thenexplores a further form of interference consisting of the orientation of the narra tor'sspeech to the semantic position of the inscribed fictional narratee (e.g., in Notesfrom Underground). His conclusion is that both forms of interference rendermeaning-construction by the reader more difficult, prevent an unequivocalconcretization of the world presented in the text, and make the reader focus hisattention on the very structure of the literary work.

Another textual feature, which turns out to be of major constructive andaesthetic importance, is explored by Johanna Kahr in EntpersonlichendePersonenerwahnung (1973), a study unique in its combination of linguistics(Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson), narrative theory, and philosophy oflanguage both analytic and phenomenological (John Searle, Edmund Husserl).The author begins with the three ways by which a character can be referred to:proper nam e, definite description (i.e., "the X"), and personal pronoun . It turns outthat referring to a character exclusively by means of a personal pronoun contributesto the depersonalization and reduction of this character to mere grammaticalfunction. In Rob be-Grillet's Laya/o.yi'e the reduction takes another form, with thenarrator of this first-person narrative never referring to himself as either characteror narrator, not even by means of an "I." The book also provides a typology of thepossible occurrence and varieties of first-, second-, and third-person pronoun s onthe levels of narrator and character in different kinds of narrative, thus providing anunexpected link to Stanzel's classic study of narrative situations. Kahr's studyfurther correla tes the greater or lesser illusionistic character of narrative as a whole,in its developm ent from realism to postmodernism, with the m ore or less extensiveuse of personal p ronouns as referential devices.

Th e 1970s and early 80s also witnessed the publication of several s tructuralist-oriented studies of narrative composition, tectonics, or architectonics, thuscontinuing a tradition started by Muller and Lammert. Following themethodological paradigm of linguistics, all of these studies begin by exploring theforms of the phenomenon under scrutiny and end with a detailed typology based oneither binary oppositions or a continuum between two p oles. This is followed by afunctional enquiry, focusing on the role and impact of each variety on the work asa whole and sometimes also on the reader. While such studies may be mostlydesc riptive and classificatory, they provide a temp late for enquiry, not unlike manyof Gen ette's works. Moreover, the conclusions of such w orks tend to remain validfor a long time, and in some cases (Neuhaus, Hartmann) anticipate more


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Introduction

different times and locations; same place, different persons and times; anddifference in all three . A rarer form is the case of sam eness of persons and place, butdisjoint time frames. It is the relative extent and them e of each plot line that decideswhich one is major and which minor. The different plot lines in a narrative can beinterrelated in a variety of ways: shared person(s), convergence of locations, anevent in one line triggering even ts in the other, parallel situations, reference in oneplot line to events in another, and a shared thematic and symbolic dimension.Different plot lines in the same work may stand in hierarchical or equality relationsto each other. Nischik sees the reasons for having mu ltiple plot lines as functional:enrichment, generalization, aesthetic integration, reciprocal illumination,explanation, intensification (e. g., of suspense), and (comic) relief.

Dietrich Weber (Theorie des analytischen Erzdhlens [1975]) is concernedwith "analytic" narrative and defines its prototypical form as the combination ofthree factors. First, there is the awareness of characters in the current sequen ce ofevents of som ething undefined, usually a past series of events or actions, coupledwith their attempts to clarify it. The second factor concerns the enigma-and-solution structure of these attempts at clarification, and the third consists in theachrony of textual presentation, such that certain events are textually presentedoutside their natural order (e.g., in medias res). The analytic story pattern is aneconomical way of introducing motifs without elaborate information. It mustcontain at least temporary ambiguity or indeterminacy and create suspense,surprise, and other emotional reactions for characters and reader alike. For thereader it may also serve as a way of distancing the terrible (since only its results areexp lored), of authenticating the improb able or supernatural, or of creating a gam eof frustrated expectations.

Volker Neuhaus, in his Typen multiperspektivischen Erzdhlens (1971), studiesthe forms of multiperspectival narration on the basis of English-language texts.Th e simplest and oldest form is that of the oral sym posium, with each participantspeaking or telling in turn. The written equivalent of this form is the epistolarynovel, followed by the archival novel, such as Dicken s' s Pickwick Papers, in whichdocuments of various kinds, written by different persons (sometimes also indifferent times and places), as well as oral testimonies, all concerning the sameperson, are gathered, arranged, annotated, and commented upon by an editor orpublisher figure. The detective novel prefers the confrontation of a plurality ofwitnesses, each with their own perspec tive, but with no solution guaranteed. In themodern age, from Henry James to Faulkner, many multiperspectival novels consist


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Monika Fludernik and Uri Margolin

supposed to help the reader arrive at a truth that cannot be formulated in any simpleway, since each perspective can grasp only one dimension or aspect, while truth iscomplex and multidimensional. Only the synthesis of numerous subjective,incomplete, and sometimes contradictory insights enables the truth to emerge. In(he third variety, the different perspectives diverge widely. There is no unique,objective reality to be reconstructed, no general truth ex ists, and no approx imationof it is possible from the comparison of the different perspectives. What we are leftwith are mere subjective images of the events and characters as twisted by eachindividual perspective.

Karl-Heinz Hartmann's study of narrative repetitions (Wiederholungen imErzdhlen, 1979) begins by noting the key role ascribed to textual recurrences orisotopies in text gram mars. They are seen as a major source of semantic coherence.Reduplication and gradation in rhetoric serve as means of steering the reader'sattention, and the device correlates with parallelism and equivalence in theories ofliterariness from those of the Russian formalists on. Hartmann proposes toestablish a systematics of repetition (iteration) in narrative as regards actions,characters, and narrative discourse itself. In single-plot narratives, repetition canassume the form of reduplication of events or repetition with variations, such assimilarity, contrast, addition and intensification. In multiplot narratives, any kindof repetition of events in different plot lines, whether coterminous or sequent,creates mutual illumination. With characters, any repetition concerns features orfeature-complexes of some kind. In the discourse, iterations can occur within thenarrator's discourse, such as prolepsis and analepsis, between characters' andnarrator's discourses, and between characters' discourses. The book provides avery fine-grained set of distinctions within each group, of which only a roughoutline can be presented here.

Transcending the boundaries of narratology per se, yet of great importance forits theoretical foundations, are two collections of conference contributions in theseries Poetik und Hermeneutik: one on event, story and history (Koselleck andStem pel, 1973), the other on the functions of the fictive (Henrich and Iser, 1983).Both volumes are multidisciplinary, including contributions from philosophers,linguists, historians, and literary scholars. Most contributors belong to theherm eneu tic, historicist school, but even so their essays engage in a discussion w iththe structuralist and analytical approaches, and both volumes are dedicated to theclarification of shared basic categories of text studies. In the 1973 volume, Karl-Heinz Stierle in "Geschehen, Geschichte, Text der Gesch ichte" explicates the term


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Introduction

clarifying both basic features and specifics of historiographie discourse . In anotheressay in the same volume, "Geschichte als Exem plum ," Stierle points to the originof numerous literary narrative genres in everyday text types with practicalfunctions. He goes on to claim that the transition to the literary sphere involves aproblematization of the schemata of practical speech activity.

In his contribution to Henrich and Iser's 1983 volume Funktionen desFiktiven, "Das Fiktionale und das Asthetische," Johannes Anderegg definesfictionality in pragmatic terms as a special mode of reception or communication,and the aesthetic as a wider category that may on occasion coincide with thefictional. In the same volume, Wolf-Dieter Stempel, in "Fiktion in konver-sationellen Erzahlungen," points out that, in everyday conversational narratives ofpersonal experience, the opposition fiction versus nonfiction is not a binary but agradient. He draws attention to the role of rhetorical embellishment and offictionalization of the factual as means of enhancing tellabiltiy and impact. To thehearer, mere probability and not factual truth is enough to make such storiesacceptable as records of genuine experience. Two other major contributions to thisvolume, by Wolfgang Iser (on the fictional and the imaginary) and by RainerW arning (on fiction as staged discourse) are available in English translation in laterreworkings (see Works Cited).

The first major period of German narratological research in the 1970s was thusa time of intellectual excitement and optimism during which scholars focused bothon the establishment of the basic outlines of narratological models (communi-cation structure, fictionality, etc.) and on more specific issues and tried to apply andextend structuralist methodology in their work. In the 1970s, German narratologyhad to establish itself within academe as a distinct discipline, to justify itsinnovative models and methods, and to demonstrate their validity by applyingthem to standard German literary works. This battle was won at the latest by theearly 1980s and, after a period of consolidation, the second generation appeared onthe academic scene towards the end of that decade.4.2. The 1990s to the PresentThe new hallmarks of German narratology in the 1990s are a greater opennessto multidisciplinary perspectives, to international scholarship and literature, tonewer theoretical approaches (poststructuralism, feminism, cognitivism, etc.), andto modernist and postmodernist texts. This reorientation has led to a series ofimpressive achievements, several of which have already been noted in section 3.2.


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narration, including frame narrative and embedded stories, the typology of first-and third-person narratives, narratorial perspective as the kind and extent ofknowledge the narrator can have regarding his characters, and perspectival shiftsand blends involving the narrator and the mind of one or more characters. Inanother study ("Indem ich") Freudenberg discusses in great detail the dual tensesystem of German and its functioning in literary narrative, paying m ajor attentionto the various kinds of present tense (of narration, of events, the historical p resent)in its many functions, and to the shift from one tense system to the other as a meansof distancing a scene or rendering it more immediate.

In the same group of integrative models one could also include publications byMatias Martinez and Michael Scheffel, Dietrich Weber, Wolf Schmid, and JurgenPetersen. Martinez and Scheffel's very successful and up-to-date bookEinfuhrung in die Erzdhltheorie (1999), begins with a discussion of fictionality asan indispensable basic component of all theories of literary narrative and thenproceeds to a presentation of the narrative "how" (time, mode, voice, narrativesituation, unreliable narration), followed by the narrative "what" (action andnarrated world), introducing for the first time into German narratologyconsiderations from possible-worlds semantics. The book concludes withnarrative models in other disciplines such as sociolinguistics (conversationalnarratives), cognitive psychology, and historiography. Most remarkable in thiswork are the wide international (English, French, some Spanish) andmultidisciplinary coverage, and the opening towards new directions on aninternational scale. Martinez and Scheffel's introduction has therefore acquired astatus similar to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's textbook Narrative Fiction.

W eber, in a slim but highly informative study , Erzdhlliteratur (1998), writtenin an almost aphoristic style, seeks to define "narrative literature" as a prototypebased on the combination of several features. Taking into account contemporaryexperimental literature, the author prefers to be cautious and minimalist in hisdefinitions. All narrative (literary or not) is understood as serial (unfolding) speechabout temporally defined states of affairs. All narratives have two centers oforientation: the I-here-now of the narrator and that of the character(s) spoken of.Narration is always addressed to someone and is basically expanded reporting.While the core of narration consists in reporting, it may also include reproductionof the speech of others and supplementary narratorial speech about the topic andabout the narrative act itself. Specifically literary narrative is an artistic writtenwork, and written narratives are considered verbal art if they are fictional, and/or


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Introduction 171

The most comprehensive and ambitious model of literary narrative to comeouto fGe rm any inrecen tyearsis nod oub tW olf Schmid's A'arrafo/og/a (2003), sofar availab le only in Russian. In this book Schmid com bines the best of western andSlavic theories of narrative, enriched by numerous innovative contributions of hisown. The author begins by carefully defining what to him are the three basicaspects of literary narrative: narrativity (i.e., event sequence), fictionality, andaesthetic function. The next section deals with narrative instances, comprising theabstract author or organizing principle and strategy of the work as a whole,followed by the abstract reader, fictional narrator, and fictional narratee. This isfollowed by a discussion of perspective or focalization and its varioussystematizations. Next comes a four-step quasi-generative model leading though aseries of transformations from the events (fabula) to the story (syuzhet), then tonarrating discourse and finally to textuality. Sc hm id's most innovative point hereconcerns the major ro le ascribed to perspectivization in the transition from each ofthese steps to the next. The fifth section of the book deals with the relations betweennarrators' and characters' discourses, focusing extensively on skaz. In the finalsection the author discusses in detail the nature and functions of positive andnegative equivalences on the compositional and thematic levels (characters,situations, actions).

Staying entirely within German literature and literary theory, Jurgen P etersen,in his Erzdhlsysteme (1993), sets out to formulate a strictly ordered poetics ordescriptive system of narrative, claiming to improve on the classical studies byHamburger, Lammert, and Stanzel and to correct their supposed mixing up ofheterogeneous categories and criteria. Petersen's system seeks to encompass allconstitutive units of narration along three basic dimensions: fictionality as theontolog ical status of any literary-narrative illocu tion; the narrator and the narrativeact; and narrative composition and architectonics.Fictional narrative texts create, according to Petersen, an absolute world,totally dissociated from actual space and time, and containing its own internalcriteria of truth and falsehood. The world of any fictional narrative is essentiallymediated through a narrative position. In the absence of a marked narrator, thepreterite tense in fictional narrative indicates merely the having-taken-place offictional events; as soon as a narrator and his present act of narration becomemarked, however, it begins to signify pastness with respect to this act. Since theSecond W orld W ar, though, many G erman narratives have appeared in which thepresent tense is used as interchangeable with the preterite. The fictionality of a


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Narration can occur in all three persons, and in each the degree of markednessof the narrator can vary from minimal to highly individuated. Narrators also varyas regards the degree of their spatial and temporal information about the narratedsphere, and the extent of their mental access to characters' minds. RejectingStanzel's model, Petersen offers his own typology and terminology (53-93),distinguishing between the Standort des Erzdhlers (spatial and temporal viewpointof the narrator), Sichtweisen (focalization), Erzdhlhaltung (evaluative relation ofthe narrator towards his characters) /4r/en der Darbietung (the forms of speech andthought representations), Sprachstile (stylistic variants), and Rellefbildung (theperspectivism of narrative em phasis). Petersen is a defender of an "authorial" first-person narrative and uses some of Stanzel's terminology to designate quitedisparate features of n arration. For instance, he distinguishes between auktorialem,personalem, and neutralem Erzdh lverhalten (i.e., a presentation stylistically keyedtoward s the narrator's language and perspec tive, those of the the character(s), andobjective description). The unique contour of each narrative is defined by thescope, frequency, and m odes of combination and alternation of all the com ponen tslisted so far. The nature of the narrator is itself one of them, since the overallcontou r is the product of the actual au thor's aesthetic preferences.

The narrative text is a system consisting of a multiplicity of elem ents, and canmanifest either constancy or variability in their selection and combinationthroughout the text. Examples of variability abound, from factual reporting to thelaying bare of fictionality, from authorial to neutral telling, from first- to third-person narration, variable focalization, and so on. Compositional variety ismanifested in textual montage, where different text types (such as reflections,letter, diary) stemming from different individuals are juxtap osed . A variabletextual system may still be capable of integra tion, say in terms of thematic un ity. Ifnot, we are facing incoherent system-plurality which may, as in somecontemporary texts, lead to the disappearance of the very narrational system,leaving us with mere verbal materials, open to the creation of any text type by thereader. Petersen's system is noteworthy for its attempt to include modernist andpostmodernist texts as well as present-tense and second-person narratives, all ofwhich have been stum bling blocks for classical narratology.

Finally, two pedagogically useful comprehensive surveys of current Germanand international narratological work deserve mention: Jochen Vogt's Aspekteerzdhlender Prosa (1998) and Matthias B auer 's Romantheorie (1991), which is infact not limited to the novel at all. Besides the above o verall studies of narrative by


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Introduction 173

character perspective (who sees?) in the detective novel, a genre in whichreliability of speech and vision (perception), the manner of distribution ofinformation, and the steering of the reader's sym pathy and suspense are decisive,interconnected factors. Finke distinguishes six possible speech positions in thisgen re: two narratorial ones (authorial and neutral), and four belonging to characterroles (detective, w itness, victim, criminal). As for focalization, it may be externalor internal, and, if internal, through one character throughout or multiple andshifting. The interplay of speech position, perspective , and rhetorical impact is thenstudied in detail in numerous detective novels in several languages. Finke's studythus links typology and the thematic groundings of genre fiction.

Although the text linguistic approach to the modeling of action sequencesabated after the 1970s, some work along these lines still continues. JoachimLiedlke'sNarrationsdynamik (1990) is a good exam ple. Using concepts from bothtext-linguistic and narratological work in several languages, the author seeks tosystematize the dynamic quality of the narrated according to four aspects: time,space , actants, and events. For each, a list of linguistic ind icators is drawn up, andmajor criteria for subclassification are defined. The study thus proposes four basicaspects of the dynam ics of the narratedchronological, topological, actantial, andepisodicand a method for defining their specific nature in each narrative throughthe subclassifications offered.

Narrative self-reflexivity is the object of two detailed studies. In Der GeistderErzdhlung (1987), a study rich in examples from various periods and literatures,Hans-Rudolf Picard discusses the ways in which the act of narration and thenarrator are portrayed within the narrated domain. These include, among others,frame narratives, stories embedded within a story told by one character to others,discourses by the narrator consisting almost entirely of the quotation of the maincharacter's account of his life, the case of an author figure trying to write a story,and the thematization of the current act of narration qua an attempt at storytelling.The same issue is studied in Michael Scheffel's book Formen selbstreflexivenErzdhlens (1997). The author distinguishes two basic kinds of narrative self-reflexivity: self-mirroring (isomorphy of part and whole, embedded andembedding, mise en abyme) and self-observation (narrative self-reference,narratological comment and discussion, metanarrative comments, generalpoetological discussion, and the like). While self-observation can occur on thelevels of narration and narrated alike, self-mirroring is specific to the story level.Moreover, reflexivity of either kind does not necessarily destroy the narrative


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distinguishes four kinds of theories according to their location of the fictional: thenarrated, the act of narration, the real-world writer's speech activity when heproduces works of fiction, and the real-world reader's mode of reception andoverall communicative situation. A final chapter discusses briefly fiction withrespect to drama and lyrical poetry. Under each heading Zipfel presents in asystematic and lucid way a myriad of English, French, and German languagetheories from literary studies, linguistics, and philosophy, providing the readerwith what currently is the best and most comprehensive overview of this theoreticalminefield. In Doppelte Welten (1996), focusing on fiction as the fictive narrateddom ain, Matfas M artinez discusses a particular type of narrative w hich enables twoincompatible kinds of emplotment of the same sequence of events, causal andteleological, without providing the means for deciding between them. The eventsin such a narrative can thus be understood in terms of realistic, empirical causa lityor in terms of teleology and providential force, hinting at a supernatural sphere.

Postmodernist narrative has been a constant challenge to any standardnarratological model. In his Der labyrinthische Diskurs (1987), ManfredSchmeling takes up this challenge on the level of narrative organization.Employing the concept of the labyrinth as his key metaphor, he focuses ondiscourses opposed to the ideal of causal, logical, straightforward or well-formednarration, and seeks to provide a general model for the manifestations of suchlabyrinthine texts on the levels of action, spatial and temporal organization,character reference, thematic progression, narrative situations, and perspective.

The growing interest in recent years in the paratextual elements of narrative isreflected in Harald Stang's Einleitung, Fussnote, Komm entar (1992), a study ofmock scholarly-editorial elements in literary narratives, including fake editors' orpublishers' introductions/prefaces, mock commentaries, footnotes, documenta-tion items, sources, quotations, indexes, and bibliographies. A wide variety ofrelevant narratives in several languages, ranging form the eighteenth century topostmodernism, are identified, and this is followed by an inductive analysis of thefunctions of such fake authenticating elements in each text, and of the reader'sability to recognize them as fake. When such ultimately expository elements turninto the constitutive principle of the text, as in some of Borges's story-essays, thenarrative and the essayistic are fused, and the text's overall generic affiliation aswell as the key to its reading becom e problem atic. More dramatic still are the casesof autho rs who have written both a nonfictional b iography of an actual person, anda fake biography of a nonexistent one (Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart and


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Introduction 175

range of texts exam ined, the questions raised, and the num erous individual answersprovided.Another issue concerning the framing of literary narrative and narrativecom mu nication that has evoked grow ing interest in recent years concems the waysin w hich the actual (real-wo rld) author can (re-)insert himself into the narrative textand its world, and the absolute or relative nature of the author-versus-narratordistinction, a postulate of structuralist narratology. A numher of essays on thissuhjeet are gathered in Fotis Jannidis et al., RUckkehr des Autors (1999). Most ofthe contributions suggest that this binary opposition, too , needs to he replaced hya continuu m , and that the fictional/actual dichotomy can, at least in special cases,assume an oscillating, dynamic and variable quality rather than obeying fixedhierarchical postulates.

The most recent stage in the development of German narratology outsideAnglistik is represented hy the activities of the narratology research group at theUniversity of Hamburg. The perspective of research here is multidisciplinary,stressing theoretical rigor and explicitness, and going back to the fundamentaldisciplinary issues first formulated in the structuralist phase. The gro up 's first bookpublication is a collection of essays in English, What is Narratology? (2003),edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller. It seeks to map out the nature andplace of narratology relative to general literary theory, text theory, interpretationtheory, theory of fiction, and cog nitive, especially reception, studies. Two essaysin the volume, by Wolf Schmid and Jan Christoph Meister, go back to the notionof event as the basic element of all narratives and of narrative studies. Meister'sCom puting Action: A Narratological Approach (2003), the second volume in theseries, is devoted to a rigorous multidisciplinary defmition of event, action andepisode, and to the construction of an event-parser computing program. Severalother research projects by members of the group are in progress.'"

The research undertaken by the Hamburg Forschergruppe is especiallyimportant also because it again tries to bring together a wide range of an alyses thathad focused on fairly specific issues and to return to basic questions of thediscipline. This strategy is particularly com mendable since the major contributionson the Anglistik side, even w here they ended up proposing new theoretical mod els,tended to focus on very specific, if not marginal, issues, from the perspective ofwhich they then went on to reconfigure the field. (This is true of Nun nin g's o euvre ,which has been p roposing important insights on the basis of issues like narratorialfunction, unreliability, metanarration and historiographic metafiction. It is also


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5. Concluding RemarksThis concludes our survey of German narratology from the 1970s to thepresent day. As w e have seen, there was a burst of creative energy in the 1970s anda reinvigoration of narratological studies in the 1990s when the students of the first

generation of narratologists started to publish. The survey docum ents, m oreover,that the developments in English studies differ from those in the other languagedisciplines. W hereas narratology becam e a widely researched focus in German andRomance departments but produced few internationally recognized figuresnarratological work conducted in Anglistik tended to cluster around a number ofnarratological centers, with the rest of scholars in English Studies concerningthemselves with other issues. Likewise, whereas outside Anglistik, the 1970sappea r like a gymnasium with num erous scholars jostling for their own turf, insidethe field was dom inated by the towering figure of F. K. Stanzel, even though superbnarratological work was published by Bonheim, Fuger, Wolfgang Muller, andothers. Overall, the 1970s experimented with the new tools derived fromstructuralism and the (re)discovery of Russian formalism, and this work resulted inthe delineation of seminal models and typologies. In the 1970s, narratology wasalso most clearly aligned with semiotics.After the consolidation of narratological research in the 1980s, the 1990s, bycontrast, both brought a return to structuralist principles and initiated anacknowledgement of theoretical developments outside Germany. WhereasGermans in the 1970s were influenced by French structuralism, German academianow started to orient itself towards theoretical innovations and fashions flourishingin North America. As a consequence, German literary studies have been widelyaffected by postcolonial theory , the New Historicism, cultural studies, and debatesabout the ethics of literature.

In the field of narratology, these developments have concerned Anglistiescholars more than other philological disciplines, or they have done so only with anotable time lag. The emphasis on linguistic training in German humanitiesdepartments, moreover, has resulted in a continuing influence of linguistics,although linguistics itself has undergone drastic refigurations from Saussureanstructuralism to Chom skyan generativism on to pragmatics, speech act theory, textlinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, andhistorical pragmatics. This strong influence of linguistics in German academia maybe partly responsible for the continuing popularity of postclassical and muted


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Introduction 177

after the generation of Schmidt, Klaus Hempfer, and Harald Posner. As we haveseen, the internationally most interesting developments in German narratologyarose in the Anglistik cam p where the influx of poststructuralism, fem inism, genderstudies, and postcolonial theory was strongest and had lasting effects. As aconsequence, it will presumably be contributions to narratology by German-speaking AngUsten and work focused on postmod ernist texts that "spea k" most tothe American academic public addressed here because this work partly rests onsimilar theoretical assum ptions and overlapping theoretical conce rns. On the otherhand, knowledge about research conducted in Germany that profits from theconceptual clarity of revised structuralisms and from the linguistic expertise andhistorical dep th that critics bring to their subject w ill so we hope offer a glimpseinto perspectives on n arrative that are less familiar, but precisely by this process ofdefam iliarization, may serve to enhan ce the reade r's re-cognition of narratologicalfeatures and important aspects.

In the essays that follow the emphasis falls on the im portance of the receptionprocess in German narratological work and its anticipation of cognitivist andconstructivist approaches in the 1990s (see the essays by Goetsch, Stanzel, Grab es,and Vera Nunning, in this issue). A second thematic group is constituted by anemphasis on logic and fictionality (the contributions by Harweg, Fuger, andHempfer, to appear in the companion issue) and documents sophisticateddevelop me nts from structuralist sources into possible worlds theory. The fmal twoessays (by Wolf and Ansgar Nunning) illustrate work that focuses onpostmo dernism and marries this perspective with the German concern for literaryhistory.

Notes' An exception to this general emphasis can be observed in Ralf Schneider'swork on literary character and H ilary D ann enb erg 's analyses of plot structure andcoincidence patterns.^ Highlights of this prolific tradition are, among others, Behaghel, Uber dieEntstehung (1877); Lorck, Die "erlebte Rede" (1921); Walzel, "Von 'erlebterRede'" (1926); Gunther, Probleme der Rededarstellung (1928); Buhler, Die"erlebte Rede" (1937); G lauser, Die erlebte Rede (1948); Neubert, Die Stilformen(1957); Hoffmeister, Studien (196 5); Steinberg, Erlebte Rede (1971); Schmid, Der

Textaufbau (1973); and Neuse, Geschichte (1990).


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^ For a brief summary see Paul Hernadi's preface to Stanzel's Theory ofNarrative; on earlier German contributions to the theoretical study of narrative seeDarby, Herman, Cornils and Schernus, and Bleckwein.

^ The book was translated almost immediately into Czech (1989), Japanese(1989), and later into Greek (1999).' For a more extensive discussion of the epic preterite see Hamburger ("Dasepische"), Stanzel ("Episches"), and Fludernik ("Chronology")." For good surveys see Stanzel, "Towards" and "Teller," and Jahn andNunning.'' For discussion and criticism of Stanzel's theory see Cohn, "Encirclement,"and Genette (114-22). For very critical discussions of the model see Petersen(Review) and Wiegemann.'" Most prominently, one needs to mention Dorrit Cohn's seminal review ofTheorie des Erzahlens ("Encirclemen t") in which she weighs the pros and cons ofStan zel's model in comp arison to G ene tte's. In Germany , Stanze l's most relentlesscritic has been Jurgen Petersen, who in his Erzdhlsysteme (1993) presented his ownmodel of narrative theory based on a series of categories largely incom mensurablewith the work of Stanzel and the Anglo-American and French traditions ofnarratology. P eterse n's critique of Stanzel is based on S tanz el's failure to have usedthe more extensive categories invented by Petersen (see esp. 159, and moregenerally 157-61, 172-74)." In his revised edition of The Rhetoric of F iction (1983) Booth had to admitthat his earlier denigra tion of the category person was "plain wrong " (412 ). Personhas become a crucial category in the wake of the discovery of large numbers oftexts in the second person (Fludernik, Second-Person), in the first-person plural

(M argolin, "Telling in the Plural") and in other experimental pronom inal forms.' Cologn e used to be among the top English departm ents in Germ any; m anyof the most renowned chair positions in English studies in Germany were filledwith scholars from Cologne.' For further publications by Jahn see Jan Albe r's bibliography of majorGerman work in narratology in this issue.'" See the homepage of the project, http://ww w.narrpo rt.uni-hamburg.de/e-

Port/Nan-Port/FGN03.nsf/FrameByKey/MKEE-4WLMF3-DE-p.


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Introduction 179

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. The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story. Cambridge: Brewer,1982.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.Orig. pub. 1961.Brandt, Wolfgang, ed. Erzahler, Erzahlen, Erzahltes. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner,

1996.Broich, Ulrich. "Gibt es eine 'neutrale' Erzahlsituation?" Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 33 (1983): 129-45.Buhler, Willi. Die "erlebte Rede" im Englischen Roman: Ihre Vorstufen und ihreAusbildung im W erke Jane Austens. Zurich: Max Niehans, 1937.Casparis, Christian Paul. Tense without Time: The Present Tense in Narration.Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, 84. Berne: Francke, 1975.Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and

Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.Cohn, Dorrit. "The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel's Theorie desErzahlens." Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 157-82.

. "Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style." ComparativeLiterature 18 (1966): 97 -112.Co rnils, Anja, and W ilhelm Schernu s. "On the Relationship between Theory of theNovel, Narrative Theory, and Narratology." Kindt and Muller. 137-74.Dannen berg, H ilary. "Divergen t Plot Patterns in Narrative Fiction from Sir Philip

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. "The Diachronization of Narratology." Narrative 11 (2003): 331 -48. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The LinguisticRepresentation of Speech and Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 1993.

. "The Genderization of Narrative." Pier, ed. 153-75.

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Freudenberg, Rudolf. "Indem ich die Feder ergreife." Schreibprozesse,Schreibprodukte. Ed. Manfred Kohrt and Am e W robel. 01ms: H ildesheimer1992. 105-62.. "Zum Beispiel Thomas Mann: Elemente einer Narrativik auf semiologischerGrundlage." Wandel und Kontinuum. Ed. Helmut Bernsmeier and Hans-PeterZiegler. Frankfurt: Peter Lan g, 1992. 164-248.

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