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Scripting the City. Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma Explore the Relevance of Storytelling for Postindustrial Urban Futures
Full text linkRezension zu: Barbara Buchenau / Jens Martin Gurr / Maria Sulimma (eds.): City Scripts. Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2023. 253 pp. USD 59.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1552-
Disaffection and You-Narration in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Tambudzai Trilogy (1988-2018)
Full text linkThis essay explores the representation of unfeeling, or disaffection, in narrative form through the writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed ‘Tambudzai trilogy.’ The narrative form I focus on is the shift in grammatical person of narration from the first person I to the second person you. The first instalment, Nervous Conditions (1988), opens with the defiant voice of its first-person narrator and protagonist, Tambudzai, but soon begins to oscillate between first and second person for self-reference. By This Mournable Body (2018), Tambu’s loss of selfhood is reflected in the narrator’s obstinate refusal to emerge as an ‘I’ at the level of discourse. I argue that Dangarembga inscribes Tambu’s institutional racial othering in you-narration and that this self-estrangement parallels the mode of unfeeling that Xine Yao (2021) calls “unsympathetic Blackness.” The trilogy, in line with recent work by contemporary scholars turning away from feeling towards negative feeling or the negation of feeling, unpicks the seams of a Western affective politics of sympathetic recognition.This essay explores the representation of unfeeling, or disaffection, in narrative form through the writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed ‘Tambudzai trilogy.’ The narrative form I focus on is the shift in grammatical person of narration from the first person I to the second person you. The first instalment, Nervous Conditions (1988), opens with the defiant voice of its first-person narrator and protagonist, Tambudzai, but soon begins to oscillate between first and second person for self-reference. By This Mournable Body (2018), Tambu’s loss of selfhood is reflected in the narrator’s obstinate refusal to emerge as an ‘I’ at the level of discourse. I argue that Dangarembga inscribes Tambu’s institutional racial othering in you-narration and that this self-estrangement parallels the mode of unfeeling that Xine Yao (2021) calls “unsympathetic Blackness.” The trilogy, in line with recent work by contemporary scholars turning away from feeling towards negative feeling or the negation of feeling, unpicks the seams of a Western affective politics of sympathetic recognition
Repetition, Again. Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Practices and Forms of Repeating
Full text linkWe propose that repetition holds exciting new avenues for cross-disciplinary dialogue between linguistics, literary and narrative studies, cultural studies, and media studies. ‘Repetition’ as a phenomenon is located on a scale that ranges from micro-levels of linguistic expression to the macro-level ‘grammar’ of narratives, including novels, films, and other media. Repetition is a key component of meaning-making in spoken and written contexts and allows for a nuanced re-configuration and cross-fertilization of research into linguistic practices and narrative forms and functions. In order to explore this cross-disciplinary potential, we approach repetition through five conceptual frames: (1) tradition/transformation, (2) prediction, (3) seriality, (4) orality, and (5) social interaction. In exploring repetition through these touchpoints, we return time and again to what makes repetitions “meaningful re-enactments” (Brown) in dependence of context, and relating to questions of spatial and temporal scale
Warum wollen ältere Beschäftigte früh in die Rente? Ergebnisse der lidA-Kohortenstudie (2022/2023)
No full textThe Grammar of Immersion. A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of immersive Narrative
Full text linkIn her influential book on narrative immersion (2015 [2001]), Marie-Laure Ryan discusses a number of narrative strategies facilitating immersion. Apart from the present tense and direct or free indirect speech, these narrative strategies are all of a narratological rather than linguistic nature. Building further on Ryan’s work, this article explores the linguistic features of immersive narrative. Central to my analysis is the Cognitive Grammar concept of ‘construal’, the language user’s capacity to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways. In close readings of two famous literary battle scenes – from the Iliad and from Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme – I demonstrate that construal can serve as a highly useful tool in stylistic and narratological analysis as it is closely linked to specific linguistic phenomena, such as tense and aspect, negation, deixis, speech representation, spatial and tem-poral markers, perspective, intonation units qua attentional frames, and vocabulary
A Toolkit for Impossibilities. Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell’s Digital Fiction and the Unnatural
Full text linkReview of Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell: Digital Fiction and the Unnatural. Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2021. (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative) 218 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1456-
Narration und Negation. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Textbeobachtung und Interpretation am Beispiel der Fokalisierungsfunktion negativer Deixis in Theodor Storms Immensee (1851)
Full text linkThis article investigates the interplay between narration and negation. The first section examines various frameworks for conceptualizing the relationship, addressing not only seminal contributions from the structuralist period (e.g., Wolfgang Iser, Karlheinz Stierle) but also more recent conceptual work on narrative refusal (Robyn Warhol) and negative deixis (Jan Knobloch). Adding to this, the article incorporates insights from linguistic studies on negation. Using parameters such as intensity, scope, modality, and responsiveness, the negation repertoire within a text can be systematically characterized. By posing the heuristic question Who (or what) can negate whom (or what), with what scope and intensity?, this analytical approach can be linked to narratological theory. The utility of this framework is demonstrated through an analysis of Theodor Storm's paradigmatic novella Immensee (1851) which highlights the specific focalizational functions of negation in literary texts and also exemplifies how exactly negation intersects with narrative gaps
Erzähler- vs. Figurenperspektive: Eine empirische Untersuchung der relevanten strukturellen Faktoren für die Festlegung der Perspektive in der Erlebten Rede
Full text linkThis article presents the results of two studies examining the effects of different narrative situations on the interpretation of free indirect discourse (FID). Our test items featured either a neutral heterodiegetic narrator, a homodiegetic narrator, or an evaluative heterodiegetic narrator. Participants had to assign a thought expressed via FID to either the narrator or the protagonist featured in example text passage. The results revealed that only homodiegetic narrators influence the interpretation in favor of the narrator. We next tested whether this was due to a special status of the first-person or the narrator’s homodiegetic nature by incorporating a heterodiegetic narrator using first-person pronouns. The results showed no difference in interpretation between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators using first-person pronouns. In third-person narration, the protagonist was chosen significantly more often. Our studies thus demonstrate that first-person narration generally establishes the narrator as a prominent perspective-taker, regardless of their diegetic nature
Emotions and Words. Representing Emotions in Narrative
Full text linkThe classic view of the relation of words to emotion holds that emotions are preverbal, while the contemporary “psychological constructionist” view argues that labels create emotions out of inchoate affect. Literature reflects the classic view, yet the pervasive use of labels in narrative underscores the power of naming the “psychological constructionist” view implies. But literature aims to be vivid, and mere naming can seem dull or trite. A spectrum of techniques has arisen that allow writers to represent emotions without naming them. Emotions for which no names exist, however, present a challenge to representation. T.S. Eliot proposed the “objective correlative,” but found that not even an objective correlative is able to capture some emotions. This essay summarizes recent theories of emotion in neuroscience and psychology; it considers how this debate is applicable to an understanding of the representation of emotion in narrative; and it gives an overview of various ways in which emotion has been represented in narrative fiction. Finally, the article looks at some examples of autobiographers’ more or less successful efforts to represent unnamable emotions. Their efforts reveal a pressure to fall back on naming for the sake of communication and control. Moreover, the conciseness of naming is consistent with narrative telling
Narrative Constitution in the Medical Consultation. A Contribution to the Dynamics of Narrated Feelings in Factual Texts
Full text linkThis paper aims, ultimately, to make a contribution to the study of the narrative constitution of factual narratives, and, with that aim, it focuses on a particular subclass of an oral and interactional character: the illness narrative. To this end, on the basis of the analysis of a corpus produced in a public hospital in the southern Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Argentina), it proposes: 1. A brief historical-critical review of the main contributions to the reflection on the story / discourse dichotomy and the failed attempt to deconstruct it; 2. The hypothetical postulation of a different functioning of these two structural levels in factual and fictional autodiegetic narratives, and the pointing out of the central role of emotions in this respect, in a theoretical-methodological sense. 3. A partial model, devised for the analysis of medical consultations, which justifies the differentiation of two levels on the represented side (the what) and which seeks to account for the function of narrated feelings in the logic of co-narration that takes place in the doctor’s surgery