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“Where do you put Jesus in your thinking?”: Negotiating Belief in Book Clubs
Get PDFThis essay will explore the ways in which a literary author’s explicit encoding of belief impacts narrative interest. Borrowing analytical tools from the fields of narrative theory and pragmatic theology, this essay will analyze recorded book club discussions of Louise Erdrich’s novel Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). In particular, it will focus on the ways participants negotiated three themes they deemed contentious and ethically problematic in the novel: the descriptions of gender as performative and porous, saintliness or hagiography, and the promotion of hybrid religious practices. This content analysis of participants’ negotiations of the novel’s themes will help elucidate some of the ways in which literary discussion can provide a space for individuals to articulate and refine their personal beliefs
Von der Bezeugung zur narrativen Vergegenwärtigung.: Fokalisierung im Reisebuch des Syrers Ḥanna Dyāb (1764)
Get PDFTravelogues involve different truth claims, depending on whether their authors attempt on the one hand to convey received knowledge about entities and places, or on the other hand, present accounts of the traveler character’s own experiences. This study focuses on a travelogue from 1764 written by the Arabian Nights’ Syrian storyteller, Ḥanna Dyāb. Having written his travelogue more than 50 years after his trip to Paris, he evidently conceived of his narrative as a means to re-enact his experiences as a young traveler. To describe his particular self-staging in this autodiegetic narration “before fiction” (Paige 2011), I argue that an understanding of focalization as a graded visual mediation between the character’s inner life and the reader is needed. This approach helps one grasp how, with reference to Dyāb’s travelogue, truth is not something the traveler witnesses, but rather something the reader is invited to realize. I conclude that, with this shift from witnessing to visualization (Vergegenwärtigung), Dyāb’s travelogue fulfills a core function of literature
The Impact of Interactivity on Truth Claims in Life Stories
Get PDFAutobiographies, biographies, and documentary life stories all claim to tell a ‘true life story’. Yet each life story genre highlights different aspects of the truth. In autobiography, the personal subjective truth of self-identity is foregrounded. In biography, it is the seemingly objective truth about someone’s life asserted by another person, whose mediation introduces an element of subjectivity. In a documentary life story testimonial, the credibility of the objective truth presented is of utmost importance, but so is the subjective life experience that undergirds it. In this article we ask: How is interactivity exploited to construct the truth claims in interactive life stories across genres? By comparing three interactive nonfiction life stories – an autobiography, Fitting the Pattern (Wilks 2008), the biographical docugame The Cat and the Coup (Brinson / ValaNejad 2011), and the documentary Alma (Fougère / Dewever-Plana 2012) –, we explore how the aspects of truth most relevant to each life story genre are foregrounded using interactivity
How Do You Know an Allegory When You See One?
Get PDFGary Johnson: The Vitality of Allegory. Figural Narrative in Modern and Contempo-rary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2012. 296 pp. Hardcover USD 41.95. ISBN 978-081421182
Von sprachlichen Formen zu mentalen Räumen: Barbara Dancygier stellt ein kognitiv-linguistisches Beschreibungstool für die Analyse der Bedeutungsgenerierung in Erzähltexten vor
Get PDFBarbara Dancygier: The Language of Stories. A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012. 228 S. EUR 79,70. ISBN 978-1-107-00582-
“What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea?”: Some remarks towards a theory of historical narratology
Get PDFStarting with the narrator’s re-reading and interpretation of her own earlier diaries in Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, this essay explores several theoretical questions pertaining to historical narratology. The essay argues that historical narratology will work its way through several steps: 1) naming and describing specific innovations or transformations, 2) determining the functions of these changes, 3) identifying dynamic processes of change, 4) appraising the cultural meaning and significance of dynamic transformations, 5) suggesting causes (in conjunction with other discourses), and 6) presenting the findings in perspective views. However, these steps will not be pursued in a neat sequence, but will necessarily take place out of backward and forward movements, as a certain heuristic teleology cannot (and should not) be avoided
Hölzerne Bilder: mentale Modelle? Mittelalterliche Figuren als Gegenstand einer historischen Narratologie
Get PDFThe article attempts to make postclassical narrative theory productive for an analysis of characters in vernacular novels from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Viewing medieval characters as well as medieval mental constructs as modern, it focuses on the processes whereby characters are constituted from textual information. Using the Fortunatus (1509) as an example, the article shows that markedly different textual structures of presentation direct the inferences of the audience and (in particular) how recipients respond to characters in different ways
Narratives Verstehen
Get PDFBrigitte Rath: Narratives Verstehen. Entwurf eines narrativen Schemas. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2011. 216 S. EUR 24,-. ISBN 978-3-938808-99-3 Der Titel des Buches kündigt es an: Ausgangslage von Brigitte Raths Unternehmen ist nicht die Bestimmung von Texteigenschaften als Kennzeichen eines spezifischen Textgenres, sondern der Versuch, den Prozess des narrativen Verstehens als eine bestimmte Verstehensart zu modellieren. Das nötige Beschreibungsinstrument bietet der Schemabegriff der Kognitionspsychologie an, der für literaturwissenschaftliche Zwecke, spezifisch narratologische Fragen, weiterentwickelt wird. Der im ersten Kapitel erarbeitete Schemabegriff wird im zweiten Kapitel an einem Fallbeispiel (C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) hinsichtlich seiner Beschreibungs- und Erklärungskraft erprobt. Die so gewonnenen Einsichten werden im dritten Kapitel verallgemeinert, systematisiert und begründet – was in den Entwurf eines elaborierten narrativen Schemas mündet. Im Folgenden werden das erste und das dritte Kapitel des Buches genauer vorgestellt und am Ende diskutiert. Auf die Darstellung des Fallbeispiels wird verzichtet, die Lektüre des Kapitels wird jedoch allen wärmstens empfohlen, die Einblick in die praktische Anwendung des narrativen Schemas erhalten möchten