2nd International Colloquium of the FGN: "Narratology beyond Literary Criticism"



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		Abstracts of the Second International Colloquium "Narratology beyond Literary Criticism" —— Day 1, 21 November 2003 —— Ute E. Eisen (Heidelberg): The Narratological Fabric of the Gospels Probably no one will dispute that the Gospels are stories. That justifies, in fact necessitates the question: What are the characteristics of early Christian story (histoire), narrative (récit), and narrating (narration) in the Gospels? In what follows this question will be considered in two steps: 1. What is a Gospel? What were the methodological questions that shaped analysis of the Gospels in the 20th century? and 2. What constitutes narratology's urgent contribution to analysis of the Gospels? My thesis is that narratology's set of instruments is outstandingly well suited to unpack the structural moments, characteristics, and specifics of early Christian Gospel narratives. This in turn demonstrates the urgent need for the application of these instruments to Gospel study. 1. The genre "gospel" was regarded for nearly a century as the sole original genre that Christianity had contributed to ancient literature. In recent times this consensus has been shaken; in particular, the close relationship of the genre "gospel" to the genre "biography" has been convincingly demonstrated. A new consensus is emerging; it regards the Christian genre of "gospel" as a mixed genre composed of Old Testament hagiography and Hellenistic biography. This mixed genre arose in the first century and had already ceased development in the third century. The essential writings in this genre are the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). As far as scholarship is concerned, the analysis of the genre "gospel" was strongly shaped by the methods of source, genre, tradition, and redaction criticism, as will be briefly summarized below. (a) As regards source criticism, the debate (especially since the Enlightenment) over the question of the literary dependence of the Gospels reached a certain conclusion in the form of the so-called Two Source Theory, which has enjoyed a broad consensus. According to this theory, the Gospel of Mark is the oldest Gospel and served as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In addition, these two Gospels used a second source, which has been lost and can only be secondarily reconstructed: The Sayings Source Q. The source-critical location of the Gospel of John was far more complicated. Here, for a long time, the dominant opinion was that the Fourth Gospel was unacquainted with the Synoptic Gospels, and therefore could not have made use of them as sources. Affinities in individual traditions were explained as the result of oral transmission. This consensus has been increasingly called into question, but a preliminary conclusion to the discussion is not yet in sight. (b) In terms of genre, two principal distinctions have been made within the genre "gospel," namely between sayings material and narrative material. Furthermore, a large number of (sub)genres have been distinguished within these two groups: parables/similitudes, apophthegms or chreia, miracle stories, legends, etc. Both the overall genre of gospel and its sub-genres were studied in finest detail in the course of the 20th century, with precise definitions given to the corresponding traits of each genre and sub-genre. (c) In addition, the question of the traditions redacted in the Gospels and their (sub)genres was and is of central importance for Gospel analysis. Among the liveliest questions here are: Which traditions can be traced to the historical Jesus? and: What are the religious-historical contexts to which individual early Christian traditions can be traced? and finally: How were these modified in the course of their transmission? (d) Beginning with the individual traditions, analysis culminates in the question of the compositional principles of the Gospels, or the redactional reworking of the material by the authors of the Gospels. This question is, for the most part, considered under the aspects of history and theology. On the basis of synoptic comparisons, word statistics, and tradition-critical hypotheses, scholars attempt to demonstrate the specific, fundamental historical and theological tendencies in the individual Gospels and in their reworking of their materials and traditions. 2. In Gospels research, narrative-analytical categories have scarcely entered the picture, nor do they at present, as an analysis of voice(s) in the individual Synoptic Gospels, questions of mood (showing, telling, focalization), the distinction between story time and narrative time, the sequential ordering, duration or rhythm, and frequency of the narrative. In addition, at the level of story, to date scarcely any narrative-analytical categories in exegesis-such as the question of events and their hierarchizing (e.g., meta-events, à la Lotman), or the characterization of the figures in the narrated world-have been applied. In this presentation I will essay an exemplary comparison of the Gospels on three levels, narrating, narrative, and story. On the basis of the results of this comparison I will sketch some preliminary basic features of the characteristics of the Gospel narratives. In a prospect, these results will be applied to non-Christian texts belonging to the genre of biography. The goal is, on the one hand to demonstrate the urgent need to raise questions in terms of narratology within the framework of Gospels analysis, and on the other to formulate some initial theses regarding the characteristics of early Christian story, narrative and narrating. Daniel Fulda (Cologne): Selective History. Why and How Historicity Depends on Narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an Example My lecture has three parts. First, I sketch certain basic principles for the narratology of history in order to articulate the theoretical framework of my argumentation. Second, I ask what points of contact are possible between the narratology of history and the general narratology discussed in recent scholarship. Finally I offer a case study. The most controversial act of history-telling in the 1990s (in Germany), the so-called "Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) Exhibition", will serve to test the explanatory power of a narratological analysis which conceives history as the product of a quasi-readerly narrativization. I. History writing has been conceived as form of storytelling since Greek antiquity, which it is to say, for almost as long as it has existed or there has been a concept of it. On the contrary, the concept of narrative within contemporary narrativist history-theory is an epistemological concept. It concerns the relation of narration to disciplinary status of history writing and, beyond this, to what makes past events count as "history" in the first place. The second basic feature of narration was less noticed in the general discourse on narration of the eighties and nineties: namely, that the past first becomes history through narrative structuring. In this vein, it is important to note that the term "history" does not designate a structure which lies in the past itself, but rather represents a pattern for conceptualizing which provides us with the very capacity for seeing the "past," along with our present and expected future, in that specific genetic context familiar to us. "History" is not past events essentially, but rather becomes such when seen from a particular vantage point. With this in mind, I advanced the thesis in the mid-1990s that the understanding of history took on its narrative structure around the year 1800, and so under the influence of the aesthetic thinking of the Goethe period. The writing of "history" became possible at that time, because the sequence of events to be represented became understood as a great story of sorts, and historiography proper was likewise organized on the model of literary texts. History (Geschichte) is a product of stories (Geschichten), more exactly, of those texts which narrate Geschichte/n (stories and history). History is less written down (wird aufgeschrieben) than it is continuously composed (immer erst erschrieben). II. The words of the history to be composed resist the objectivistic error which contends that past events are in themselves "historical" (in the narrativist sense of continuous, directed, and intelligible). The words do not conform as well to the perception of the past within a schema of narration. In order to emphasize that history provides a pattern for thinking that allows reality to be observed in a specific ways, one must instead speak of "selective" history. Without in any way pitting composition (erschreiben) and selection (erlesen) against one another, I wish today to place the latter in the foreground. The fact that, in recent years, scholars have discussed the composition of history is understandable, given the increasing interest in the historiographical-analytical approach of research. The extant discourse does not suffice, however, from the perspective of either narrative theory or the theory of history. The (narrativizing) 'reading' or 'selection' of the past or of its representations is both more primary and more commonplace, since it is also practiced by those who merely receive history yet do not produce it. To foreground the narrativizing constitution of history in a quasi-readerly perception of the past is, moreover, to cohere with current trends in general narratology. As is well known, the classical structural analysis of texts has been supplemented for several years by questions about their communicative context or the cognitive presuppositions of narrativizing readings of them. Cognitive science postulates that our knowing (here understood in a comprehensive sense to include perceptions and utterances) is structured by schemata, scripts, and frames. These schemata process narrativity by means of a whole series of operations at different levels of textual comprehension. Moreover, the localization of cognitive schemata in an interchange between experience and expectation does much to facilitate a theoretical grasp of the narrativizing construction of history: "Stored in the memory, previous experiences form structured repertoires of expectations about current and emergent experiences." Molded by experiences, these expectations structure perceptions which are themselves stored in the treasury of experience. This recursivity or interchange befits exactly to the status as a pattern for thinking that history achieved 200 years ago: We perceive events as historical on the basis of "historical experiences"—which we experience, admittedly, in eminently mediated forms, including the form of readings—and construct further "historical experiences" from them. The object and mode of perception here mutually support one another, such that they can only be differentiated with explicitly theoretical effort. III. After the Reunification, the single greatest event within German historical culture was without doubt the so-called "Wehrmacht Exhibition". Developed by the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, it was displayed in 33 German and Austrian cities from 1995 to 1999. It attracted not only 800,000 visitors, but also stimulated deep and lasting discussions, in the public and the ---private spheres, and among both politicians and historians. Applied to my question about the narrativizing construction of history, these external data already show the high degree to which "history" is a product of reception. Above all, the visitors themselves made visible, in working their way from document to document, and either standing, squatting, or bending as required by the various locations of the texts on display—that history must always and as a matter of principle be selected (erlesen), that it can no easy or simple way merely be read (gelesen). Extensive interviews have clarified the way that the exhibition was perceived. Taken alongside journalistic and other public reactions, these provide a unique corpus of documents for understanding the reception of the exhibition, which make it possible to establish empirically the theoretical turn sketched above to the narrativizing achievement of the recipient. My thesis is that the controversy surrounding the exhibition owes essentially to the fact that the structure of its discourse impedes the narrativization, which the viewer must undertake, in order to perceive the presented events as history. It was clear, even to the most unwilling viewer, that the exhibition concerned events in history. The structure of its presentation and so of the events it represented was not narrative, but judicative, and for this reason hindered history-constituting narrativization on the part of the viewer. One criticism occurs again and again in the interviews of visitors to the exhibition: namely, that the exhibition suppressed evidence for "the other side": e.g., the "normal" conduct of the war, the vast number of soldiers involved, the learning curve completed after the war, etc. At the level of personal experience, we see here a wholeness being reclaimed which is a distinctive feature of the modern, narratively-generated concept of history. What skeptical visitors of the exhibition were missing, even if they lacked a clear concept of it, was some measure of narrativity. This entirely clear from the fact that they responded to it by telling autobiographical stories. They began, that is to say, to narrate, if not their own experiences, those of their fathers or other relatives. Narrative, as schema or complex of schemata, was at work here; it became palpable for us (or any rate its effects were palpable); narrative is the scheme which a recipient uses to organize historical experience. Vyacheslav Yevseyev (Almati): Measuring Narrativity in Literary Texts In his paper "The two principles of narrative" Todorov (1971: 38) differentiates "description" and "narrative" as the two principal dimensions of literary texts; he emphasizes, in addition, that most narrative texts contain both narrative and descriptive elements, as a rule: "Description by itself is not enough to constitute a narrative, but narrative itself does not exclude description". As the proportion of narrative and non-narrative elements can vary from text to text considerably, it is obvious that texts differ in their narrativity. Prince (1982: 146) points out that "a passage where signs of the narrated […] are more numerous than signs of the narrating […] should have a higher degree of narrativity than a passage where the reverse is true". But how can the degree of narrativity of a literary text be m e a s u r e d ? Apart from attempts to characterize degrees of narrativity heuristically, until now no reliable method for quantifying this parameter seems to have been proposed. To fill the gap, Yevseyev (2003: 181-201) puts forward a statistical method for measuring narrativity in literary texts. The gist of this method consists in identifying and counting text segments where two events, i.e. changes of situation (in opposition to states, which do not presuppose any situation changes and thus constitute description) are encoded in a coherent syntactic structure. In contrast to researchers which equate the minimal narrative with just one change in a state of affaires, one transition from the initial state to the final state (Danto 1965: 252; Genette 1983: 14-15), the author of this colloquium contribution shares the opinion that the minimal / molecular narrative is given in "a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered" (Labov 1972: 360). On the assumption that the minimal narrative is represented by two events not coinciding temporally, narrativity can be defined in terms of movement of the reference time point over a section of the time line. Explicitly showing this movement by placing two "event-clauses" in a coherent syntactic structure based either on coordination or subordination can be regarded as the elementary instance of narrating. Jakobson (1957/1971: 135) designated the coherence of two events as "taxis" and included this phenomenon, besides tense and aspect, in the system of verbal categories. Grammatical aspectology (Bondarko 1991) developed Jakobson's idea of taxis further and achieved significant results in description of its functions. The crucial importance of an interdisciplinary cooperation between narratology and aspectology is evident from the fact that the difference between states (constituents of description) and events (constituents of narrative) can be exactly detected only with methods of aspectology, which identifies states as "imperfective / atelic situations" and events as "perfective / telic situations". Following the idea that the microstructure of the narrative is constituted by combination of two events expressed in a coherent syntactic structure, Yevseyev proposes the notion of taxis-relevant narrative strategy ("taxisbezogene Erzaehlstrategie"). That denotes, therefore, the tendency of the speaker or writer either (1) to express events regularly in coherent syntactic structures, so that temporal relations between the constituents of a narrative chain are accentuated (many taxis units appear), or (2) to "scatter" clauses, expressing events, on the text surface, i.e. to separate them from each other by non-narrative clauses, so that temporal connection of the narrative remains implicit (scarcely any taxis units can be found). Thus, if a speaker or writer frequently uses taxis units in relation to a text passage of a certain length, e.g. 1000 characters, then this text can be regarded as highly narrative; the less recurrent taxis units are, the less narrative is the text. The average frequency of taxis units in a literary text may be considered as a numerical characteristic of its narrativity. The calculations, which were carried out on the basis of nearly 80 German and Russian texts from different historical periods of the two languages (from Song of Hildebrand to Grass's The Tin Drum and from Nestor's Chronicle to Solzhenicyn's Cancer Ward), leaded to values forming a continuum from 0,3 up to 3 taxis units per 1000 characters. One of the most important results of the statistical evaluation is that "larger" narrative forms, especially modern genres of occidental literary tradition such as novels, are as a rule less narrative than "smaller" narrative forms, especially traditional oral genres such as folk tales. This data can be plausibly explained by the fact that the exhaustion of the "narrative potential" of a literary text, especially of a lengthy one, would have negative effect on its aesthetic function; therefore the "additional" textual space is primarily used for non-narrative elements such as descriptions, dialogues etc. Only in "narrative passages", i.e. segments of literary texts where taxis units are particularly dense, the values can reach the mark of 15 taxis units per 1000 characters. In non-authentic narrative passages consisting mostly of sentences with subject and predicate, the narrativity values can reach 30 and more (e.g. "No sooner said than done": 1 taxis unit per 24 characters = 41,7 taxis units per 1000 characters). The extremely high narrativity of such texts is only possible on account of their extreme shortness. Although the comparison of German and Russian texts from the point of view of "taxis narrativity" is only partially possible (according to my rough calculation, narrative texts in Modern German are on average 20 per cent longer than their equivalents in Modern Russian) it was possible to sketch a general scheme of narrativity values: 0,3 – narrative threshold for realistic prose; 0,5 to 1,0 – typical for novels; 2 to 3 – typical for chronicles, biographies, short stories, fairy tales; 10 to 15 – narrative passages found in authentic texts; 20 and more – fictitious narrative passages. This colloquium contribution, which connects narratology, aspectology and statistical linguistics in the sense of interdisciplinary approach, aims at the discussion of the method outlined above, in order to verify its importance and validity for narratological research. References: Bondarko, Alexander 1991. Functional grammar: a field approach. Amsterdam u.a.: Benjamins. Danto, Arthur C. 1965. Analytical philosophy of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Genette, Gérard 1983. Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil. Jakobson, Roman 1957/1971. Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb. In: R. Jakobson. Selected writings. Vol. 2. Word and language. The Hague u.a.: Mouton. 1971. S. 130-147. Labov, William 1972. Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English vernacular. Oxford: Blackwell. Prince, Gerald. Narratology. The form an functioning of narrative. Berlin etc.: Mouton Todorov, Tzvetan 1971. The two principles of narrative. In: Diacritics (1971: Fall). S. 37-44. Yevseyev, Vyacheslav 2003. Ikonizitat und Taxis. Ein Beitrag zur Naturlichkeitstheorie am Beispiel des Deutschen und Russischen. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Michael Bamberg, Worcester / MA: Narrative, Identities, and the Interactional Construction of Context In my presentation I will break down the spatial metaphor of the 'turn to narrative' in the social sciences and delineate three orientations or movements: In terms of a first stride, the turn to narrative in the social sciences was an attempt to move away from more traditional methods in personality and identity research that used (and still use) predominantly quantitative measures (such as scales) to assess people's internalized values and attitudes, as in the form of a personality/character inventory. It may be important to note that this move happened at the height of the ("first") 'cognitive revolution' and was escorted by cognitive models of stories and story understanding in the form of 'story grammars'. One of the cognitive underpinnings was that the human mind came (or is) equipped (universally) with the schemes that organize (social) reality in the form of 'story schemata' <"scripts, plans + goals" and 'prototype-categorical expectations'>. Within this more general cognitive, information processing orientation, language is targeted (and analytically made use of) mainly in its ideational, referential (semantic) function and stories are mainly used as tools to do memory research or research into other capacities of 'the human mind'. A different orientation (though in some strange ways often in cahoots with the 'information processing' interest in narrative <in particular where I grew up academically in the late 70's>) emerged out of anthropology and sociology (in particular ethnography <and here especially the 'ethnography of speaking'>) and was accompanied by the turns to discourse, pragmatics, interpretation and subjectivity. In contrast to the cognitive strides and interest in narrative, this orientation saw stories as ways of storing and transmitting cultural, historical, and personal experience and as such could deliver entry into such historical, cultural or personal realms. Language and language analysis within this orientation were deeply tied to cultural practices, where they gained their function, value, and meaning. Some proponents of this movement went so far to give 'narratives' a privileged status (among other discourse modes), because of what is called the 'unity of time, space + charactership' in Literary Studies, and, as others argues, because in 'narratives' the personal horizon merges with the social (and vice versa). --- It is out of this orientation that a number of new trends could emerge more recently, such as the 'Life History approach' with its close relative in the form of psychoanalytic 'In-Depth Interviewing', 'Narrative Psychology', 'Narrative Therapy', and the like. In a third orientation - one that is best characterized as the 'discursive turn' or 'turn to discourse and interaction'- 'narrative' is approached and made use of very differently. Grounded in ethnomethodology, and its off-spring 'conversation analysis', discursive activities are seen to be interactively accomplished by following the 'methods' that people use to "do" this kind of business. Here, the study of how interactants accomplish (jointly) the telling of a narrative is at the forefront of the analytical engagement. Let me illustrate this point by drawing briefly on a clip (that most of us know) from the movie 'Stand By Me' in which four boys sit around a campfire, sharing a story about another kid named Davie Hogan, resulting in a "barf-o-rama" (see: http://www.clarku.edu/~mbamberg/positioning_and_identity.htm). Approaching stories along these lines brings out the situatedness and interactional embeddedness as extremely relevant for the structure and the content of the story itself. More generally speaking, this approach builds on the interactive function of language and has resulted in interesting new trends such as 'Critical Discourse Analysis' and 'Discursive Psychology'. It is on the grounds of such considerations that the analysis of narrative discourse as locally constituting individual and social identities becomes highly relevant. No longer is identity viewed as anything essential (as a resource in the mind or the body of the person), but rather as constantly changing and constantly rebuilt in everyday, mundane discursive/interactive activities. In my presentation I will lay out these three different strands of narrative analysis in slightly more detail and try to distill some insights that could be taken out of these three orientations for the topic of 'doing' Literary Studies. I am thinking (at this point) in particular of a re-consideration of the notion of 'context'. While thus far the notion of 'context' has mostly been viewed as 'givens' that the analyst has (privileged) access to, and narrative activity as embedded in (and to a large degree constrained if not formed by) this context, it may be more useful to see context as constructed – or even better: as something that is interactively accomplished. --- While this has been an exciting and eye-opening uncovery in the business of doing narrative analysis in the social sciences, particularly within gender and identity analysis, I am wondering how this could impact Literary Studies in a similarly productive way. References: Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story. Toward an annihilation of language and history. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. --- http://www.clarku.edu/~mbamberg/Encyclopedia_Entries.htm --- http://www.clarku.edu/~mbamberg/end_of_story.htm Wolfgang Kraus (Munich): The Eye of the Beholder: Social Psychology's View of Narratology and its Methods This paper outlines the development of the narratological discourse in social psychology from a social psychological perspective. It draws on the use of narratological concepts in empirical social psychological research (Kraus 2000; Keupp et al. 2002). Special emphasis is given to the question, what narratological methodology has to offer to social psychology? Discussions surrounding the"narrative turn" have strongly promoted narratology's entrance into the field of personal and social psychology. Especially with regard to self and identity theory, narrative concepts have been welcomed by social psychology, even if mainly in the US-American discourse (e. g. Jerome Bruner; Theodore Sarbin; Kenneth Gergen). A narrative psychology seemed to offer a way out of the long conflict over substantialistic identity concepts. By linking the homo narrans to the discursive social worlds of meaning making, social psychology's core interest in the self-alter-relationship could thus be preserved, while opening up a new field for theoretical development and empirical research. From the point of view of social psychology the main interest lay in the question of identity construction in a changing social world, which social theorists came to analyse as "late" (Anthony Giddens), "post-modern" (Zygmunt Bauman) or "reflexive modernity" (Ulrich Beck). Narrativity as a core concept in many of the newer identity theories seems to offer many advantages. It does away with the substantialist heritage in psychology by being easily related to a constructivist world view. It proposes concepts for the developmental part of identity, i. e. the question, how identity can be thought as open and coherent/continuous at the same time, by offering a whole array of analytical categories, which help to understand the various structural aspects of a story and their communicative impact. Furthermore, narratology concurs with identity construction as a process, which is inherently social, which cannot be conceived without the "other", by insisting on the "reader" as co-constructor of the story. Narratology can also be easily linked to a theory of human action, because this idea has been part of its heritage since Aristoteles. And finally it certainly can contribute to answering the question, how cultural stereotypes, signs, ready-mades provide a foundation for the individual efforts of personal "meaning making" (Jerome Bruner). Wasn't that the question which kept narratologists busy for quite some time since Vladimir Propp? The concept of narrativity, however, is only on first sight an easy way out of the puzzle of identity construction in our "disembedded" societies. The question "who tells?" is indeed an intriguing one. As deconstructionists argue, it may be the telling which produces this "who". And it may be the construction of authorship, which merits all our interest and critical analysis. So, the "easy way out" on first sight has lead - via some fundamental questions - to an enrichment of the discussion on authorship and the question of narrative closure as an ideological figure. This is a discussion which can be easily paralleled to the theories on "identity politics". Narratology, thus, was (and is) many things to many people in social psychology. While on the one hand the dissolution of traditional identity concepts has led to a belated discovery of a "mild" version of structural narratology, on the other hand a resonance of deconstructive efforts in narratology with postmodernist concepts in psychology can be noted. From a methodological point of view, however, this tissue of connections and undercurrents seems rather weak. In general it can be said, that narratology in social psychology is more appreciated as a theoretical focus than as a methodological device. This may be due to the fact that much of narratology's discussion is focused on literary narratives and thus needs some translation/adaptation to the field of a more "natural" narratology. Many other arguments can be brought forward to prove this impression. On first sight, the most important one seems to be, that narratologists focus on the story, while social psychologists are interested in the world "behind" the story and in the storyteller: Narrative as a vehicle for experiencing the "real" world and getting to know an individual, autodiegetic author. This, certainly, is only a very simplistic view of these different points of view. A much richer field of exchange may be found in the thinking about the social construction of realities and their relationship to concepts of fictionality/virtuality. Narratologists as specialists for fictional worlds have made interesting contributions to this thinking. Another field of exchange could be the analysis of how various lifeworlds or realities are narratively bound together, i. e. separated, combined, opposed or "contaminated" ( c. f. the discussion about metalepse). As social psychology has come to deconstruct totalizing concepts in favour of models of hybridisation, dissonance, and reflexive forms of coherence, it is also in need of suitable concepts for the analysis the discursive production of the individuals. The same argument is true for the narratological discussion of the "who talks"-question. With regard to narrative identity the task is to explore the "backstage view on the first person singular" (Philippe Lejeune). There as well, the narratological toolbox seems to offer an elaborate choice of analytical means. This, finally, is true also for the question of cultural ready-mades within individual narratives. Especially when integrating the analysis of media production, narratology can contribute to social psychology's analysis of individual discursive sense making efforts. References Kraus, W. (2000). Das erzählte Selbst. Die narrative Konstruktion von Identität in der Spätmoderne. [The narrated self. The narrative construction of identity in late modernity]. Herbolzheim: Centaurus (2nd ed.) Kraus, W. (2002). Falsche Freunde. Radikale Pluralisierung und der Ansatz einer narrativen Identität. [False friends. Radical pluralization and the concept of narrative identity]. In Jürgen Straub & Joachim Renn (Hg.), Transitorische Identität. Der Prozesscharakter des modernen Selbst, S. 159-186. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Harald Weilnböck (Berlin): Psychotrauma, Narration and the Literary Public In what ways and under which circumstances can narration assist in the therapeutic "working through" of traumatic experience? How can narration – in therapeutic settings as well as in the public sphere of literary narration – be conceptualized in order to better describe and understand the interactive processes that do eliviate emotional suffering? My approach rests on the theoretical premises of Psychotraumatology – the science of mental injury –, as it has been formulated as an academic research discipline in Germany only very recently (Fischer/Riedesser: Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie, 1998). Psychotraumatology draws from sources of developmental and cognitive psychology, medicine/neurosciences and psychotherapy studies. Of central importance is the concept of "information trauma", which states that it is the linguistic and/or narrational input into a human psyche which causes the traumatic impact. It is the (self-)narration in its psycho-affective dimension which injurs and becomes unspeakable. And yet, narration before a significant other is the only means that can contribute to reduce and eleviate the injury. Further concepts which I will use are "trauma-compensatory pattern" (traumakompensatorisches Schema), "repeated traumatisation" (Traumasucht), "screen-empathy" (Deck-Empathie), therapeutic working through, complementary and concording (counter-)transference. From the perspective of philological narratology I will argue the necessity to formulate a concept of "trauma association" and "empathy resonance" between a text/author and it's readers. These concepts refere to the fact that the specific trauma which is dealt with in the text brings up personal trauma associations in the reader. Although they might be of a different kind and less serious in magnitude, there is no empathic listening to narration without the reader being connected to his trauma associations. Presenting two examples I will argue that "trauma association" is crucial not only for therapeutic settings but also for literary/media interaction. My first example is a text of contemporary literature, Judith Hermann's "Hunter Tompson Musik", which does not contain explixit narrative information about the nature of the trauma but presents a protagonist who is characterized by psychotraumatic symptoms. The protagonist's encounter with a young woman fails and can be shown to have retraumatizing effects for both figures. However, narrative analysis reveals that the text – on account of his formal structure – supports the reader's working through of the resonant traumatic experience. The text does so by constructing subtle inconsistencies within the perspectiv of the third person narrator thus fascilitating the build-up of empathy in the reader. My second example is a sequence of James Moll's non-fiction film "The Last Days", which – produced by the Steven Spielberg Foundation – presents extensive interviews with child Shoah survivors conducted on a trip back to their original home towns in Hungary an to the concentration camps. The film's narrations present themselves as documentary, which however realizes it's own. The film analysis can show that the films's narrativ organization as well as ist aesthetic mis-en-scene works in an way that enhances the viewer's identification with an african american World War II officer who in an impulse of uncontrolable rage kills the commander of Dachau. The close reading of the narrativ makes clear how this identification serves the function to project affects of reactiv anger/rage onto this officer in order to deflect from the collective traumatic issue of the superession of african american citicans in US post war society – thus silencing a major issue of violence and trauma in recent national history. The narrativ structure of Moll's film offers the american viewer a deal: He offers not to speak of the violence/trauma of the african american population and in turn demands respect and empathy for the violence/trauma of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. However, the capacity of the collectiv "working through" of trauma via literary and filmic narration is severely restricted if the individual and social "trauma association" is suppressed. It rather causes a defensive trauma identification. Alan Palmer (London): Cognitive Frames and Fictional Minds This paper is based on four basic assumptions: 1. Narratology has neglected the whole minds of fictional characters in action by giving undue emphasis to the private, passive, solitary and highly verbalized aspects of thought at the expense of all the other types of mental functioning. 2. We should make use of what I call the parallel discourses on real minds, such as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, in studying the whole of the social mind in action in the novel, because these real-mind disciplines contain a very different kind of picture of consciousness from that provided by narrative theory. 3. The constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work, because narrative is, in essence, the presentation of fictional mental functioning. 4. The study of fictional minds should be established as a clearly defined and discrete subject area in its own right within narrative theory. Cognitive frames are knowledge structures that capture the essence of concepts or stereotypical situations (for example, being in a living room or going to a restaurant) by clustering together all the information relevant to these situations. This includes information about how to use the frame, information about expectations (which may turn out to be wrong), information about what to do if expectations are not confirmed, and so on. Cognitive frames enable readers to comprehend the fictional minds that are contained in narrative texts. In particular, we able to follow the workings of characters' minds by applying what I call the continuing consciousness frame. This key cognitive frame is concerned with the ascription of consciousness to narrative agents. The work that we put into constructing other real minds prepares us, as readers, for the work of constructing fictional minds. Because fictional beings are necessarily incomplete, cognitive frames are required to fill the gaps in the storyworld and provide the presuppositions that enable the reader to construct continually conscious minds from the text. The processing strategies that are used by readers to infer characters' inner lives are a central way in which structure is imputed to strings of events. The reader collects together all of the isolated references to a specific proper name in a particular text and constructs a consciousness that continues in the spaces between the various mentions of that character. The reader strategy is to join up the dots. The reading process is very creative in constructing coherent and continuous fictional consciousnesses from what is often a bare minimum of information. A key tool for the study of fictional minds is Marie-Laure Ryan's notion of embedded narratives, which I am extending by using it to mean the whole of a character's mind in action: the total perceptual and cognitive viewpoint, ideological worldview, memories of the past, and the set of beliefs, desires, intentions, motives, and plans for the future of each character in the story as presented in the discourse. It is a narrative because it is the story of the novel as seen from the limited, aspectual point of view of a single character. The use of the term embedded narratives is intended to convey the point that the reader has available a wide range of information with which to make and then revise judgments about characters' minds. The results of an analysis of a single fictional mind can, in turn, be enmeshed into analyses of the other minds in the storyworld, with their own embedded narratives. The sum of these embedded narratives forms the plot of the novel. In this way, a complete picture of an aspectual, subjectively experienced storyworld results. The storyworld is aspectual in the sense that its characters can only ever experience it from a particular perceptual and cognitive aspect at any one time. The continuing consciousness frame is the means by which we are able to construct fictional minds; embedded narratives are the result of that construction. They are the product of the application of the continuing consciousness frame to the discourse. Possible worlds theorists argue that fictional entities are inherently incomplete because it is impossible to construct a fictional object by specifying its characteristics and relations in every detail. By contrast, it is assumed that it is, in theory, possible to specify real objects in this way. But it is implausible to say that it is possible to specify in every detail the characteristics and relations of real minds. The relative determinacies and indeterminacies of real minds and of fictional minds are, in many significant respects, quite similar. The reader can cope with the gaps in the continuing consciousnesses of fictional minds because, in the real world, we experience gaps in other, real minds too. From an aspectual point of view, another mind is sometimes present to us (when we are with that person) and sometimes absent. Our real-world cognitive frame enables us to construct a continuing consciousness for the absent person. Real absences equate to fictional gaps. I conclude by referring briefly to three of the subframes of the continuing consciousness frame: The relationship between fictional thought and fictional action. The distinction between thought and action is not as clear-cut as narrative theorists have assumed, because action descriptions often clearly identify the accompanying mental processes. Intermental thought, or shared, group or joint thinking. This phenomenon reflects the considerable extent to which our thought is public and social in nature. Much of our cognition, action and even identity is socially situated or distributed amongst other individuals. Doubly embedded narratives: the fact that versions of characters exist within the minds of other characters. These subframes utilize fundamental aspects of our real-world knowledge of the mental functioning both of ourselves and of others. They are certainly not the only subframes, but they are highlighted because they are important facets of the whole of the social mind in action. ——- Day 2, 22 November 2003 —— Marie-Laure Ryan (Bellvue, Colorado): Transmedial Narratology and Concepts of Narrative Early narratologists (Bremond, Todorov, Barthes) conceived narrative as a phenomenon that transcends individual media. Yet "classical" narratology has largely developed as the study of literary fiction, and many of the definitions of narrative that have been offered presuppose language as the supporting medium. These definitions are inadequate for the project of a transmedial narratology; yet without a unifying concept of narrative, this project would lack any solid theoretical foundation. In this paper, I propose to revisit the concept of narrative and make it compatible with a transmedial expansion of narratology. This concept will be developed against the background of three positions that I regard as unproductive: The exclusive language-centered approach. In this position, one adopts a language-based definition, such as "narrative is an act of storytelling adressed by a narrator to a narratee," and one uses it as a criterion for denying narrativity to artifacts that do not fulfill the necessary conditions. Texts without overt narrators, such as drama, or texts that do not represent events retrospectively, such as computer games, are excluded from narratological investigations. The inclusive language-centered approach. Here again the language-based definitions mentioned above are taken as central, but instead of serving as a criterion for dismissing certain texts as non-narrative, they are used as a model for the analysis of non-verbal texts. In contrast to the first, this second approach accepts the possibility of transmedial narratology, but only if predominantly visual or aural texts can be fitted into the verbal mold, for instance by analyzing drama or movies in terms of the famous structure "author - implied author - narrator - naratee - implied spectator - spectator." The doctrine of radical medial relativism. Here media are regarded as self-contained systems of signs, and their resources as incommensurable with the resources of other media. Just as two languages cannot convey the same semantic values under the doctrine of linguistic relativism, two different media cannot convey similar meanings or use similar devices under the doctrine of medial relativism. This view comes in a strong and a weak form. In the strong form, the signified cannot be separated from the signifier. Since a transmedial concept of narrative presupposes such a distinction, this position kills in the egg the project of transmedial narratology. In its weaker form, medial relativism accepts common meanings but insists on the uniqueness of the expressive resources of each medium. This means that the analytical toolbox of narratology must be rebuilt from scratch for every new medium. This approach ignores the fact that the conceptual tools of verbal narratology are often borrowed from other media (theme from music, perspective from painting, camera-eye narration from the cinema). The only alternative to these three positions is to ground transmedial narratology in a medium-free concept of narrative. According to a fairly uncontroversial, though rudimentary definition, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events. (H. Porter Abbott, 12). Since representation is not a medium-specific concept, this definition provides a useful starting point. It tells us that narrative is a signifier of a variable nature that calls to mind a meaning – or signified – of a fixed nature. Though narrative involves two components, signifier and signified, the transmedial identity of narrative lies therefore entirely in the signified. This means that narrative is a certain type of mental image, or cognitive construct which can be isolated from the stimuli that trigger its construction. This mental image will be defined through the following features: 1. Narrative must evoke a world populated with individuated agents (characters) and objects. (Spatial extension.) 2. This world must undergo changes of state that are caused by physical events: either accidents ("happenings") or deliberate human actions. (Temporal extension.) 3. The physical events must be connected by a network of goals, plans, causal relations, and psychological motivations which gives them coherence and intelligibility and turns them into a plot. (Mental extension) Though narrative as artifact requires both signifier and signified, i.e. both discourse and story, narrative as mental image can be formed in response to stimuli which are not material representations produced by humans. We may for instance form stories in our mind in response to life itself. While life is not a narrative, its ability to inspire the cognitive construct defined above – let me call it narrative script – means that it occasionally possesses a quality that we may call "narrativity." The property of "being" a narrative can be predicated of any semiotic object produced with the intent to evoke a narrative script in the mind of the receiver. "Having narrativity," on the other hand, means being able to evoke such a script. In addition to life itself, pictures, music or dance can have narrativity without being narratives in a literal sense. Both types of phenomena fall within the concerns of transmedial narratology. A medium-free definition of narrative does not mean, however, that all media are equally adept at conveying the cognitive image in question. The conditions of narrativity can only be spelled out in language, and language remains the only way to make completely explicit the relations listed under 3. But there are other ways to call narrative constructs to mind than explicitly representing the causal and motivational network of the plot. If narratology is to expand into a medium-free model, the first step to be taken is to recognize other narrative modes, this is to say, other ways of evoking narrative scripts than the standard verbal situation of telling somebody else that something happened, with the assumption that the addressee is not already aware of the events. This paper will propose a list of modes that includes the pairs listed below. In each case the left term can be regarded as the unmarked case, because the texts that present this feature will be much more widely accepted as narrative (at least by theorists) than the texts that implement the right-hand category: Diegetic / Mimetic Autonomous / Illustrative (or ancillary) Receptive / Participatory Determinate / Indeterminate (or actual / virtual) Literal / Metaphorical One of the major problems faced by transmedial narratology is to reconcile the centrality of language with the original contributions made by other media. This means recognizing that narrative is not just the wireframe plot sketched by the definition proposed above, but the expansion of this wireframe into a total imaginative experience, a spatio-temporal world to which we react both intellectually and emotionally. Though verbal narrative offers the most balanced and diverse expansion of the wireframe, other media can outdo language in their expansion of one of its particular dimensions. Douglass Seaton (Tallahassee, Florida): Narrative in Music: The Case of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata Critical theory in music has recently debated the possibility of musical narrative. Doubts have been raised about musical narratology on the basis of music's supposedly abstract material, the impossibility of a past tense in music, and other grounds. Nevertheless, narrativity can be demonstrated even in purely instrumental musical works, and indeed it constitutes a defining factor for musical Romanticism. This paper argues that, entirely apart from literary content, a musical work can satisfy the two requirements of narrative that transcend artistic medium: plot and voice. Plot is established in instrumental music of the Classic-Romantic era by the definition of character through rhythmic/melodic identities and the articulation of action through harmonic patterns of stability, rising tension, climax, and resolution. Voice is created in various ways, sometimes embodied in musical forms but often, too, in musical behaviors surrounding the performance and hearing of a work, or in reception. Beethoven's Piano Sonata in D Minor, op. 31 no. 2, the "Tempest Sonata," demonstrates these factors. The first movement employs the standard plot resources commonly identified as "sonata form," but it also departs from the norm to create an analytically vexed situation in which the functions of character within the plot remain uncertain. Beyond its thematic and harmonic plot outline the movement introduces a striking passage of recitative, a style "extra-generic" to the piano sonata. Entering at the moment when tension might be resolved and uncertainties clarified, this intruding "voice" has the effect of commentary on the plot itself, constituting a level of discourse that contrasts with the movement's main action. Narratology must also seek insight beyond the work itself. Equally intriguing is another narrative about the sonata, the report of Beethoven's amanuensis Anton Schindler in his highly unreliable memoirs of the composer, which forms the source of the reference to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in relation to op. 31 no. 2: Schindler asked Beethoven for the "key" to this sonata, and Beethoven responded that he should read "The Tempest". Although almost certainly untrue, Schindler's story engages the D-minor Sonata narratologically on two levels. First, it contributes to the mythology of Beethoven's persona, which has undergirded assumptions about the narrative voice for Beethoven's music since his own time. It further suggests (possibly in Beethoven's own mind, if Schindler's report has any basis in an actual event) a connection between the "composer's voice" and Shakespeare's Prospero, which turns out after all to offer a hermeneutic clue to the recitative's intrusion into the music of the sonata. In summary, then, this presentation begins by laying out definitions and models to support the possibility of musical narrative. Analysis of the Tempest Sonata's first movement illustrates how narrativity can operate in a musical work. Examination of a presumably fictitious story about the composer demonstrates how mythology comes into play as a determinant of authorial persona for a musical narrative. The return from that story to the music, finally, hermeneutically connects the extramusically constructed narrative voice to the "voiced" passage within the music. Britta Neitzel (Berlin): Implied Author and Creator – Notions of Authorship in Computer Games By means of interactive media, the borders of Narratology can be mapped and the scope and the meaning of its terms and methods can be discussed. This is especially evident in the case of interactive media based on visual interfaces, such as computer games. These intersect with basic narratological terms in several ways. The three basic levels of the narrative that are affected are: - The level of the discourse which changes from a textual to a visual presentation – this change is widely discussed in Film Studies (see e.g. Bordwell, Chatman, Gunning, Joost, Gaudreault), - The level of narration, since in computer games the recipient is not only given an interpretative function but also explorative and configurative functions (see Aarseth). - This in turn effects the story (histoire), because the actual sequences of a story are laid down during the course of the game, and a range of possibilities is given in the programme which functions as a pre-scription for the actual selection of events. One of the biggest differences between games and narratives touches the level of narration. It lies in the way the recipient and player, respectively, take part in the narrative or game, which incorporates the issue of the author of the narrative or the game: In the computer game, a concrete order of events is established by the player in the course of playing the game. S/he is responsible for creating the plot. The explorative and configurative functions a player carries out are necessary for every game and their effects are restricted to the plot. The player chooses from possibilities given by the program and transfers them to the process of play, and so places a text-space in a time. By constantly inputting information throughout the game, the player prompts the computer to process the sequence of events. It is only in the course of play that possible plots are actualized, individual objects combined with one another, actions produced and brought into chronological order. The program itself does not contain a chronology of events, rather, it organizes possible sequential and causal relationships in algorithms, object definitions and databases. A potential narrative portrayal first arises during the game, only then chains of actions are formed. A game can only be considered as a narrative when it is actually played. Hence, the process of playing and the actions of the player are integral constituents of the game and a possible narrative. This leads to a concept of "shared authorship". By carrying out the explorative and configurative functions the player could be described as a co-author, as it is s/he who ultimately determines what comes to pass. However, this would overrate the role of the player, as s/he is not an equal co-author. I would much prefer to adopt the term implied author from literary theory to define the player's function as an author implied by the game. The implied author isn't the only authority responsible for production of the game. Another narrative instance, which I'd like to call the implied creator, has superiority. The implied creator is responsible for forming the virtual world, that is, for the setting, the characters and the happenings in this world. Among the elements laid down by the implied creator are also the characteristics of the avatars, e. g. their looks and modes of taking action, as well as hindrances and restrictions to action. The implied creator makes the initial selection out of all the possibilities imaginable by first presenting them as options in the program. From these the implied author, in a second stage of selection, can choose. The paper will consider the different functions of the implied author and creator, and the way these instances are presented in the game during the course of the play or narration, respectively. As examples I will use the text-adventure (Zork), the action-adventure (Tomb Raider) and the adventure game (Silent Hill). Starting from the text-adventure I will discuss the narrative situations established in these games, especially in respect to the narrator as the textual representation of the implied author. Here again, the interpretation of a computer game as narrative comes to its limitations. To introduce the concept of a narrator in the game, the narrator has to be the representation of the implied author. But the implied author does not show itself in the game through narrating the story but through the carrying out of certain actions. A story in the game is actualized by an avatar's walking, running and jumping, which then creates a plot, a series of events. This can be compared with the act of narration according to de Certeau: "The act of walking is for the urban system what the utterance (the speech-act) is for language or for formulated statements" (de Certeau 1980, 189). It is only by this metaphorical transfer that a narrator can be made out in the game. In addition to the transfer of narratological concepts to the subject of computer games I especially like to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of modelling the process of playing in computer games as a process of narrating. References Aarseth, Espen J. (1997) Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bordwell, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Routledge. Certeau, Michel de (1988) Die Kunst des Handelns, Berlin: Merve 1988 (org.: L'invention quotidien 1. Arts de fair, Paris: Union Générale d'Edition, 1980) Chatman, Seymour (1978) Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Chatman, Seymour (1990) Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Gaudreault, André (1984) Narration et monstration au cinéma, in: Hors Cadre 2, 1984, pp. 87–98. Genette, Gérard (1972) Discours du récit, in: Figures III, Paris: Seuil, S. 65-273. Genette, Gérard (1983) Nouveau discours du récit, Paris: Seuil. Gaudreault, André (1989) Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit, Paris: Klincksieck. Gunning, Tom (1991)D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. The Early Years at Biograph, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois. Jost, François (1989) L'oeil - caméra. Entre film et roman, Lyon: Presses Universitaires. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Beyond Myth and Metaphor - The Case of Narrative in Digital Media, http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/ Todorov, Tzvetan (1971) The Two Principles of Narrative, in: Diacritics, H. 1, pp. 37-44. Silke Horstkotte (Amsterdam): "Doing Intermediality": W.G.Sebald's "Die Ringe des Saturn" and the Quest for a Visual Narratology The twentieth century has been a century of images. The omnipresence of images in newspapers and magazines, advertisements, film, TV, video, computers and the internet has led scholars such as Barbara Stafford and Martin Jay to claim that Western culture is currently undergoing a shift in which the visual medium, traditionally playing a secondary role as the illustration of text, is becoming the dominant medium of thought (Stafford 1994; Jay 1996). From the seventeenth-century invention of the telescope and the microscope, and the progressive elaboration of spatial representation in photography, cinema, the x-ray, scanning technologies and the interactive computer screen, technologies of the visible – and the images they generate – have played an increasingly central role in the production, interpretation and distribution of knowledge. One field in which the proliferation of images has been especially conspicuous concerns the construction and documentation of history. Not only has the growing sophistication of visual technologies lead to a proliferation of images in the non-imaginative communication of political and historic events, but images have also begun to play an increasingly central part in how imaginative discourses conceptualise history. Since the early 1990s, but especially in the wake of the Wehrmacht show, quite a number of literary texts have been published that use photographs – imaginary/narrated as well as graphically reproduced ones – to depict the Second World War and the memory processes involved in its transmission. These are the works of W.G. Sebald, especially The Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn] (1992), The Emigrants [Die Ausgewanderten] (1993) and Austerlitz (2001); László Márton, Die schattige Hauptstraße (1999); Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe (1999); Marcel Beyer, Spione (2000); Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room (2001); Ulla Hahn, Unscharfe Bilder (2003); Stefan Wackwitz, Ein unsichtbares Land (2003); as well as the recent re-publication of Peter Henisch's Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (1987/2003), among others. All of these texts are characterised by very sophisticated interactions between images and words, or pictorial and verbal discourses, as I prefer to call them. Although there are some promising recent studies, especially by Peter Wagner and Werner Wolf, the relation between the visual and the verbal in explicitly intermedial texts like these has not been systematically researched so far (Wagner 1995; 1996; Wolf 1996; 2002a; 2002b). Taking its cue from theorists such as Mieke Bal and W.J.T. Mitchell, who stress that "all media are mixed media" (Mitchell 1994 5) and that verbal discourse is therefore "a partner, rather than dominant opponent, of visuality" (Bal 1991 288), this paper investigates the possibilities for an intermedial narratology that seeks "to formulate the general principles of Narrative as well as its actualizations in various media" (Chatman 1990 2) through a close reading of intermedial relations in W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn] (Sebald 2002; 1998). Typically for Sebald's imaginative writings, The Rings of Saturn include many graphically reproduced images and photographs. The increasing 'imageness' that becomes visible here again has been theorized under the heading of 'pictorial' or 'iconic turn' (Mitchell 1994 11-34; Boehm 1994)– referring not only to the increasing presence of images, but more specifically to the fact that the analysis of culture is no longer predicated on the arbitrary and shifting sign relations associated with textuality, but rather on phenomena such as spectatorship and the gaze (Silverman 1996 131ff; 2000). What implications does this paradigm shift have for narratological analyses, and what can narratology contribute to this discussion? That is, how can narratology move away from a linguistic paradigm of culture and focus more on visual phenomena such as spectatorship and the gaze? One tool of narratological analysis that can be brought to bear on Sebald's intermedial narrative is the concept of focalisation, because focalisation stresses the practice and processuality of narrative instead of conceptualising narrative as a finished product. It is also that point at which the narrative structure and the process of making sense of it – its reception – overlap most. Because of the sheer abundance of visual objects, and because of the complex ways in which they complement and challenge the verbal narrative, accepted notions of illustration or ekphrasis, which are premised both on the secondary and subservient role of pictorial discourse, and on static delimitations between the media, will not be helpful in analysing the intermediality of Sebald's book (Boehm 1995; Krieger 1992). Instead, it might be more fruitful to regard the photographs as part of an ongoing intermedial process, and to interpret them as covert focalising agents in competition with the overt focaliser of the verbal discourse, the first person narrator. My analysis will therefore trace the microstructures of individual images and their verbal context as well as the larger structure of the book, which is itself premised on visual and spatial concepts, rather than on a chronological structure. The narrator's journey in particular introduces a spatial, geographical orientation into the narrative which chronology becomes subordinate to. Concepts of spectatorship and of the gaze can be particularly helpful in this analysis, both regarding the performative level of the intermedial interaction, and the receptive level of reading processes. The exhibitory strategies of Sebald's intermedial 'image-' or 'iconotext' will therefore be conceived of as active gestures, rather than static combinations of text and image (Mitchell 1994 83; Wagner 1996; 1995). Works Cited Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994. Die Wiederkehr der Bilder. In Was ist ein Bild, edited by G. Boehm. München: Fink. 11-38. ———. 1995. Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache. In Beschreibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, edited by G. Boehm and H. Pfotenhauer. München: Fink. 23-40. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press. Jay, Martin. 1996. Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions. In Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, edited by T. Brennan and M. Jay. New York: Routledge. 1-12. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis. The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sebald, W.G. 1998. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by M. Hulse. London: Harvill. ———. 2002. Die Ringe des Saturn. 5. ed. Frankfurt: Fischer. Original edition, 1992. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. World Spectators, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stafford, Barbara. 1994. Artful Science, Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wagner, Peter. 1995. Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 1996. Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) of the Art(s). In Icons - Texts - Iconotext. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, edited by P. Wagner. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. 1-40. Wolf, Werner. 1996. Intermedialität als neues Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft? Plädoyer für eine literaturzentrierte Erforschung von Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Wortkunst und anderen Medien am Beispiel von Virginia Woolfs 'The String Quartet'. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 21: 85-116. ———. 2002a. Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musk: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie. In Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by V. Nünning and A. Nünning. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. 23-104. ———. 2002b. Intermedialität. Ein weites Feld und eine Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft. In Literaturwissenschaft - intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by H. Foltinek and C. Leitgeb. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 163-192. Werner Wolf (Graz): Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Intermedial Narratological Concept Traditional narratological concepts that can be 'exported' from narrative theory to the theories of other genres and media fall into two categories: a) concepts which are related to the narrative essence of literary narratives and which can therefore be transposed only to other narrative genres and media, and b) concepts which refer to features that may typically, or with particular clarity, be found in literary narratives, but also occur in non-narrative genres and media, and which therefore can be used for their description as well. While the well-known dichotomy 'story vs. discourse' would be an example of the former type of essentially narrative concepts with restricted export potential, 'metalepsis' is an example of the latter, trans-narrative type with an extended export potential. The concept of 'metalepsis', the paradoxical transgression of ontological (and not merely narrative) levels of representation, is in fact relevant beyond narrative fiction as a literary genre and even beyond literature as a verbal medium. Yet it was first conceived of as a narratological term by Gérard Genette in 1972 in "Figures III". This is no coincidence, since the precondition of metalepsis, namely the existence of different ontological levels, can be fulfilled by literary narratives with particular ease. The historical as well as material links between metalepsis and fiction have deeply influenced research, which has so far largely ignored the wider applicability of the concept. In fact, with a few exceptions (among which Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" [1979] must be mentioned as one of the earliest and Marie-Laure Ryan's "Logique culturelle de la métalepse, ou: la métalepse dans tous ses états" as one of the most recent studies that have attempted to widen the scope), 'metalepsis' has continued, since 1972, to be treated almost exclusively with reference to literature, and what is more, to fiction as a specific literary genre. This can be seen not only in the treatment of the subject by Jean Ricardou, David Lodge, Cristopher Nash and Brian McHale, but also in the table of contents of the recent "Colloque International: la métalepse aujourd'hui" held in Paris last November (only two of the papers announced dealt with non-fictional topics, including Ryan's afore-mentioned "Logique culturelle de la métalepse"). In contrast to previous research, I want to explore some aspects of the neglected transgeneric and intermedial potentials of metalepsis and the conditions of its transferability to other literary genres and other media. As a basis for such an exploration, the concept of metalepsis must be defined in a sufficiently broad manner to permit such transfers, yet with such restrictions as to render an application e.g. to instrumental music extremely unlikely. Starting from such a relatively extensive definition of metalepsis and an illustration of the phenomenon taken from its 'home domain', 'high-brow' narrative fiction, I will broaden the perspective to include first other literary narrative genres, in particular drama (e.g. Stoppard "The Real Inspector Hound") and children's literature (Carroll "Through the Looking Glass"; Michael Ende "Die Unendliche Geschichte"), before presenting examples from fields other than literature: from narrative media such as the comic strip (W. Disney) and film (e.g. the genuine metalepses in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" as opposed to the quasi-metalepses in "The Truman Show"), as well as from media that are not intrinsically narrative: drawing and painting (M.C. Escher and R. Magritte). Special emphasis shall be placed on the functions metalepsis can fulfill, in particular concerning the self-reflexive foregrounding of the opposition 'reality vs. fiction' and its importance to representation, but also with reference to the anti-illusionist effect of metaleptic paradoxa and their relevance to the implied worldview of individual works. In conlusion, some reflections shall be dedicated to the question under what conditions narratological concepts such as 'metalepsis' can be 'exported' to other domains. One such condition is certainly the existence of similarities between the 'exporting' and 'importing' domains. Yet the requirement of similarity should not be misunderstood as referring to the entirety of the domains and their typical medial or generic configuration – for this would mean that all narrative concepts, including those of the above-mentioned category b), could only be applied to narrative genres and media. Similarity with regard to individual traits and potentials of the 'exporting' and 'importing' domains ought to be sufficient. A further, particularly important criterion is, of course, the heuristic value of the conceptual export: metalepsis certainly fulfils this criterion, as the use of this term permits both to highlight 'technical' similarities between narrative and non-narrative works and to explore similar functional potentials which these works can realize, owing to the same 'technical' device.