About this Issue

Abstract

This issue is about feelings – about love and disgust, sadness, joy, mistrust and disaffection. The articles assembled here draw on various theories to examine “narrated feelings,” theories – from Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject (in the article by Dilek Tepeli and Jürgen Straub) to Schwarz-Friesel’s sociolinguistic concept of the ‘emotional potential’ of texts (Rita Luppi and Ramona Pellegrino) and Luhmann’s ‘love as passion’ (Christoph Kleinschmidt) –, which have shaped the trans- and interdisciplinary affective turn that assesses the relevance of affects and emotions for psychological, socio-political, cultural and economic narratives and research. In recent studies the multifaceted connection between narrative and emotions has frequently been discussed from the perspective of the aesthetics of reception. In contrast, this DIEGESIS issue focuses on ‘narrated emotions,’ the narrative representation, (de)construction and evaluation of affects and emotions.

As usual, one focus of this DIEGESIS issue is on the study of factual narrative texts: Martín Koval analyses illness narratives from a public hospital in Buenos Aires; Rita Luppi and Ramona Pellegrino examine interviews with the Vienna-born Israeli journalist Ari Rath, which are part of the ‘Israel corpus’ compiled by Anne Betten et al.; and Dilek Tepeli and Jürgen Straub look at ‘Schimpfklatsch’ in group discussions and narrative-biographical interviews with adolescents and young adults of Turkish descent who grew up and live in Germany. In his contribution “From Feelings to Text: Models of Discursive Arrangement in the History of Emotions,” Philippe Carrard adopts a metahistoriographical perspective.

The contributions on ‘narrated feelings’ in fictional narrative texts suggest that the innovative negotiation of complex emotional worlds has its cultural location primarily in the field of literature. In her contribution “Emotions and Words,” Lorna Martens identifies and scales the various techniques used by authors to introduce emotions into their fictional narratives and finally directs our attention to current (semi-)autobiographical narrative texts that attempt to narratively capture emotional experiences for which there are no words. Christoph Kleinschmidt traces Leif Randt’s attempt to replace the concept of ‘romantic love’ in his imagined worlds with a completely new emotional culture of ‘PostPragmaticJoy.’ Finally, Denise Wong’s analysis of the narrative situation in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai trilogy, which oscillates between first-person and second-person narratives, emphasises the socio-political significance of the narration of disaffection and of disaffected narrations.

This year, Monika Fludernik received the prestigious Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. We are delighted that she has given DIEGESIS an interview on this occasion, which can be found in the section “The Shape of Things to Come.” Congratulations on this honourable distinction, Professor Fludernik!

The issue is rounded off with four reviews. Discussed are City Scripts. Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures (2023), edited by Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr and Maria Sulimma; The Crisis of Narration (2023) by Han Byung-Chul; Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (2023) by Virginia Pignagnoli; and La puissance projective. Intrigue narrative et projet urbain (2021), written by Pieter Uyttenhove, Bart Keunen and Lieven Ameel.

Enjoy browsing and reading!