About This Issue

Authors

  • Editors / Herausgeber*innen

Abstract

Fictional narratives frequently center on acts of violence. Factual narratives, likewise, often refer to a reality in which the experience of violence appears inescapable. In both cases, the focus tends to be on active, event-based forms of aggression – forms that are easily narrated and deemed narratively significant. This special issue, by contrast, aims to foreground less visible yet equally destructive forms of violence: “structural” (Galtung), “symbolic” (Bourdieu), and “slow violence (Nixon). The four selected contributions all highlight the close entanglement of structural, symbolic, and slow violence with overt physical aggression. Each essay, in its own way, examines the narrative strategies through which these ‘other’ forms of violence are rendered representable.

The opening essay by Hella Liira and Eckhard Schumacher examines contemporary German-language fictions and autofictions – Hendrik Bolz’s Nullerjahre (2022), Daniel Schulz’s Wir waren wie Brüder (2022), Anne Rabe’s Die Möglichkeit von Glück (2023), and Antje Rávik Strubel’s Blaue Frau (2021) – that reflect on the violence of the post-1989 transformations from a thirty-year remove. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, the authors reveal how some of these texts employ narrative strategies aimed at avoiding the reproduction of violence through the act of narration itself. In others, the depiction of violent acts is deliberately withheld in order to shift attention to the latent effects of historical events.

Daniel Mandel, Elisabeth Gülich, and Stefan Pfänder combine multimodal conversation analysis with oral history to reconstruct how Holocaust survivors narrate their experiences in concentration and labor camps. By including gesture, gaze, and vocal modulation in their analysis, they demonstrate how aspects of hierarchical positioning and structural coercion become manifest – dimensions that often remain obscured in word- or text-centered approaches.

Larissa Muraveva turns her attention to autofiction and asks how authors narratively negotiate the ethical tension between trauma processing and retraumatization. Focusing on Édouard Louis’s History of Violence (2018 [2016]) – as well as autofictional works by Christine Angot, Neige Sinno, and Oksana Vasyakina, among others – Muraveva shows how nonlinear, polyphonic storytelling can resist reductive appropriation and instead frame violence as a symptom of deeper classed, gendered, and sexualized structures of order.

Cornelia Pierstorff’s contribution reads Christa Reinig’s Entmannung (1986 [1976]) through the lens of Johan Galtung’s concept of violence. Pierstorff argues that Reinig embeds personalized acts of aggression within a broader context of socially sanctioned misogyny, thereby entering into dialogue with the Norwegian theorist’s contemporary reflections on violence. Drawing on this framework of a “narratology of violence,” the essay reconstructs Reinig’s portrayal of the triad of personal, structural, and cultural violence. It further analyzes how intertextual and intermedial references serve to trace structural violence back to its cultural foundations, and explores the possibilities of narrative intervention.

The special issue concludes with a guest essay by Lambert T. Koch, which does not directly address the theme of latent violence but proposes a model for analyzing economic structure narratives. According to Koch, current narratives of transformation can be situated within three key areas of tension, each responding – albeit indirectly – to the forms of slow violence against the environment diagnosed by Nixon. In this sense, stories of transformation gesture toward the crises that necessitate societal change. Koch’s suggestion that economic storytelling can be deliberately employed in either destructive or constructive ways also offers valuable insights into broader questions of representing violence.

How is narratology itself being transformed? In an interview for the series “The Shape of Things to Come,” Marco Caracciolo offers his own vision for the future of the discipline – one that resonates in many respects with Koch’s contribution. Caracciolo also identifies the increasing complexity of the world as a challenge to which narrative can respond. This response, however, is no longer anchored in a canon of fictional works but emerges from a diversity of narratives across various media. He advocates for an empirical and interdisciplinary narratology that nonetheless retains space for interpretation. In doing so, literary studies open their own avenues for engaging with potential losses of control in the face of crises such as climate change.

The collected contributions underscore the significance of structural effects – including slow, structural, and symbolic forms of violence – for understanding the present, as well as the shared responsibility of narrators and narrative scholars in making these processes visible. By mapping the narrative strategies that expose this continuum, they invite a revision of analytical categories as well as a reflection on the ethical dimensions of narrative representation. We wish you an engaging and thought-provoking read.

Published

07/18/2025