DIEGESIS

Doing Trust – Precarious Practices

2023-06-18T21:14:57+00:00

Report on the Workshop “Trust, Crisis, Catastrophe III: Practices,” organized by Nina Doejen, Gerald Hartung, Katharina Kalthoff, Florian Kappeler, and Cécile Stehrenberger, January 18–20, 2023, University of Wuppertal (Germany)

How Was It Made, Why Does It Work? Approaching Texts by Combining Narratology and Scholarly Editing

2023-06-18T21:08:23+00:00

Report on the Conference “Produktion des Erzählens, Varianten des Erzählten. Narratologische, editionswissenschaftliche und literarhistorische Perspektiven auf die Genese von Erzähltexten,” organized by Matthias Grüne and Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, November 17–19, 2022, University of Wuppertal (Germany)

Auf der Suche nach dem Narrativ. Fritz Breithaupt erkundet das narrative Gehirn und übersieht eine Leerstelle

2023-06-13T10:03:50+00:00

Review of: Fritz Breithaupt: Das narrative Gehirn. Was unsere Neuronen erzählen. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2022. 368 S. EUR 28,-. ISBN 978-3-518-58778-2

Revision des kontrafaktischen Erzählens. Michael Navratil zeigt das politische Potenzial kontrafaktischer Gegenwartsliteratur auf

2023-06-16T15:20:27+00:00

Review of: Michael Navratil: Kontrafaktik der Gegenwart. Politisches Schreiben als Realitätsvariation bei Christian Kracht, Kathrin Röggla, Juli Zeh und Leif Randt. Berlin / Boston, MA: De Gruyter 2022 (= Gegenwartsliteratur). 607 S. EUR 39,95. ISBN 978-3-11-076296-9

Increasing Knowledge through Multiple Perspectives. Alexandra Valint Discusses Victorian Multinarrator Novels

2023-06-16T15:32:55+00:00

Review of: Alexandra Valint: Narrative Bonds. Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 2021 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 219 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1463-3

The Shape of Things to Come. An Interview with Eva von Contzen

2023-06-18T10:12:12+00:00

In this interview, Eva von Contzen introduces her current research project on retellings of premodern texts in contemporary narrative fiction. In this connection, she talks about the potential of historical and diachronic narratologies as an interdisciplinary undertaking that not only investigates storytelling practices at certain points in time, but that also examines narratives from different cultures.

About this Issue

2023-06-22T18:34:01+00:00

This special issue of DIEGESIS, edited by Sandra Heinen, Uta Poplutz and Cécile Stehrenberger, focuses on the role of trust in narratives of crisis and catastrophe. Taken together, the four research articles analyse a wide range of factual and fictional narratives that respond to current and socially relevant crises of trust by reflecting, promoting or questioning relationships of trust.

The section “The Shape of Things to Come” features an interview with Eva von Contzen, in which she outlines her current research project on the retelling of ancient and medieval stories. In addition to three reviews of recent publications in the field of narrative research, this issue also contains two conference reports: one on a conference that – in keeping with the issue’s thematic focus – also examined the role of trust in crisis situations, and the other on a conference devoted to the intersection of narrative theory and genetic criticism.

We hope you enjoy the read!

Introduction. Trust and Narratives of Crisis and Catastrophe

2023-06-13T09:18:43+00:00

Introduction to the Special Issue by the Guest Editors.

Doing Trust and Crisis Communication. Narratives of the 2021 Explosion in the Chempark Leverkusen

2023-06-13T09:37:42+00:00

According to governmental recommendations and scholarship concerning crisis communication, which have emerged from the 1980s onwards, an important characteristic of successful disaster-related crisis communication is its capacity for developing or restoring trust. This article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of a tank farm explosion on 27 July 2021 in the waste incineration plant Chempark in Leverkusen, the managing company, Currenta, engaged in crisis communication in a way that can indeed be interpreted as a form of ‘doing trust.’ By offering a discourse analysis of the statements published by Currenta on a newly created info page and its Twitter account, the paper explores the emergence of a specific crisis narrative connected to that aim. Our study shows how Currenta’s crisis narrative depicted the company as trustworthy by referring to its attempts at reflecting the values of integrity, transparency and (willingness to) dialogue. We situate these attempts in the context of competing narratives which, disseminated by other actors such as journalists, environmental activists and individual social media users, ‘revealed’ an alleged deceptiveness of the company and presented it as untrustworthy.

Losing Trust. Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight and Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege as Threat Communication

2023-06-13T09:47:14+00:00

This article discusses two Indian English novels, Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege and Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight, first published in 2003 and 2005, respectively, both of which deal with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India at the turn of the millennium. The novels can be described as ‘crisis narratives’ in the sense that they represent in narrative form what the authors perceive as a serious political crisis in which trust is lost. Since both texts deal with the crisis not in retrospect, but at a moment when it is still unfolding, the texts can be regarded more specifically as instances of ‘threat communication,’ a communicative act that identifies a threat to an existing order. Although both novels negotiate the same social crisis, they speak from different vantage points and foreground distinctive aspects and perspectives. Thus, trust, its absence, and its contraposition, distrust, are shown to play different roles in the two narratives.

Narrating Crises of Trust in Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction

2023-06-18T10:02:17+00:00

This article argues that post-Celtic Tiger fiction reflects the current crisis of trust and offers a perfect laboratory for the intersubjective negotiation of social practices of trust. Drawing on received and recent philosophical discussions of trust, the article first introduces the main parameters of this social phenomenon. Based on a corpus of about a dozen austerity novels, but with Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012) as the main reference text, it then proceeds to establish (1) the general relevance of matters of trust for post-Celtic Tiger Fiction, and (2) the defining features of the narrative representation of social structures and performances of trust. Finally, in order to take into account not only trust-related issues and structures recurring in contemporary Irish austerity fiction, but to also point up pronounced differences in narrative form and ideological orientation among individual post-Tiger novels, it complements the reading of The Spinning Heart with an analysis of the narrative dynamics of ‘doing trust’ in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011).

Telling Y(our) Story. Precarity of Trust in Contemporary Refugee Life Narratives

2023-06-18T10:07:15+00:00

Emerging from a growing number of conflicts and catastrophes in the twenty-first century, contemporary refugee life narratives are marked by a multiple erosion of trust, and yet are intimately engaged in rebuilding trust. In the face of material and legal constraints for refugees to speak, their life stories are frequently facilitated by new networks of solidarity to protest hostile immigration regimes, involving activists, lawyers, go-between writers, and translators, among others. These networks offer a safe space for testimony and work towards restoring trust while mutually inscribing biographers and biographical subjects in a relational act of telling y(our) story: The refugee’s tale – ‘your’ story – encapsulates the collaborative and trust-building tale of its making – ‘our’ story. Outlining a narratology of trust in refugee life-writing, the paper assesses the intricate and innovative dynamics of ‘hospitable form’ in acts of fictional accommodation, in multiperspectival emic and etic narratives, and in the interplay of auto- and heterobiographical storytelling.