DIEGESIS

Ways of Recounting the Past Across Genres and Media

Philippe Carrard — 2025-01-10

Review of:

Stefan Berger / Nicola Brauch / Chris Lorenz (eds.): Analysing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past. New York, NY / Oxford: Berghahn 2021 (= Making Sense of History. Studies in Historical Cultures, volume 40). 356 p. USD 145.00. ISBN 978-1-80073-046-5

Talkin’ bout a Revolution. Jarmila Mildorf on the Fictionality of Conversational Storytelling

Dunja Dušanić — 2025-01-10

Review of:

Jarmila Mildorf: Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2023, 211 pp. USD 114.99. ISBN 9783111072265

Logik der erzählten Welten. Cornelia Pierstorffs „Ontologische Narratologie“ zeigt an Wilhelm Raabe, warum Theorien narrativer Welten nicht auf Überlegungen zu Erzählakt und Rhetorik verzichten sollten

Florian Scherübl — 2025-01-10

Review of:

Cornelia Pierstorff: Ontologische Narratologie. Welt erzählen bei Wilhelm Raabe, Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter 2022 (= Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 229), 507 S. EUR 99,95. ISBN 9783110778274.

Repetition, Again. Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Practices and Forms of Repeating

Eva von Contzen — 2025-01-10

We propose that repetition holds exciting new avenues for cross-disciplinary dialogue between linguistics, literary and narrative studies, cultural studies, and media studies. ‘Repetition’ as a phenomenon is located on a scale that ranges from micro-levels of linguistic expression to the macro-level ‘grammar’ of narratives, including novels, films, and other media. Repetition is a key component of meaning-making in spoken and written contexts and allows for a nuanced re-configuration and cross-fertilization of research into linguistic practices and narrative forms and functions. In order to explore this cross-disciplinary potential, we approach repetition through five conceptual frames: (1) tradition/transformation, (2) prediction, (3) seriality, (4) orality, and (5) social interaction. In exploring repetition through these touchpoints, we return time and again to what makes repetitions “meaningful re-enactments” (Brown) in dependence of context, and relating to questions of spatial and temporal scale.

The Grammar of Immersion. A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of immersive Narrative

Rutger J. Allan — 2024-12-20

In her influential book on narrative immersion (2015 [2001]), Marie-Laure Ryan discusses a number of narrative strategies facilitating immersion. Apart from the present tense and direct or free indirect speech, these narrative strategies are all of a narratological rather than linguistic nature. Building further on Ryan’s work, this article explores the linguistic features of immersive narrative. Central to my analysis is the Cognitive Grammar concept of ‘construal’, the language user’s capacity to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways. In close readings of two famous literary battle scenes – from the Iliad and from Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme – I demonstrate that construal can serve as a highly useful tool in stylistic and narratological analysis as it is closely linked to specific linguistic phenomena, such as tense and aspect, negation, deixis, speech representation, spatial and temporal markers, perspective, intonation units qua attentional frames, and vocabulary.

Erzähler- vs. Figurenperspektive. Eine empirische Untersuchung der relevanten strukturellen Faktoren für die Festlegung der Perspektive in der Erlebten Rede

Stefan Hinterwimmer — 2025-01-10

This article presents the results of two studies examining the effects of different narrative situations on the interpretation of free indirect discourse (FID). Our test items featured either a neutral heterodiegetic narrator, a homodiegetic narrator, or an evaluative heterodiegetic narrator. Participants had to assign a thought expressed via FID to either the narrator or the protagonist featured in example text passage. The results revealed that only homodiegetic narrators influence the interpretation in favor of the narrator. We next tested whether this was due to a special status of the first-person or the narrator’s homodiegetic nature by incorporating a heterodiegetic narrator using first-person pronouns. The results showed no difference in interpretation between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators using first-person pronouns. In third-person narration, the protagonist was chosen significantly more often. Our studies thus demonstrate that first-person narration generally establishes the narrator as a prominent perspective-taker, regardless of their diegetic nature.

Shaping Memory Through Lyric Narration. The Specificity and Scope of Noun Phrases in the Depiction of Past Events

Anne Holm — 2024-12-20

The article fleshes out the concept of lyric narration in the depiction of memories by suggesting that Ronald W. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar offers a helpful framework for understanding how lyric narration operates on spatiality. Expanding from Werner Wolf’s (2005, 2020) idea of the lyric as a cognitive frame, the paper posits that lyricality may be fruitfully viewed as a quality of narrative texts, particularly in regard to portraying mental processes such as reminiscing. To argue for this view, the paper first outlines characteristics of lyric narration, as well as linguistic features that contribute to a sense that eventfulness is being backgrounded. Here, the discussion is inspired by Paul Simpson’s (2014) stylistically oriented and empirically tested model of narrative urgency, guided by the assumption that reflection on past events constitutes a lack of narrative urgency. Subsequently, since the narration of memories often involves a strong spatial element – the retrieval of autobiographical memories has been linked with scenes (Rubin et al. 2019) – the discussion zooms in on the role of spatially anchored noun phrases in narrated memories. In analysing several extracts from English-language narrative fiction, Langacker’s concepts of specificity and scope (2008, 55–56, 62–63) are employed to explore how noun phrases contribute granularity to memories but also suggest crucial conceptual connections.

The Role of Finiteness in Narratives

Horst Lohnstein — 2025-01-10

The article discusses the role of finiteness in sentence structure and its implications for their interpretation of narratives. Finite, infinite, and semi-finite sentence structures are analysed with regard to their ability to speak ‘about’ something. Only finite constructions allow this. The inflectional morphological markers of finiteness and their interpretation are examined in detail. For German, the inflectional morphemes -t for tense and -e for mood are identified. Their properties are summarised as abstract features for tense [±t] and mood [±e]. These two features constitute the central properties of the grammatical category ‘finiteness’: they allow the separation of the speech situation and the event situation to be expressed. If finiteness is fronted (via verb movement), it anchors the expressed proposition in a possible world at some time without dependence on matrix structures. These properties are used to derive central aspects of narratives with the help of regular grammatical devices. In a first step, these are applied to narratives in the preterite, so that – analogous to indirect speech – a narrator can be established for fictional narratives. For the morphologically unmarked present tense, an interpretation of the grammatical properties is proposed with reference to the available contexts, systematically relating central aspects of present tense narratives to the properties of finiteness.

Narration und Negation. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Textbeobachtung und Interpretation am Beispiel der Fokalisierungsfunktion negativer Deixis in Theodor Storms Immensee (1851)

Roman Widder — 2025-01-10

This article investigates the interplay between narration and negation. The first section examines various frameworks for conceptualizing the relationship, addressing not only seminal contributions from the structuralist period (e.g., Wolfgang Iser, Karlheinz Stierle) but also more recent conceptual work on narrative refusal (Robyn Warhol) and negative deixis (Jan Knobloch). Adding to this, the article incorporates insights from linguistic studies on negation. Using parameters such as intensity, scope, modality, and responsiveness, the negation repertoire within a text can be systematically characterized. By posing the heuristic question Who (or what) can negate whom (or what), with what scope and intensity?, this analytical approach can be linked to narratological theory. The utility of this framework is demonstrated through an analysis of Theodor Storm's paradigmatic novella Immensee (1851) which highlights the specific focalizational functions of negation in literary texts and also exemplifies how exactly negation intersects with narrative gaps.

About this Issue

Editors / Herausgeber*innen — 2024-12-20

Our new issue deals with grammatical aspects of narrative. Linguistically oriented analyses of narrative texts in general and of fictional narration in particular have a long tradition. In the 1950s, Käte Hamburger’s reflections on the specific meaning of the preterite and the speaker’s origo in fictional texts triggered a controversial debate (Harald Weinrich et al.). In the 1960s and 1970s, there were various text-linguistic approaches to modeling macrostructures of narrative texts in the vein of generative transformational grammar (Claude Bremond, A. J. Greimas, Teun van Dijk, and others). Parallel to this, conversational linguistic and sociolinguistic theories of narrative in everyday life emerged (William Labov, Konrad Ehlich, Elisabeth Gülich, and others). Such theories, which looked for features of the narrative at sentence level, as well as in the text structure or in the pragmatic context, have been resumed in conversational linguistics in recent decades (‘oral storytelling,’ ‘small narratives’; De Fina, Georgakopoulou, and others). However, grammatically oriented approaches in the narrower sense also continue to attract attention or are attracting renewed attention. These include recent studies on the use of personal pronouns in ‘second-person narratives’ (Monika Fludernik) and ‘we-narratives’ (Natalya Bekhta) as well as analyses of the linguistic representation of speech and consciousness (free indirect discourse), perspectivization/focalization (Manfred Jahn) and the use of tense (Carolin Gebauer). Although an increasing differentiation and distance between the disciplines of literary studies and linguistics as a whole has been under way for decades, our issue shows that linguistic perspectives on narrative phenomena are also valuable and connectable across disciplines.

This issue gathers five articles that approach the topic of "Narrative and Grammar" from different perspectives. Rutger J. Allan uses battle scenes from the Iliad and Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme to show how linguistic phenomena such as tense, aspect, negation, deixis, speech rendition, perspective, and lexis among others create immersion effects. In their empirical study, Stefan Hinterwimmer and Christopher Saure explain, in regard to the grammatically ambiguous phenomenon of free indirect discourse, which grammatical factors determine whether utterances are assigned to the narrator’s or the character’s perspective. Anne Holm describes the function of nominal phrases for the stylistic phenomenon of ‘lyrical narration,’ which is evident in the backgrounding of eventfulness in favor of the representation of memory processes. Horst Lohnstein explains the fundamental function of finiteness for narrative and analyzes the morphological structure of finite sentences. Roman Widder discusses manifold types of negations and gaps in narrative texts in an exemplary analysis of Theodor Storm’s novella Immensee.

In our interview section, the renowned Hamburg narratologist Peter Hühn sums up his personal view of narratology. And in an interdisciplinary featured article, Eva von Contzen, Stefan Pfänder, Uta Reinöhl, and Maria Sulimma deal with forms and functions of repetition from a range of prespectives from linguistics, cultural, literary, and media studies.

In the review section, Philippe Carrard discusses an anthology on historiographical narratives (Stefan Berger / Nicola Brauch / Chris Lorenz (eds.): Analyzing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past), Dunja Dušanić the monograph Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity by Jarmila Mildorf and Florian Scherübl Cornelia Pierstorff's study Ontological Narratology. Narrating the World with Wilhelm Raabe.

Enjoy browsing and reading (digitally)!

My Narratology. An Interview with Peter Hühn

Peter Hühn — 2024-12-20

In this interview, Peter Hühn reflects upon his narratological interest in the nexus between narrative and poetry, his favourite narratological studies, and the value of narrative research.