DIEGESIS

The Shape of Things to Come. An Interview with Marco Caracciolo

Marco Caracciolo — 2025-07-18

In this “The Shape of Things to Come” interview, Marco Caracciolo provides insights into his current project on narrative complexity and its implications. He also discusses the value of collaboration and interdisciplinarity for the future of narrative research, and empirical approaches to narrative in particular.

Narrative Escalation and the Dynamics of Violence in Post-Reunification German Literature

Hella Liira — 2025-07-18

The article aims to show how escalation narratives in contemporary German literature dissect the dynamics of violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by dealing with outbreaks of violence and making visible hidden forms of violence, both in the modes of latency and drastic depiction. Whereas in Nullerjahre (2022) by Hendrik Bolz and Wir waren wie Brüder (2022) by Daniel Schulz the post-reunification period is reflected through different modes of escalation, depicting publicly visible violence, Anne Rabe’s novel Die Möglichkeit von Glück (2023) shifts this setting to the family level, where different forms of violence appear to be a consequence of the structural violence inherent in the authoritarian system of the GDR. Antje Rávik Strubel’s novel Blaue Frau (2021) addresses similar issues but focuses on the political situation in Europe, describing a young woman’s journey from East to West, filled with exploitation and assault. All texts expose narratives of violent (but sometimes invisible) excesses in the post-reunification period in relating them both to past, but in parts still intact forms of structural and symbolic violence that remain visible as traces – or return in the mode of direct, physical violence.

Darstellungen von Gewalterfahrungen in Oral-History-Interviews

Daniel Mandel — 2025-07-18

Videotaped oral history interviews are used to investigate how contemporary witnesses from Nazi concentration and labor camps narrate their experiences of violence. Our analysis focuses on representations of experiences of violence that are not purely psychophysical in nature but reveal other aspects of violence. The present study understands narration as an embodied practice that is analyzed moment by moment in the framework of micro-sequential utterances. In the process of storytelling, physical-visual resources not only contribute to the local formation of meaning but also enable supra-individual insights into the communicative strategies used by contemporaneous witnesses. In the light of this volume’s question regarding the possibility of narrating violence, the consideration of all semiotic channels proves to be a profitable approach for narrative research.

Autofiction on Violence. The Ethics of Storytelling and the Symbolic Role of Language

Larissa Muraveva — 2025-07-18

This article explores the representation of violence in autofiction and its ethical implications. Through an analysis of Édouard Louis’s autofiction, with additional references to contemporary Russian and French authors such as Christine Angot, Egana Jabbarova, Neige Sinno, and Oksana Vasyakina, the article examines how narratives mediate trauma and construct a “victim narrator.” The study highlights the narrative tension between testimonial authenticity and ethical concerns over victimization. Special attention is given to the symbolic role of language in shaping trauma narratives, with a focus on indirect storytelling techniques. The case of History of Violence by Édouard Louis is analyzed to illustrate how autofictional narratives blur the boundaries between narrating ‘I’ and experiencing ‘I,’ reinforcing the narrator’s vulnerability. The article argues that autofiction functions both as a form of literary resistance and as a space for negotiating the ethics of storytelling in the face of violence.

Kultur entmannen

Cornelia Pierstorff — 2025-07-18

For an increasing number of female German authors in the 1970s, the question of how to narrate under the conditions of structural violence seems to be central, in particular that of addressing gendered violence. As one striking example, Christa Reinig’s experimental novel Entmannung from 1976 attempts to deal with the contradictions of very different perceptions of violence in everyday life. In doing so, the text adopts a multidimensional understanding of violence. As I will argue, Reinig’s so-called novel is discoursively linked – and intentionally so – to Johan Galtung’s concepts of violence, first introduced in 1969 and further developed in 1990. Through its narrative techniques, Entmannung seeks to render structural violence tangible, allowing it to be traced back to its cultural dimensions. Only by acknowledging its multiple dimensions, the novel suggests, can gendered violence be challenged.

About This Issue

Editors / Herausgeber*innen — 2025-07-18

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.

Narrative in der ökonomischen Sphäre. Dogmengeschichtliche und disziplinäre Rahmung am Beispiel des aktuellen Transformationsgeschehens

Lambert T. Koch — 2025-07-18

This contribution is derived from a lecture intended to advance interdisciplinary engagement between the humanities and the field of economics, with particular regard to the role of narratives in the context of current social processes of sustainability transformation. Addressing a primarily non-economist audience, the lecture – and, by extension, this article – begins with basic reflections on the self- concept of economics as a discipline, including its doctrinal and intellectual-historical underpinnings. The article proceeds from the conviction that, in view of the profound ecological and societal disruptions of our time, there exists a compelling imperative to intensify interdisciplinary cooperation. Against this backdrop, four interrelated perspectives are elaborated: The first is an examination of why orthodox economic thought has long struggled to incorporate a narrative dimension within its analytical canon. The second highlights the persistent and constitutive role of narratives in economic history. The third is a discussion on narrative phenomena from the conceptual perspective of evolutionary economics. And the fourth perspective investigates which narratives are currently competing for discursive primacy in the debate on sustainability transformation.