DIEGESIS

Ein Dialog mit Fallstricken. Jonas Grethlein vermutet, dass moderne Narratologie zur Analyse antiker Erzählformen vielleicht doch weniger taugt als angenommen

Silvio Bär — 2026-02-06

Rezension zu:

Jonas Grethlein: Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory. Towards a Critical Dialogue. Cambridge: CUP 2023, viii + 199 S. GBP 22.99. ISBN 9781009339599

About This Issue

Editors / Herausgeber*innen — 2026-02-06

The fascination of sport goes beyond the pleasure of engaging oneself in athletic activity or observing the physical performances of others. Through its proximity to play and spectacle, sport resembles literary and artistic practices, and the praise of outstanding athletes constituted a well-established literary genre in classical antiquity. Beyond these interrelations between literature and sport, the representation, remembrance, perhaps even the experience of sporting events display a narrative dimension. Sporting events are embedded in stories that arouse emotions, enable identification, and shape perceptions of what occurs. This special issue of DIEGESIS is devoted to the narration of sport from a narratological perspective. The contributions assembled here demonstrate that sport is not merely the object of narratives but itself generates narrative dynamics: in competition, in media stagings, in discourses of memory, and in the active appropriation by fans and players. Sport thus appears as a field of emergent narrativity in which rules, bodies, affects, and media interact. The contributions range from literary and cultural-historical analyses to media- and game-theoretical approaches and systematic narratological modellings. What unites them is an interest in how sporting practice is translated into stories – and how these stories structure perception, meaning, and social imagination.

Anna S. Brasch’s contribution examines the gender coding of boxing in German literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The point of departure is the semantization of boxing as the “most masculine of male domains,” which is historically rooted in English discourse. Brasch first reconstructs the archive of this discourse and shows how women were for a long time marginalized or excluded both in factual history and in literature. In a second step, she analyzes literary texts of the twentieth century, especially boxing novels of the Weimar Republic, in which traditional gender norms are perpetuated, for example through bipolar character constellations and morally coded images of femininity. Finally, the focus shifts to more recent texts since the turn of the millennium that for the first time place female boxers at the center and thus mark narrative and aesthetic openings. The contribution combines discourse history, narratology, and gender theory.

Antonio J. Ferraro criticizes the widespread view that wrestling is merely spectacle or ‘fake’ and demonstrates that it encompasses highly complex processes. Ferraro distinguishes three central rhetorical domains: the narrative domain of match structures, the fictional domain of constructed ‘kayfabe’ worlds, and the performative domain of bodily actions that function simultaneously as action and carriers of meaning. His triadic critique serves to reveal how wrestling generates stories, steers expectations, and produces emotional effects. At the same time, the contribution shows that wrestling challenges established narratological categories, for instance through the simultaneity of staging and physical reality and through the active role of the audience. Wrestling thus appears as a borderline case between sport, theater, and narration. The article shows that narrative theory must not only be applied but productively expanded.

Matthias Grüne and Antonius Weixler analyze the literary processing of the 2006 Football World Cup in three recent German coming-of-age novels. The point of departure is the dominant memory narrative of the ‘Summer Fairy Tale,’ which codes the World Cup summer as a collective festival and national experience. Grüne and Weixler show that the novels do not simply reproduce this narrative but vary, disrupt, or relativize it according to their own narrative logic. The analysis examines perspective construction, proximity and distance to the major sporting event, and the integration of the World Cup into adolescent identity formation. It becomes clear that literature can function as a “counter-story” that undermines habitualized media narrative patterns and offers alternative frameworks of meaning. The authors' submission thus makes an important contribution to the question of how literary narration engages with overdetermined sports narratives.

Matías Martínez describes Diego Armando Maradona as a paradigmatic example of a popular sports hero. Sports heroes, the thesis argues, exhibit a secondary heroic structure in that they fluidly combine features of different heroic types. Using the case of Maradona, it is shown how triumphator, martyr, godlike hero, national hero, tragic hero, and antihero overlap. This patchwork structure emerges from an interplay of sporting achievements, biographical narrative patterns, and media circulation. Maradona thus appears as a product of participatory popular culture whose myth is constantly retold and rewritten.

Steven Willemsen conceptualizes road cycling, especially the Tour de France, as a “narrative engine.” The point of departure is the distinction between ludic structure and narrative reception: while cycling is determined by rules and competition, spectators understand it primarily through narrative. The contribution shows historically how cycling and mass media developed together and identifies ludic features – such as intransparency, spatial extension, and temporal structure – that favor narrativization. Drawing on insights from cognitive narratology, Willemsen argues that stories are not given in advance but emerge from the interplay of sporting events, media mediation, and interpretive activity. Cycling thus becomes readable as an example of narrative meaning-making beyond classical text forms.

The contribution by Esko Suoranta investigates emergent narrativity in sports video games using the “Be a Pro” mode of NHL 20 as an example. At the center is the discrepancy between the victory narrative intended by game design and actual player experiences, which may be marked by failure, frustration, and affect. Through an autoethnographic case study, the author shows how players construct their own stories from the course of play through affective-interpretive agency. Precisely the failure of the intended success logic opens up a surprisingly realistic narrative of sporting effort and resistance. Theoretically, this contribution combines game studies, cognitive narratology, and affect theory and introduces the concept of the “affective niche.” Sports games thus appear as co-productions of design and player interpretation in which narrativity emerges.

In the My Narratology section, John Pier outlines narratology as an open field of research that asks not so much for a universal grammar of narrative than for the conditions under which narratives emerge, function, and reach their limits. Starting from the classical narratology of Gérard Genette, Pier traces the development toward postclassical, transmedial, and transdisciplinary approaches that examine narrative phenomena far beyond the literary text. He places central emphasis on a semiotic framing of narratology, particularly with reference to Peirce, Eco, Sternberg, Mukařovský, and Lotman. Pier understands narratives as dynamic, unstable processes unfolding between order and contingency and always interacting with cultural, media, and social environments. He warns both against an unreflective pan-narrativism and against a purely instrumental use of “storytelling.” For Pier, narratology has a future where it critically reflects on its own concepts and asks not what narratives are, but when they are.

Finally, Silvio Bär reviews Jonas Grethlein's narratological examination of ancient narrative forms, Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory. Towards a Critical Dialogue, as a “dialogue with pitfalls.”

The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that sport is a fascinating object of narrative meaning production. Whether in the boxing ring, on the football pitch, in cycling, in wrestling, or in digital play, sport proves to be a field of emergent stories in which rules, bodies, media, and affects intertwine. To narrate sport means not only to retrospectively confer meaning on events but also to make visible narrative processes that structure the event itself. In this sense, the issue sees itself as an invitation to further develop narratology where narration comes into motion – under conditions of uncertainty, competition, performance, and risk.

Enjoy reading.

My Narratology. An Interview with John Pier

John Pier — 2026-02-06

In this “My Narratology” interview, John Pier revisits the influences that shaped his narratological interests. He shares memories of his time as a Ph.D. scholar of Genette’s and discusses the extent to which the works of Umberto Eco, Meir Sternberg, Jan Mukařovský, and Yuri Lotman have inspired his thinking about narrative. He also presents his ideas about the future of the field of narrative studies.

Kaunisnaama and Me. Affective-Interpretive Agency and Niche Construction in NHL 20 “Be a Pro” Mode

Esko Suoranta — 2026-02-06

The article presents an account of discrepancies between the designed sportsgame narrative and emergent narrative elements in the hockey game NHL 20 and its “Be a Pro” game mode, in which players create their own avatars with which to play the game. At the same time, character-creation decisions and the game design can severely disrupt the narrative of winning that the game privileges. These disruptions lead to frustrating player experience, but also to a more realist sport narrative of overcoming adversity than the game intends. With the example of my own avatar, Edwar Kaunisnaama, I show how the game becomes a particular affective niche that emerges when the straightforward narrative of winning fails and player-led narrativization of game events is employed. From failure emerges a surprisingly faithful and even fulfilling representation of athletic struggle, stemming from the player’s affective-interpretive action rather than game design.

Von Boxerfrauen und Boxerinnen. Geschlechterkonzeptionen in der deutschsprachigen Boxsportliteratur

Anna S. Brasch — 2026-02-06

For much of the 20th century, women were excluded from boxing in terms of both discourse and factual history. This is closely linked to the conceptualization of the sport: Boxing was – and to some extent still is – considered a ‘male’ sport. Nevertheless, since the end of the 20th century, a cautious opening of the boxing discourse and its literature to questions of gender equality and diversity can be observed. This article begins by revealing the archive that the German-language boxing discourse draws on in its development, also with regard to its gender concepts. On this basis, in a second step, the development of (literary) gender concepts is worked out using selected examples. In a third step, the narrative and aesthetic structure of the literary sources will be examined.

Narrative Theory in the Squared Circle

Antonio J. Ferraro — 2026-02-06

While significant work has been done on the cultural, technological, and political aspects of professional wrestling, less attention has been paid to the specific strategies and methods by which narratives emerge within and across wrestling performances. This essay argues that professional wrestling can be fruitfully studied through several frameworks afforded by narrative theory, specifically related to the narrativization of nonnarrative sporting events; the rhetorics of fictionality; and the overlaps between performance, drama, and narrative. To make the case for professional wrestling’s place as a fruitful object of study for narrative theory, I examine how wrestling tells its stories by identifying three primary rhetorical domains: the narrative domain, or the plot structures of matches; the fictional domain, or the creation and maintenance of invented, “kayfabe” universes; and the performative domain, or the physical moves that are vehicles for storytelling as well as meaningful actions in themselves. By examining how each of these storytelling domains work, I highlight how narrative theory’s existing critical approaches can help us better understand the rhetorical complexity of both the narration and the interpretation of professional wrestling’s stories. At the same time, a detailed examination of professional wrestling’s unique formal qualities provides the opportunity to expand and enrich those approaches and, in so doing, ultimately affirms professional wrestling as a narratively complex phenomenon worthy of further study.

Mythos / Sommer / Märchen. Die Fußball-WM 2006 als Hintergrund zeitgenössischer deutschsprachiger Coming of Age-Romane

Matthias Grüne — 2026-02-06

In Germany, the collective memory of the 2006 World Cup is closely linked to the narrative of the ‘Sommermärchen’ (‘summer fairy tale’). This narrative combines the enthusiasm for the German team’s unexpectedly successful tournament run with heightened national self-confidence and a new desire to express patriotic feel-ings. Although this narrative thus adds national significance to the sport event, the World Cup was hardly addressed in fictional literary narratives for a long time. Recently, however, three coming-of-age novels set in the summer of 2006 have been published: Lars Werner’s Zwischen den Dörfern auf hundert (2023), Luca Kizer’s Pink Elephant (2024) and Christoph Kramer’s Das Leben fing im Sommer an (2025). After some general thoughts on the potential of literary sports narratives, this arti-cle discusses how these three novels refer to the World Cup summer in different ways and how they use this reference for their own narrative endeavours. Our aim is to show how these novels retell, to a certain extent, the ‘Sommermrächen’ while at the same time asserting an inherent logic of literary storytelling against the dom-inance of this myth.

Maradona. Der Sportheld als Patchworkidentität

Matías Martínez — 2026-02-06

This essay examines Diego Armando Maradona as a paradigmatic figure of popular heroism. Heroes of popular culture hold a derivative status in relation to other heroic types, as they continually recombine their features in ever-changing contexts. Building on and extending narratological and cultural-theoretical approaches to heroism, I argue that Maradona’s figure represents a patchwork of heroic modes: he appears successively as triumphant athlete, martyr, deity, national savior, tragic hero, and antihero. His popularity derives from the fluid interplay between sacralization and profanation – an interplay that typifies modern media heroism. As a product of participatory popular culture, Maradona’s myth is continually rearticulated through stories, images, songs, memorabilia, and rituals that reconfigure fragments of traditional heroism. The sports hero thus emerges as a dynamic bricolage, eliciting a form of veneration that is both playful and ironic.

Sports as Emergent Storytelling. The Narrative Construction of Road Cycling

Steven Willemsen — 2026-02-06

Professional road cycling is grounded in ludus (structured play), but its reception has long been shaped by narrative (stories). Focusing on the Tour de France as a paradigmatic case, this article examines how, since its late nineteenth-century inception, the sport has functioned as a narrative engine: a ludic system that generates storied interpretations. Drawing on cultural and cognitive narratology, the article argues that cycling’s narrativization arises not from predetermined storytelling but from emergent narrativity: stories produced by the sport’s ludic dynamics, the media ecologies that frame it, and the interpretive activities of commentators and fans. To show this, the article (1) traces how professional cycling historically developed in close intertwinement with the rise of new mass media and narrative mediation, and (2) identifies distinct ludic features that afford the cognitive construction of road races as narratives. It hereby shows how cycling’s ludic and medial structures have coevolved, turning athletic performance into shared storyworlds that connect the sport to experiential, social, and ideological meanings.