DIEGESIS

Als wir noch unter Bäumen saßen … Han Byung-Chuls ambivalente Kulturkritik der Gegenwart

Christian Baier — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rezension zu:

Byung-Chul, Han: Die Krise der Narration. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2023 (= Fröhliche Wissenschaft 217). 100 S. EUR 12,-. ISBN 978-3-7518-0564-3

On the Significance of Digital Epitexts. Virginia Pignagnoli Examines how Digital Epitexts Shape Post-Postmodernist Narrative Poetics

Torsa Ghosal — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of:

Virginia Pignagnoli: Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2023 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series) 158 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1542-5

Scripting the City. Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma Explore the Relevance of Storytelling for Postindustrial Urban Futures

Carlos Tkacz — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of:

Barbara Buchenau / Jens Martin Gurr / Maria Sulimma (eds.): City Scripts. Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2023. 253 pp. USD 59.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1552-4

Erzählte Stadtplanung. Pieter Uyttenhove, Bart Keunen und Lieven Ameel entwickeln eine narrative Theorie des Urbanismus

Laura Wiemer — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rezension zu:

Pieter Uyttenhove et al.: La puissance projective. Intrigue narrative et projet urbain. Genf: Métis Presses 2021 (= vuesDensemble). 264 S. EUR 32. ISBN 978-2-940563-85-2

The Shape of Things to Come. An Interview with Monika Fludernik

Monika Fludernik — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2024, Monika Fludernik was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. To mark the occasion, we invited her for an interview in which she talks about her memories of studying under Franz K. Stanzel, her career as a professor of English Literature in Germany, and the future of narratology.

About this Issue

Editors / Herausgeber*innen — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This issue is about feelings – about love and disgust, sadness, joy, mistrust and disaffection. The articles assembled here draw on various theories to examine “narrated feelings,” theories – from Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject (in the article by Dilek Tepeli and Jürgen Straub) to Schwarz-Friesel’s sociolinguistic concept of the ‘emotional potential’ of texts (Rita Luppi and Ramona Pellegrino) and Luhmann’s ‘love as passion’ (Christoph Kleinschmidt) –, which have shaped the trans- and interdisciplinary affective turn that assesses the relevance of affects and emotions for psychological, socio-political, cultural and economic narratives and research. In recent studies the multifaceted connection between narrative and emotions has frequently been discussed from the perspective of the aesthetics of reception. In contrast, this DIEGESIS issue focuses on ‘narrated emotions,’ the narrative representation, (de)construction and evaluation of affects and emotions.

As usual, one focus of this DIEGESIS issue is on the study of factual narrative texts: Martín Koval analyses illness narratives from a public hospital in Buenos Aires; Rita Luppi and Ramona Pellegrino examine interviews with the Vienna-born Israeli journalist Ari Rath, which are part of the ‘Israel corpus’ compiled by Anne Betten et al.; and Dilek Tepeli and Jürgen Straub look at ‘Schimpfklatsch’ in group discussions and narrative-biographical interviews with adolescents and young adults of Turkish descent who grew up and live in Germany. In his contribution “From Feelings to Text: Models of Discursive Arrangement in the History of Emotions,” Philippe Carrard adopts a metahistoriographical perspective.

The contributions on ‘narrated feelings’ in fictional narrative texts suggest that the innovative negotiation of complex emotional worlds has its cultural location primarily in the field of literature. In her contribution “Emotions and Words,” Lorna Martens identifies and scales the various techniques used by authors to introduce emotions into their fictional narratives and finally directs our attention to current (semi-)autobiographical narrative texts that attempt to narratively capture emotional experiences for which there are no words. Christoph Kleinschmidt traces Leif Randt’s attempt to replace the concept of ‘romantic love’ in his imagined worlds with a completely new emotional culture of ‘PostPragmaticJoy.’ Finally, Denise Wong’s analysis of the narrative situation in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai trilogy, which oscillates between first-person and second-person narratives, emphasises the socio-political significance of the narration of disaffection and of disaffected narrations.

This year, Monika Fludernik received the prestigious Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. We are delighted that she has given DIEGESIS an interview on this occasion, which can be found in the section “The Shape of Things to Come.” Congratulations on this honourable distinction, Professor Fludernik!

The issue is rounded off with four reviews. Discussed are City Scripts. Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures (2023), edited by Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr and Maria Sulimma; The Crisis of Narration (2023) by Han Byung-Chul; Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (2023) by Virginia Pignagnoli; and La puissance projective. Intrigue narrative et projet urbain (2021), written by Pieter Uyttenhove, Bart Keunen and Lieven Ameel.

Enjoy browsing and reading!

From Feelings to Text. Models of Discursive Arrangement in the History of Emotions

Philippe Carrard — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Emotions have become an important field of study in historical research. Looking at a few works held as important in this area, this article investigates the issue of order, that is, of the way historians of feelings organize the material they have selected. The texts in my corpus display two main models. First, arranging the data synchronically (e.g., Sanders, Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens), they take the form of thematic tableaux accounting for the state of one or a set of emotions at a specific time and in a specific geographical area. Second, arranging the data diachronically (e.g., Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling), they take the form of stage narratives, that is, of narratives that proceed not from event to event, but from phase to phase. Whatever the model selected might be, these texts pose questions frequently asked in the epistemology of history. Are the models found in the data or constructed? If they are constructed, are historians free to go about that construction as they please? Debating the work of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen and postnarrativist theorists of history for whom these questions are obsolete, the article argues that they in fact are still worth posing. A distinction, however, must be made between verifiability and acceptability, as only acceptability can be productively discussed at the level of the whole text.

Postromantische Liebe und Poetik der Vagheit. Zur Neucodierung von Emotionen in Leif Randts Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty und Planet Magnon

Christoph Kleinschmidt — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Diverging from the pathos of strong feelings commonly embraced by literary tradition, contemporary author Leif Randt’s writing is concerned with balancing emotions. In his two novels Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) and Planet Magnon (2015), he develops a post-romantic discourse on love that counters the notion of passionate love (Niklas Luhmann) with the theory of PostPragmaticJoy. According to this theory, the failure of love is no longer a catastrophe, but an opportunity for something new. At the same time, Leif Randt’s literature is characterized by a poetics of vagueness, leaving many aspects within his novels unclear. The article explores the connection between the discourse of post-romanticism and the mode of vagueness and shows how Randt initiates a new coding of emotions while leaving their consequences in limbo.

Narrative Constitution in the Medical Consultation. A Contribution to the Dynamics of Narrated Feelings in Factual Texts

Martín Koval — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper aims, ultimately, to make a contribution to the study of the narrative constitution of factual narratives, and, with that aim, it focuses on a particular subclass of an oral and interactional character: the illness narrative. To this end, on the basis of the analysis of a corpus produced in a public hospital in the southern Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Argentina), it proposes: 1. A brief historical-critical review of the main contributions to the reflection on the story/discourse dichotomy and the failed attempt to deconstruct it; 2. The hypothetical postulation of a different functioning of these two structural levels in factual and fictional autodiegetic narratives, and the pointing out of the central role of emotions in this respect, in a theoretical-methodological sense. 3. A partial model, devised for the analysis of medical consultations, which justifies the differentiation of two levels on the represented side (the what) and which seeks to account for the function of narrated feelings in the logic of co-narration that takes place in the doctor’s surgery.

Emotionsausdruck und thematisches Wiederholungsverfahren in narrativen Interviews

Rita Luppi, Ramona Pellegrino — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Our contribution builds upon prior linguistic research into emotional expression, and specifically into the role of prosodic elements. It makes use of a corpus of autobiographical narrative interviews – known as the Israelkorpus – conducted by Anne Betten and her collaborators with Jewish migrants who escaped from German-speaking regions of Central Europe to Palestine/Israel during the Nazi era. Given that the recounting of traumatic events often exhibits circular-repetitive and fragmented speech patterns, we complement and enrich the study of the prosodic dimension by analyzing the role of repetition at the textual level. The paper’s main objective is thus to explore the relationship between emotional expression and thematic repetitions. Firstly, we detect recurring themes that appear like leitmotifs across five interviews with the same speaker, Ari Rath; we then examine more closely how such a circular speech procedure affects the emotional potential of the latest narrative in the sequence. Finally, we focus on the expression of emotions to determine whether thematic repetitions bring about similar prosodic patterns.

Emotions and Words. Representing Emotions in Narrative

Lorna Martens — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The classic view of the relation of words to emotion holds that emotions are preverbal, while the contemporary “psychological constructionist” view argues that labels create emotions out of inchoate affect. Literature reflects the classic view, yet the pervasive use of labels in narrative underscores the power of naming the “psychological constructionist” view implies. But literature aims to be vivid, and mere naming can seem dull or trite. A spectrum of techniques has arisen that allow writers to represent emotions without naming them. Emotions for which no names exist, however, present a challenge to representation. T.S. Eliot proposed the “objective correlative,” but found that not even an objective correlative is able to capture some emotions. This essay summarizes recent theories of emotion in neuroscience and psychology; it considers how this debate is applicable to an understanding of the representation of emotion in narrative; and it gives an overview of various ways in which emotion has been represented in narrative fiction. Finally, the article looks at some examples of autobiographers’ more or less successful efforts to represent unnamable emotions. Their efforts reveal a pressure to fall back on naming for the sake of communication and control. Moreover, the conciseness of naming is consistent with narrative telling.

Erzählte Affekte und radikale Entwertungen von Anderen. Psychosoziale Funktionen von Abjekten

Dilek Tepeli, Jürgen Straub — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The significance of emotions for human practice has been receiving increased attention in various disciplines recently. In sociology, an affective or emotional turn was diagnosed already two decades ago, and parallel trends appear in both (narrative) psychology and philosophy. This article outlines an affect and emotion theory perspective for figuration, micro-sociological and social respectively cultural-psychological conflict research. It then introduces Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytically defined concepts of the “abject” and “abjection”. After some definitional clarifications, we illustrate the heuristic, hermeneutic and explanatory potential of these theoretical concepts by drawing the empirical example of the relationship between Alevis and Sunnis in post-migrant Germany. These are embedded in historical “relations of injury and harm”, in which not only excessive physical violence, but also psychological and symbolic violence has been exercised and suffered. The radical, abjectivising devaluation of people of the Alevi faith played a major role in this. We argue that the resulting demarcations, contact blockades and practices of exclusion, which continue to this day, cannot be adequately understood without recourse to their affective-emotional foundations.

Disaffection and You-Narration in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy (1988–2018)

Denise Wong — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the representation of unfeeling, or disaffection, in narrative form through the writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed ‘Tambudzai trilogy.’ The narrative form I focus on is the shift in grammatical person of narration from the first person I to the second person you. The first instalment, Nervous Conditions (1988), opens with the defiant voice of its first-person narrator and protagonist, Tambudzai, but soon begins to oscillate between first and second person for self-reference. By This Mournable Body (2018), Tambu’s loss of selfhood is reflected in the narrator’s obstinate refusal to emerge as an ‘I’ at the level of discourse. I argue that Dangarembga inscribes Tambu’s institutional racial othering in you-narration and that this self-estrangement parallels the mode of unfeeling that Xine Yao (2021) calls “unsympathetic Blackness.” The trilogy, in line with recent work by contemporary scholars turning away from feeling towards negative feeling or the negation of feeling, unpicks the seams of a Western affective politics of sympathetic recognition.

DIEGESIS

Als wir noch unter Bäumen saßen … Han Byung-Chuls ambivalente Kulturkritik der Gegenwart

On the Significance of Digital Epitexts. Virginia Pignagnoli Examines how Digital Epitexts Shape Post-Postmodernist Narrative Poetics

Scripting the City. Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma Explore the Relevance of Storytelling for Postindustrial Urban Futures

Erzählte Stadtplanung. Pieter Uyttenhove, Bart Keunen und Lieven Ameel entwickeln eine narrative Theorie des Urbanismus

The Shape of Things to Come. An Interview with Monika Fludernik

About this Issue

From Feelings to Text. Models of Discursive Arrangement in the History of Emotions

Postromantische Liebe und Poetik der Vagheit. Zur Neucodierung von Emotionen in Leif Randts Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty und Planet Magnon

Narrative Constitution in the Medical Consultation. A Contribution to the Dynamics of Narrated Feelings in Factual Texts

Emotionsausdruck und thematisches Wiederholungsverfahren in narrativen Interviews

Emotions and Words. Representing Emotions in Narrative

Erzählte Affekte und radikale Entwertungen von Anderen. Psychosoziale Funktionen von Abjekten

Disaffection and You-Narration in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy (1988–2018)