How to Do Things with Narrative

Jan Alber, Greta Olson, Birte Christ, Jan Alber, Greta Olson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110568462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

Contributors

Jan Alber is Professor of English Literature and Cognitive Studies at RWTH Aachen University and President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). He is the author of Narrating the Prison (2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016). Jan Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation, and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2016, he was a COFUND Marie-Curie Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Jan Alber worked as Monika Fludernik’s assistant for several years, and has learned many things from her. He admires her knowledge and persistence very much, and believes that he could not have had a better mentor.

Dorothee Birke is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Denmark. Her monograph Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel came out in 2016; further book publications include Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels and the edited volume Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics and Medial Configurations (with Stella Butter). Her main research interests are reception theory, narrative theory, history of reading and the novel as well as political theatre. Monika Fludernik has been a long-term source of inspiration, mentor, and advisor of her habilitation at the University of Freiburg.

Philippe Carrard is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Vermont and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Program of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His research bears mostly on conventions of writing in factual discourse. In this area, he has recently published History as a Kind of Writing: Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography (2017) and L'Histoire s'écrit, a translation of selected essays by Hayden White (2017). He knows Monika through conferences and a both scholarly and social visit to Freiburg.

Marco Caracciolo is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative (2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction (2016); and A Passion for Specificity (coauthored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt, 2016). Marco’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. Before coming to Ghent, Marco spent two years at the University of Freiburg on a post-doctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; Monika Fludernik was his host professor.

Birte Christ is Assistant Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. Birte’s most important publication in the field of narratology is “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field” (2013), with Dorothee Birke. She is interested mostly in using concepts and insights of narratology for ideological analysis, which is the case in her monograph Modern Domestic Fiction (2012). Birte did not know what she was about to get into when she attended a seminar on Ulysses with Monika Fludernik in the year 2000 – writing a PhD thesis under her tutelage, being taken along to Narrative conferences, and continuing to be the recipient of much-needed academic advice would only be a very small part of what it means to be a member of the “family.”

Eva von Contzen is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg and the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture: Towards a Listology.” She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration (2016) and has published on narrative theory and medieval literature, sanctity in the Middle Ages, Neo-Latin epic, and lists in literature. She is the co-editor of a handbook of historical narratology (together with Stefan Tilg; forthcoming). Currently, her main project is devoted to lists and enumerations in literary texts from Antiquity to postmodernism. Monika Fludernik’s work on diachronic narratology has inspired her to become a narratologist.

Hilary Duffield is Professor of English Literature at the University of Trier. Her current research interests include narratives of environmental crisis and the Anthropocene, cognitive approaches to television and film narrative, fantastic journeys in space and time – representations in fiction and film. Her book Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (2008; published as Hilary Dannenberg) won the George and Barbara Perkins award for the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in 2010. She worked as Assistant Professor to Monika Fludernik at the University of Freiburg from 1995 to 2002.

Kerstin Fest is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. Her monograph And All Women Mere Players? Performance and Identity in Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys and Radclyffe Hall appeared in 2009. She contributed a chapter on idleness and the comedy of manners to Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature edited by Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi (2016) and published articles on queer theory, chick lit, and art in German Life and Letters and The Journal of Popular Culture. She is now working on a Habilitationsschrift on eighteenth-century English theatre under the supervision of Monika Fludernik, who was also her PhD supervisor.

Benjamin Kohlmann is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. His first monograph Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature was published by Oxford UP in 2014. He specialises in the politics of writing, contemporary literary theory, and the links between literature and political economy. Even though Benjamin is not a narratologist, he got the chance to rejoin Monika’s team in Freiburg when he returned from doing his doctoral work in the UK. As an ‘Assistent’ at Monika’s chair, Benjamin has always admired her ability to take a genuine interest in (and her willingness to engage with) work that falls outside the field of narratology. It is hard to imagine a more brilliant – or a more supportive – mentor.

Susan S. Lanser is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (1981), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992), and The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 (2014) and co-editor with Robyn Warhol of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015). Her current research interests encompass narrative theory, eighteenth-century literature and culture, and narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has long admired and benefited from the work of Monika Fludernik, not least because of their shared commitments to both eighteenth-century studies and narratology.

Wolfgang G. Müller is retired Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. His book-length publications include Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare (1979), Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), and an edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2006). His research interests cover the theory and practice of poetry analysis, meter, style and rhetoric, Shakespeare’s drama, narratology, the tradition of Don Quijote in European literature, the literary flâneur and the relation of literature and philosophy. He first met Monika Fludernik at a conference in Salzburg in the 1980s and shares many scholarly concerns with her, especially the conviction that there is a necessary bond between linguistics and literary studies.

Miriam Nandi is Assistant Professor of English...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Monika Fludernik and the Invitation to Do Things with Narrative
• Perspectives on Narrative and Mood
• Enigmatic Experientiality in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock
• Irony in Jane Austen: A Cognitive-Narratological Approach
• Fictional Minds in Cognitive Narratology
• Dido’s Words: Representing Speech and Consciousness in Ancient and Medieval Narrative
• Narrative Identity and the Early Modern Diary
• The Diachronization of Jane Eyre
• Historiographic Discourse and Narratology: A Footnote to Fludernik’s Work on Factual Narrative
• Multimodal You: Playing with Direct Address in Contemporary Narrative Television
• How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet
• Muße, Work, and Free Time: Nineteenth-Century Visions of the Non-Alienated Life
• The Intermediate State between Good and Bad Company: Managing Leisure in Frances Brooke’s The Excursion
• Out of the Dungeon, into the World: Aspects of the Prison Novel in Emma Donoghue’s Room
• Epilogue: Notes on a Possible History of Reception – From Stanzel to Fludernik
• Contributors