Literature Department

At unease with Musil’s positivist background and techno-scientific optimism, critics have often considered Musil’s epistemological stance to be theoretically productive but, as thematized in and performed by his prose writings, to be either implicitly male, cynically objectivist or even inherently violent. According to Helmut Lethen, Musil’s narrative strategy subscribes more in particular to the craze for ideological typification while failing to question the unity of the distanced observer itself. Testing Lethen’s hypothesis with narratological means, it is argued that a thematic reading focussing on the „usual suspects“ of Ideologiekritik (the Weberian icons of modernity and technological progress) fails to do justice to the text’s rhetorical self-awareness. By means of a close-reading, Musil’s text is shown to illustrate the constructivist and autopoietic nature of perception by means of specific telling tactics (rhetorical patterning, shifts in argumentative deictics and imagery).
The distance and mediacy of observation and perception is interpreted as a deliberate option for a verbose and overt verbalization of experience, outbidding the more common anti-conceptual poetics of contemporary avant-garde and modernist deviation aesthetics.

The study of literary modernism continues to be faced with a recurring methodological deadlock: Whereas literary scholars tend to explore the aesthetic and epistemological potential of the models of language and identity advanced and practiced by modernist writers, interpreters ranging from disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and the history of science and technology point out (especially in more recent times) the passive complicity of these writings with more mundane contemporary ideologies. In the specific case of Musil's magnum opus, this claim is often reinforced by the suggestion that the man without qualities displays affinities with Jünger's (politically problematic) position during the interbellum. This claim is loosely based on shared terminological backgrounds (the psycho-technical method of experimental psychology, the pervasive ''Gestalt''-terminology) and on a vague sense of similarities in the biographical profile (the support of and active participation in World War I). This article argues, however, that such 'history of ideas'-reconstructions need to be supplemented by a rhetorical analysis of the way in which concepts and ideas are mediated in narrative and argumentative structures. The article hence reassesses the Musil-Jünger comparison thoroughly. But beyond that it also advances a terminology that is able to explore the way in which programmatic statements (concerning the new speeds and intensities of post-war modernity and the experiment to grasp their epistemological consequences) are framed argumentatively so as to constitute different discourse tactics.

Contrary to wide-spread assumptions, metaphor in narrative is not a pre-established, extra-textual form appearing in different instances of discourse, but rather an event resulting from a strategic distribution of information in the narrative process. Hence, the appeal to conceptual cultural knowledge is to be considered as a consequence, and not as a prerequisite of metaphor interpretation. By means of the concept of the paranarrative, we highlight the rhetorical interconnectedness of metaphor with other figures of speech (such as metonymy) and we explore the narrative integration of diacritic forms of indirectness. In order to illustrate the terminology that can address these focal concerns, the paper discusses the relation between tropes and narrative, via selected examples from narrative texts (both fictional and non-fictional) written by Juli Zeh, Herta Müller, Jürgen Nieraad, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. As their common denominator, these examples channel through narrative figurative domains considered to be known intuitively to wit: personifications; iconic pars pro toto references to concentration camps; and metaphors for cancer in disease biographies."

Much of the current research on memoria convincingly demonstrates the vital and quasi-anthropological contribution of literature to the development of collective symbolism and its wavering between warning testimony and forgetting. Independently, cognitive linguistics increasingly turns its attention to metonymy as a central and very productive thought and language category, without, however, giving much thought to the question of the markedness and the narrative function of this rhetorical form. Our paper aims to circumscribe metonymy as a textual process that affects the literary staging of memory. How does metonymy relate to other forms of figuralization in this respect? To what extent does metonymy display an awareness of narrativity, and how does this call to the fore an ethical, self-reflexive sensibility towards the distribution of power in language, especially in view of the fact that metonymy is commonly associated with violent, stigmatizing, "excitable speech" (Judith Butler)? Our hypotheses concerning the narrative function of metonymy will be illustrated by means of examples taken from post-war literature, to wit Günter Grass' Die Blechtrommel and Im Krebsgang, as well as Elfriede Jelinek's Die Liebhaberinnen, Die Kinder der Toten and Gier.

Die moderne Narratologie hat ihr terminologisches Instrumentarium vorwiegend an Texten mit so genannten engeren Fokalisationen und Perspektivierungen (Virginia Woolf usw.) entwickelt. Das führt zu einer gewissen Verlegenheit, wenn man feststellt, dass z.B. in den modernistischen Texten Thomas Manns, Robert Musils und Hermann Brochs durchaus auktoriale Vermittlung von Bedeutung ist. Der folgende Beitrag hat sich zweierlei zum Ziel gesetzt: Zunächst erfolgt eine kritische Darstellung der einflussreichen normativen Poetiken, die die missverständliche Austreibung des auktorialen Erzählers aus der Literatur(wissenschaft) herbeigeführt haben, sowie eine Problematisierung der Art und Weise, wie Auktorialität mit Autor-Intentionalität und Thesenroman gleichgesetzt wird. Anschließend wird ein kombiniertes Narrativik-Modell, das einerseits im Sinne von Genette auf Informationsverteilung, andererseits auf grammatische Merkmale auktorialen Sprechens achtet, auf Brochs experimentelle Methodologische Novelle (1918) angewendet. Die Analyse versucht den Beweis zu erbringen, dass die Konvention des Allwissens und der Allmacht des Erzählers nicht unbedingt mit Dogmatik gleichgesetzt, sondern auch mit einem subversiven, dynamischen Akzent versehen werden kann.

Narratologists are increasingly faced with the situation that the concept of narrative varies widely across borders. This is a happy circumstance for the relevance and vitality of narratological concepts. At the same time, however, this situation means that any easy "lateral compatibility" of concepts such as "narrator," "(un)reliability," "focalization," etc. across different media such as the printed book, film or the digital media, among others, can no longer be taken for granted. Carrying on with the debates that got underway at the 2013 Paris conference, ENN 4 will address these issues by exploring conceptual models and inputs from various disciplines and methodologies such as rhetoric and stylistics, but also more recent developments including the cognitive sciences, media studies, the digital humanities and many more. In doing so, the ENN aims to act as an on-going forum for discussing narrative theory across borders -conceptual, disciplinary, national, cultural, historical.

With 158 speakers, 28 doctoral course participants and an estimated total number of 250 participants, ENN4 looks to be this year's biggest event in the field of narrative studies. ENN4 follows up on previous ENN conferences in Hamburg, Kolding (Denmark) and Paris and aims to bring together scholars from all disciplines to discuss recent developments in the study of narrative.

The conference is preceded by a doctoral master class with Prof. Jan Christoph Meister (Hamburg University), on the topic of  Computational Narratology.