Narratology of space and time

A lot has been written about the myth of the Roman origins of Lithuanians, but the issues of identity construction in its various versions did not receive sufficient attention in scholarship. In this article I will explore the mechanisms of identity construction and their ideological implications in the earliest Lithuanian version of the Roman myth contained in the Krasiński and Evreinov manuscripts of the Chronicle of the GDL. [...] I will put a heavy emphasis on the representation of regions in the text, since, as will become clear later, the regional discourse is the dominant form of self-narration in the myth. Such emphasis makes this article a contribution to the under-researched field of regional identities and their narrative dimension in the Middle Ages and early modernity.

There are numerous articles and books which examine the temporal structure of comic books but in doing so most fail to address the particular properties of superhero comics. The existence of the superhero raises a number of issues that extend beyond the common properties of the comic book, including the arrangement of panels and serialisation, to questions of immortality, progress and the visual representation of eternity. In this article, I have chosen Alan Moore's Miracleman series, in particular the first volume A Dream of Flying, to examine questions of time in comic books due to its use of a wide variety of stylistic tropes, its structural foregrounding of temporal themes and the exploration in the diegesis of the relationship between eternity, ageing and becoming. One of the most novel features of Miracleman is the incorporation of the narrative and stylistic features of earlier editions of the comic book, which interrogates both the reader's and character's relationship to questions of continuity. In Miracleman, Alan Moore directly addresses the relationship between superheroes and their historical context. It is a theme that is further explored in his subsequent works, including the Watchmen and Promethea where Moore attends to the asymmetries of power between humans and superheroes through drawing on classicist assumptions concerning the qualitatively different notions of time experienced by mortals and gods. To establish a point of reference for a detailed discussion of Miracleman, and superhero comics in general, it is worthwhile introducing a selective taxonomy of temporal modes operating within the comic book panel. This is certainly not an exhaustive list and it does not take into account the full complexity of time in still images-an issue that extends across many centuries of painting and drawing-but nevertheless adumbrates the key areas of intersection between narration and the representation of the superhero. There are three main temporal modes in any one comic book panel: the time of the event as an aspect of narrative, the progressive historical time, and the implied time of the character's action. The narrative event is clearly situated as part of a series of events that form the narrative whole, that is, to some extent, already complete before the narrative begins. The actual duration of the event is of less importance than the overall

"Le Neveu de Rameau", dont l’intrigue se déroule au café de la Régence, a constitué le point de départ de ma réflexion sur le rapport entre les fictions de café et l’idée de Paris comme une "ville-littérature", formulée par Pascale Casanova ("La République mondiale des Lettres", 1999).

En effet, dans le mythe parisien, l’espace du café évoque une mise en abyme de la ville refuge, et le microcosme du café sera présenté, jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, selon l’expression consacrée, comme un "abrégé" de Paris : « - Ah! ces choses-là ne sont pas nouvelles! II y a près de deux siècles qu’un vrai café de Paris est l’abrégé de Paris ! » (Philibert Audebrand, "Un café de journalistes sous Napoléon III", 1888).

Certes, au XVIIIe siècle, le jardin du Palais Royal, saturé de prostituées et de nombreux cafés dans ses galeries marchandes a également été comparé à un tel abrégé et cet autre espace public peut donc être envisagé en arrière-fond de ma thématique, comme dans mon poster. Ainsi, le microcosme des cafés et celui du Palais Royal ne sont pas exclusifs l’un de l’autre; ensemble, ils constituent plutôt une zone grise dans l’espace urbain – en adéquation visuelle parfaite, en l’occurrence, avec la peinture "grisaille", en clair-obscur, des galeries du Palais Royal par Louis Léopold Boilly. Or, de l’Ancien Régime aux monarchies postrévolutionnaires, on peut aussi noter que l’imaginaire parisien s’accorde à un nuancier de gris : il suffit d’évoquer l’étoffe grise et de mauvaise qualité des "grisettes", ces modestes travailleuses aux mœurs légères, l’habit gris des "mouches", ces espions qui hantent les cafés, ou la couverture bleue-grise des livres bon marché de la Bibliothèque bleue; après la Révolution apparaissent les légendaires "bandes noires", ces royalistes pratiquant le brigandage puis, au début du XIXe siècle, les "bandes grises" des milices bourgeoises patrouillant dans la nuit urbaine.

Par ailleurs, de la fin du XVIIe siècle à la première moitié du XIXe siècle, l’ambiguïté morale entre le filou parisien et le poëte déchu ou le pauvre diable se trouve thématisée à travers le motif des cafés, de même que l’identification du littérateur à la figure de l’escroc ou de l’espion. Tous ces personnages diaboliques composent l’imaginaire d’un monde clandestin, interlope et souterrain, mais qui demeure paradoxalement lié à l’espace public des cafés. Ce cercle infernal se situe dans les marges du réel et renvoie à la notion théâtrale d’intrigue. De façon plus générale, l’esprit d’intrigue et le personnage de l’intrigant échappent à la distinction conventionnelle entre réel et fiction.

En ce qui concerne l’univers des cafés parisiens, j’ai constaté cette porosité du texte entre l’événement historique et l’illusion narrative, dans la mesure où ces lieux publics ont été le théâtre d’intrigues, de cabales théâtrales, de scènes de guet-apens et de complots politiques aussi bien avérés qu’inventés. En fait, dans les intrigues de café, peu importe qui est l’ennemi désigné, puisqu’on lui attribue le rôle du criminel - du "scélérat".

Dans mon corpus, ce couplage entre l’histoire des cafés de la capitale et les fictions de café permet de distinguer l’évolution d’une poétique parisienne qui, au XIXe siècle, se dédouble dans le romantisme bohème et l’imaginaire insolite des "bas-fonds".

Introduction to a volume of essays titled "Reading Joycean Temporalities."  Contributors analyze James Joyce's preoccupation with time and temporal epistemology and revisit critical/theoretical polemics on the modalities of time, (in) finitude, subjectivity and perception. The essays address the ways ibn which Joyce's works problematize the handling of psychologically experienced and mechanically measured time.

This paper aims to analyze Turkish modernist poet Nâzım Hikmet's architectural spaces in his poetry from the perspective of Paul Ricoeur's theory of architecture and literature to unfold their artistic impact. As an interdisciplinary field, the narratology of space is directly linked to architecture and literature mainly dealing with the described spaces in fiction. Phenomenology and cognitive research, on the other hand, provides a background for the emotional experience of space. Paul Ricoeur's parallelism of architecture and literature rooted in phenomenology will be interpreted from the perspective of narratology of space to provide the main methodology of the research. Paul Ricoeur's theory not only offers a temporal perspective of the need, design, and experience but also provides an interchangeable terminology for narrative spaces. Taking his configuration concept into account, the modernist Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet's narrative spaces will be analyzed. Ricoeur's theory presents a fitting methodology due to the socio-political discourse and the communicability of Hikmet's poetry. His narrative spaces in different periods will be interpreted according to their emphasis on certain spatial aspects, namely, the emplotment, intelligibility, and context. It will be demonstrated how the spatial qualities of Hikmet's spaces generate corresponding artistic effects. In conclusion, it will be claimed that Hikmet's narrative architecture creates an artistic impact to be experienced by reproducing the main idea, acting as a separate symbol, or shifting the poem's context. The conclusions will also suggest a viewpoint of how narrative qualities may inspire architectural design due to its configurative artistic impact.

Der ›katholische‹ Roman ist ein Unterfall der Gattung der engagierten Kunst und trägt mit ihr an allen ihren Hypotheken. Engagierte Kunst hat ihr Ziel stets fest im Auge. Sie verfährt wie ein Anwalt, der in seinem Plädoyer nur erwähnt, was den Angeklagten entlasten könnte. 1 Diese Bestimmung ist nur eine von mehreren, die Martin Mosebach auf die Frage Was ist katholische Literatur? in seinem gleichnamigen Essay (2006) zu geben weiß. Die scharfsinnigen Erwägungen des -so das Feuilleton -»Erzkatholiken« liefern einen besonders sprechenden Beleg für einen Sachverhalt, der auch über die katholische Tradition hinaus gilt: Die Kirche, als Institution konfessioneller Christlichkeit, ist fraglos ein Faktor, der mitunter erheblich und auf jeden Fall in vielfältiger Weise in den literarischen Diskurs hinein spielt. Manche diese Verstrickungen sind augenfällig und hinlänglich bekannt. Man denke historisch ans extraliterarisch wirksame Beispiel der Indexierung unkatholischer Literatur, den Index Librorum Prohibitorum, der bis in die 1960er Jahre wesentlich zum Erfolg verschiedenster »Skandalautoren« beitrug. 2 Man denke, nun evangelischerseits, an das Tübinger Stift 3 , das Hamburger Johanneum 4 und andere kirchliche Kaderschmieden der deutschen Literatur-und Philosophiegeschichte. Andere Ausprägungen dieses Verhältnisses sind weniger offensichtlich und wahrgenommen. Und eine verdecktere innerliterarische Spielart der Beziehung von Kirche und Literatur möchte mein Beitrag denn auch ausloten.

in: M. Fafinski/J. Riemenschneider (edd.): The Past through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heidelberg (Das Mittelalter, Bd. 18), p. 57–72.

The article follows a relatively recent trend in applying modern narratological analysis tools to late antique hagiographic texts, a genre that has hardly been touched on by such approaches. It provides a spatial narratological close-reading of three exemplary episodes from Sulpicius Severus' 'Vita Sancti Martini'. First, it focuses on Sulpicius' account of how Martin converts a robber in the dangerous Alps (Mart. 5, 4-6), then on the protagonist's encounter with a pagan funeral procession (Mart. 12). Finally, it analyses an episode in which Martin is tempted by the Devil in his bare monk's cell (Mart. 24, 4-8). The study is based on the spatial narratological model proposed by Birgit Haupt and also draws on Jurij M. Lotman's semantic model of space. It works out that the narrative space of Sulpicius' hagiographic description of the life of St Martin is more than just a mere background foil against which the events are narrated. Rather, it has its own semantics that highlight, illustrate and enlarge the holiness and power of its ascetic and hermit hero.

15. Dezember 2017: Vortrag im Rahmen des interdisziplinären Workshops 'Towards a Digital Narratology of Space' des Philologischen Seminar Tübingen und der Digital Humanities an der Universtität Stuttgart (Freitag, 15. Dezember 2017, Tübingen, Keplerstraße 2, Raum 181)

The very political title of Goli Taraqqi’s first collection of short stories, "Man ham Che Guevara hastam" (1969) is ironically juxtaposed to the non-political content of the narratives included in the volume. This paradox foregrounds the significance of the title in relation to both the content of the stories as well as the literary context in which the work has been produced. Unlike Che Guevara, Taraqqi’s characters in "Man ham Che Guevara hastam" are depicted as individuals who struggle to bring about a change in a personal realm rather than a social one. Stuck in certain circumstances (married life, chaotic households, philosophical obsessions, etc.), they strive desperately, but also persistently, to pull themselves out of the background they are carved in. In this sense, they endeavor against two interrelated conditions: against space and stability. Accordingly, this paper, drawing upon Stuart Hall and Zygmunt Bauman, will be engaged with the depiction of disoriented identities in two of the stories published in the volume. The main discussion of the paper will focus on the clash between the demands of a communal life and the self’s desire of individuation in modern times; and will, thereby, elaborate on the interrelation among the concepts of identity, space and mobility as depicted in the narratological structures of the stories.