David Darby

Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology

This essay compares two distinct traditions of narrative theory: on the one hand, that of structuralist narratology as it emerged in the 1960s and in its various subsequent manifestations; on the other, that of German-language Erzähltheorie as codified in the 1950s, with a prehistory dating back to German classicism. Having mapped the connections between these traditions, this essay then concentrates on exploring how narratology, unlike German narrative theory, has come to broaden its project exponentially since its first critical incarnation as a strictly formalist poetics. While the German tradition has concentrated on rhetoric and voice (with reception theory constituting a largely separate area of inquiry), narratology, which frames the text within a symmetry of real, implied, and fictional intelligences, has always had the potential to pose questions about how narrative functions in relation to a surrounding world of ideas. Of the two only narratology can therefore theorize both authorship and reading. In specific terms, this essay argues that the controversial narratological abstraction of implied authorship represents the only point at which a negotiation between textual and contextual worlds can logically take place. Evidence of how crucial such theorization has been in the development of contextualist narratology is sought in the examination of a test case, namely the much-disputed project of feminist narratology.

Form and Context Revisited

While I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the commentaries both of Monika Fludernik and of Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, I am confronted by the challenge of their having cast me in two distinct, contradictory roles. I am presumed, it seems, to play the part of the contextualist aggressor (or at least the author of a contextualist manifesto) upon the uncontaminated fields of ‘‘classical’’ narratology,while at the same time I am said to have underrepresented the contextualist dimensions of contemporary ‘‘postclassical’’ narratological scholarship conducted in the German-speaking areas. Given the impossibility of occupying these conflicting positions simultaneously, not to mention the dangers inherent in attempting to mediate here in a controversy that, as exemplified in the differences between the arguments of these two responses, is clearly as alive and unresolved in German narratology as it is elsewhere, my response will address separately the points raised in the two rejoinders.1

The unfettered eye: Glimpsing modernity from E. T. A. Hoffmann's corner window

This essay examines the vision of the city in Hoffmann’s Des Vetters Eckfenster. Starting from Walter Benjamin’s commentary, it considers the story’s formal complexity and its exploitation of conflicting representational styles, and it proposes, challenging the reading of the story as a final statement of Hoffmann’s poetic principles, that its image of urban space anticipates a later, characteristically modern mode of vision.ZusammenfassungAusgehend von Walter Benjamins Hoffmann-Kommentar, untersucht diese Abhandlung die Darstellung der Stadt in der Erzählung Des Vetters Eckfenster. Durch eine Analyse der formalen und stilistischen Vielschichtigkeit des Textes stellt sie die Interpretation dieser Erzählung als eindeutiges poetisches Testament in Frage und erblickt darin das Bild einer Stadtlandschaft, das eine spätere und spezifisch moderne Sehweise vorwegnimmt.

Photography, Narrative, and the Landscape of Memory in Walter Benjamin's Berlin

alter Benjamin’s memoirs of his childhood and youth in Berlin represent, W by their author’s own admission, anomalies within the general development of his own career. Uncharacteristic most obviously by virtue of their firstperson reference, and among the most personally intimate of his publications, the collection Berliner Kindheit urn neunzehnhundert is also, it is safe to say, among the most popular and best-loved of his writings. Even more personal-especially in its quasi-documentary, first-person biographical dimension, but also in what the author’s self-conscious commentaries reveal about his own engagement with the methodological aspects of life-writing-is the slightly earlier Berliner Chronik, of whose sections some subsequently found their way, mostly in radically rewritten form, into the Berliner Kindheit. In focusing in this essay on the differences between the two Berlin texts, my objective is to illuminate an important juncture in the development of Benjamin’s writing on the modem city. The texts, dating from the early 1930s, have received relatively little detailed scholarly attention in their own right, general studies having tended to see them as marking a fixed point in the developmental sequence of Benjamin’s city writings, a sequence that begins with the Stadtebilder of the 1920s and culminates in the sprawling, unfinished labyrinth of the folders of the Pussagen-Arbeit. Within this framework, the Berlin texts are typically read together as representing one of a series of attempts to find a vision and literary style appropriate to the depiction of the metropolitan landscapes of modernity.’ By

Elias Canetti's Cities

Abstract This paper explores Elias Canettis mapping of his biography and intellectual development on to a network of cities across Europe and beyond. It interrogates the tension between his assertion of the clear personal significance of certain cities and a fundamental ambiguity that characterizes his recounted engagements with, and retreats from, the potentially overwhelming intensity of modern urban experience. The terms in which cities are described — from Rustchuk to Marrakech, from London to Vienna, from Zurich to Berlin, and so on — are negotiated within an idiosyncratic economy of meaning. Throughout Canettis non-fictional writings, their significance is repeatedly contested between extremes: between personal and historical association, between the intellect and the senses, between divine and demonic connotation, between the potentials of creativity and destruction, and between narratives of loss and those of personal redemption.