Eva von Contzen

Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Experience

Medieval examples of characters in interaction with other characters, often in groups, are ubiquitous. This is hardly surprising, and neither is the fact that these groups can act collectively as groups. However, to describe such phenomena in terms of “social minds” as described by Alan Palmer (details below) is problematic: the concept is misleading when applied to representations of collective experience in medieval literature, because medieval culture had a different understanding of the self than the one that underlies Palmer’s argument. Palmer takes for granted the idea of the postEnlightenment self characterized by the privileging of interior consciousness. The concept of social minds is the logical extension of this idea: the novel shows a belief and interest in groups having a consciousness like the self. Medieval culture, however, had an action-oriented rather than a mind-oriented conception of self. Consequently, representations of collectivity turn out to be different from their counterparts in the age of the novel. The medieval evidence, I propose, may be better described in terms of exemplarity as a special case of collective experientiality, where experientiality is tied much more to acting than to thinking (and its cognitive bedfellows). Collectivity is contained in and expressed through the exemplary individual’s actions, which invite emulation on the part of the audience.

The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History

ABSTRACT: This article argues that it is possible to write a literary history of lists. Literary history told through the feature of the list promises to be highly relevant because it necessarily combines form and function, content and context, as well as genre and meaning. Lists provide a means of pushing the boundaries of narration, of negotiating meaning, of exploring the roles of the narrator, and of playing with the audience’s expectations. These functions can all be aligned more generally with questions of literariness. This article argues that lists can actively promote literariness in the trajectory of experientiality, as is demonstrated by the example of epic poetry and the epic catalogue, which looms large in the tradition of all list-writing in literature. The examples range from the Iliad to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune.

Unnatural narratology and premodern narratives: Historicizing a form

Abstract ‘Unnatural’ narratology has been a thriving new field of narrative theory in recent years. What its various sub-fields share is that they are concerned, very broadly, with narratives that transcend the parameters of conventional realism. One of the field’s promises is that it can also account for earlier ‘unnatural’ narrative scenarios, for instance in ancient and medieval literature. Focusing on two recent publications by Alber and Richardson, this essay challenges the historical trajectory the movement envisages. Paying special attention to the influence of religion on premodern narratives and its implications for the concept of the unnatural, this essay argues that unnatural narratology is reductionist and adheres to a structuralist paradigm, and thus cannot do justice to the idiosyncrasies of premodern narrative forms and functions. An alternative approach to the unnatural as a dynamic form is introduced as an outlook.

Grenzfälle des Erzählens: Die Liste als einfache Form

Um das Urteilsvermogen eines guten Literaturkritikers in Erfahrung zu bringen, bedarf es laut W. H. Auden der Beantwortung folgender vier Fragen:

“Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature

This paper argues that some postmodern experimental forms of plot and narrative structure can be thrown into sharper relief by delineating them with medieval narrative practices of plot development. Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to be both offers an experimental plot that is shaped by the alterity and modernity of medieval and Renaissance art. Drawing on the technique of fresco painting, the novel narrativizes the experience of simultaneity created by recollections of the past in the present. The novel’s two narrative strands – one set in contemporary England, the other in fifteenth-century Italy – are linked in associative and crosstemporal ways and highlight individual experience. Bearing similarities to medieval episodic narratives, the novel maximizes an a-centric narrative design that capitalizes on the reader’s input in motivating the story. Subsequently, Tokyo cancelled (2005) by Rana Dasgupta is briefly discussed as another example of a postmodern novel reminiscent of medieval narrative practices: in this tale collection held together by a very loose framework, plot itself becomes the protagonist as an epitome of modern society’s loss of identity.