Gunther Martens

Narrative unreliability in the twentieth-century first-person novel

This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a close reading of literary texts from a variety of national literatures, including French, Italian, German, British, Dutch, Danish and Polish. In this way, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements.

Channelling figurativity through narrative: The paranarrative in fiction and non-fiction:

Contrary to widespread 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, 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 article 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.

Rhetoric and narratology

In 2011, Monika Fludernik edited a collection of essays entitled Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor in the newly established series Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics (Fludernik, 2011). As the title indicates, the volume aimed to take issue with Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, arguing in favour of updating the theory of metaphor (and of other tropes) by redirecting attention to the specifics of figurativity in literature. In a similar vein, Steven Pinker described in more general terms the importance of ‘rhetorical payoff’ (Pinker, 2007: 265), the feeling of accomplishment and reward that is experienced when readers can themselves contribute to the success of the communicative exchange. The articles collected in the present thematic issue want to add to the focus of the aforementioned studies a particular emphasis on the relation between the rhetorical toolkit that underlies the creative potential of figurativity and narrative. In doing so, we take our cue from related critiques of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g. Eder, 2007), but also from recent trends in cognitive stylistics and cognitive pragmatics itself (Emmott et al., 2013). Narrative (either fictional or non-fictional) is a particularly rich environment for exploring and discussing the various functions and

Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Age of the Encyclopedia

In this article I argue that, in case Digital Humanities are looking for an anthem text, Robert Musils (1930) The Man without Qualities is worthy of consideration. Musils modernist novel is the first novel written from the perspective of information overload; at the same time, it mounts a passionate defense of the importance of technology, routines and unsupervised procedures even in dealing with culture and the world of letters. In order to substantiate these claims, I relate some of the fears accompanying literatures renewed exposure to media and technology with similar discussions in early modernity. This historical perspective allows to identify and link three specific discourses underpinning the debate on the future of reading and the book, namely: education, rhetoric, and the concept of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is a model of writing that foregrounds such cultural techniques as metadata and collaborative authorship that can be grouped under the common denominator of transliteracy (which is the tokenization of a specific media text in view of its potential transcription into other media). The new methods and tools developed by Digital Humanities may be frowned upon by established philology. But they will meet with more widespread approval if they are properly situated within their shared historical background, namely the study of rhetoric and the cultural history of the encyclopedia and the encyclopedic novel as a tool for organizing and visualizing knowledge.

Eine von den Halberstädter Putzfrauen Überwachste Fussspur

Schon seit den fruhen 1980er Jahren durchzieht die Beschaftigung mit Kleist das Werk von Alexander Kluge. Aus den expliziten Bezugnahmen wie aus den Motiv- und Stilzitaten spricht eine literarische Kongenialitat, die merkwurdigerweise bislang noch nicht in der Kleist- oder Kluge-Forschung kritisch thematisiert wurde. Begeistert von der Person und dem militaristisch-burokratischen Hintergrund, fuhrt Kluge in verschiedenen ›Geschichten‹ Kleist als Figur auf.1 Mit einem entscheidenden Fokus auf das Anekdotische schildert Kluge hiermit eine alternative, Tatsache und Fiktion aufs Auserste vernetzende Biographie. So entsteht ein unentwirrbares Gewebe, das bis zur Irritation ein Spiel mit dem Leser treibt. Eine besondere Stellung in diesem Spiel nehmen die verschiedenen Kurzgeschichten ein, in denen Kluge Kleists Novelle ›Die Marquise von O…‹ um- und fortschreibt. In ›Problem der Abkunft. Seltener Fall einer unbefleckten Empfangnis‹, ›Eine spate Anwendung von Immanuel Kants Naturrecht‹, ›Eine Episode in der Zeit der Aufklarung und ›Eine Episode aus dem Russlandfeldzug 1812‹ inszeniert Kluge die Widerwartigkeiten der ungewollt schwangeren Marquise unterschiedlicher Zeitraume (beziehungsweise um 1926, 1945, 1732 und 1812).2 Kleists brennendes Schloss wird zu einer Sauna, die ohnmachtige Marquise zu einer trunken gemachten Baronin, die »Geschichte einer Aufklarung«3 zu einer Gerichtsverhandlung in der Nachkriegszeit, infolgedessen der russische Vergewaltiger sein deutsches Opfer heiraten muss, und ein tot gewahnter Graf kehrt aus dem Russlandfeldzug wieder und muss feststellen, dass das Bild, das er sich von seiner Frau gemacht hat, vollkommen verzerrt ist.