Werner Wolf

Narrative and narrativity: A narratological reconceptualization and its applicability to the visual arts

Abstract Among the many reorientations which the past century has brought about in the field of knowledge we have also witnessed what has been called the ‘narrativist turn’.2 This turn is evident in the increased attention that narratives and their characteristic quality, narrativity, have met with over the past few decades in a surprisingly large number of cultural practices. The table of contents of a volume edited by Cristopher Nash, Narrative in Culture,3 lists, for instance, economics, law, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature — and this is only a selection of the discourses that have been associated with narrativity. In addition, one may mention autobiography (for obvious reasons), historiography,4 ‘natural history’ including geology and biology (an example of which is the series of booklets The Story Behind the Scenery devoted to explaining the geological, biological and cultural backgrounds of US National Parks and Monuments) and, moreover, the so-called ‘natural narratives’ of oral everyday onversation,5 film6 and even architecture7 and music8. There are in fact so many fields in which narrative is said to play a role that Michael Toolans sweeping statement, ‘[n] arratives are everywhere’,9 hardly sounds like an exaggeration. This is also true of art history. Here ‘narrative’ is a current concept, too, as can, for instance, be seen in the writings of Ernst Gombrich, for whom there has been a ‘constant interaction between narrative intent’ and illusionist ‘pictorial realism’ since the classical ‘Greek revolution’,10 or of Svetlana Alpers, who takes it for granted that post-classical Western painting was predominantly narrative from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.11

Intermediality Revisited: Reflections on Word and Music Relations in the Context of a General Typology of Intermediality

The essay continues Steven Paul Scher’s well-known and influential typological reflections on the field of word and music relations, which he has devised since the late 1960s, and tries to rechart this field in order to accommodate developments which have since occurred: the rise of intermedia studies in general and, in particular, of musico-literary perspectives that do not merely focus on ‘intracompositional’ phenomena, which can be observed exclusively within given works, but also ‘extracompositional’ relations, which occur between works transmitted in different media. Word and music relations are here seen as part of the wider field of intermediality, of which a general typology is proposed. It is a partial reconceptualization of a previous typology in the light of ongoing research. Former discussions of intermedia or interart relations have tended to focus on what I call ‘intracompositional intermediality’ or ‘intermediality in the narrow sense’ and on its subforms: ‘plurimediality’, and ‘intermedial reference’ through ‘thematization’ and ‘imitation’ of other media. As distinct from this approach, my typological revisiting of intermediality starts from a broader sense of the term, which also includes ‘extracompositional’ intermediality and its subforms ‘transmediality’ and ‘intermedial transposition’. All forms discussed are shown to be of relevance for word and music studies. The essay concludes with some perspectives of research that go beyond typological concerns.