Narratology in The Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research HEINEN - SOMMER PDF

Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research
Narratologia
Contributions to Narrative Theory
Edited by
Fotis Jannidis, Matı́as Martı́nez, John Pier
Wolf Schmid (executive editor)
Editorial Board
Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik
José Ángel Garcı́a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn
Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister
Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel
Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert
20
≥
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
Narratology in the Age
of Cross-Disciplinary
Narrative Research
Edited by
Sandra Heinen
Roy Sommer
≥
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
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앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research / edited

by Sandra Heinen, Roy Sommer.
p. cm. ⫺ (Narratologia)
ISBN 978-3-11-022242-5 (alk. paper)
I. Heinen, Sandra, II. Sommer, Roy.
P302.7.N385 2009
4011.41⫺dc22
2009026537
ISBN 978-3-11-022242-5
ISSN 1612-8427
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
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Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Laufen
Preface
This volume contains revised versions of the papers presented at the Inaugu-
ral Symposium of the Center for Narrative Research, which took place from
June 25-26, 2007 at the University of Wuppertal. The contributions by An-
dreas Mauz and Harald Weilnböck were added in order to emphasize the
cross-disciplinary character of the volume. The editors wish to thank Wolf-
gang Schmid, the executive editor of the Narratologia series, for his generous
support, and the external reviewers (whoever they are) for their very helpful
suggestions. We would also like to thank Anne-Catherine Höffer, who
helped prepare the layout for this volume, Joseph Swann for his translations
and careful proof-reading, Manfred Link for his work on the manuscript and
Manuela Gerlof at de Gruyter.
Wuppertal, May 2009
Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer

Contents
SANDRA HEINEN, ROY SOMMER

Introduction: Narratology and Interdisciplinarity......................... 1
BO PETTERSSON
Narratology and Hermeneutics: Forging the Missing Link......... 11
TOM KINDT
Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents....................... 35
ANSGAR NÜNNING
Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies:
Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials... 48
DAVID HERMAN
Narrative Ways of Worldmaking..................................................... 71
ROY SOMMER
Making Narrative Worlds: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach
to Literary Storytelling ...................................................................... 88
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
The Cage Metaphor: Extending Narratology into
Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis of Imagery ........ 109
WOLFGANG HALLET
The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes
and Media in Novelistic Narration.................................................. 129
PETER VERSTRATEN
Between Attraction and Story: Rethinking Narrativity
in Cinema............................................................................................ 154
Contents
SILKE HORSTKOTTE
Seeing or Speaking: Visual Narratology and Focalization,
Literature to Film............................................................................... 170
SANDRA HEINEN
The Role of Narratology in Narrative Research
across the Disciplines........................................................................ 193
ASTRID ERLL
Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies .................................... 212
JULIA LIPPERT
A “Natural” Reading of Historiographical Texts:
George III at Kew ............................................................................. 228
VINCENT MEELBERG
Sounds Like a Story: Narrative Travelling from Literature
to Music and Beyond ........................................................................ 244
ANDREAS MAUZ
Theology and Narration: Reflections on the “Narrative
Theology”-Debate and Beyond....................................................... 261
HARALD WEILNBÖCK
Toward a New Interdisciplinarity: Integrating Psychological
and Humanities Approaches to Narrative ..................................... 286
SANDRA HEINEN, ROY SOMMER
(Wuppertal)
Introduction: Narratology and Interdisciplinarity
1. Interdisciplinary Narrative Research as a

Horizontal Transfer between ‘Generic’ Theories
In his survey article, “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of

Narrative Theory”, Brian Richardson (2000: 168) observes not only that
“narrative is everywhere”, but also that it “seems to be a kind of vortex
around which other discourses orbit in ever closer proximity” (ibid.: 169).
There is no denying that narrative has been put on the agenda by an increas-
ing number of scholars in a wide range of disciplines: psychologists are not
only developing their own methodology to deal with narrative interviews
(Riessman 1993) but have recently also proposed a dedicated ‘psychonarra-
tology’ (Bortolussi/Dixon 2003); artificial intelligence research has a strong
interest in storytelling (e. g. Bringsjord/Ferrucci 2000); there is a branch of
business studies which deals with stories as means of branding and market-
ing (e. g. Zaltman 2003); ludologists have long recognized the narrative na-
ture of games (e. g. Murray 1997); anthropologists explore everyday storytel-
ling (Ochs/Capps 2001); theologists seek to ‘reclaim narrative’ (Doak 2004),
and in performance studies there is talk of a “storytelling revival” (Wilson
2006: x) on British, Irish and, especially, American stages.
The observation that many scholars in different disciplines are interested
in the processes, results and functions of storytelling is frequently interpreted
and welcomed by narrative theorists as a move towards interdisciplinarity. If
one defines interdisciplinarity as a mutually enriching exchange of findings
and ideas, based on shared research interests and concepts, however, there is
little evidence of such a transcending, let alone erosion, of disciplinary
boundaries. Only an extremely restrictive canon of seminal narratological
works by Propp, Genette and, sometimes, Chatman is routinely admitted to
the footnotes in works by ludologists, economists or psychologists dealing
with stories, while current narratological research is all but ignored. On the
other hand, only a handful of narratologists are really prepared to engage in a
dialogue with, say, cognitive psychology or artificial intelligence research. As
2 Sandra Heinen, Roy Sommer
a consequence, despite the shared interest in narrative, common ground is

hard to find:
Although there has been extensive research on narrative on a wide range of fields, the
flow of research findings across disciplinary boundaries is still minimal. Important ad-
vances in different scholarly traditions do not always inform each other, and research
findings often remain isolated and largely unintegrated. (Bortolussi/Dixon 2003: 2)
One plausible explanation for such mutual ignorance between ‘unintegrated’
fields of research is offered in Sandra Heinen’s survey article in the present
volume. Heinen points to the fact that narratologists are traditionally inter-
ested in narrativity in a very general way, and whereas this sounds almost
tautological in narratological ears, one has to understand that researchers in
other disciplines are interested in narratives for a wide range of reasons—
except for narrativity. Thus, the epistemological status of narratives varies
among the disciplines: whereas the analysis of life stories is a means to an
end in narrative psychology, for instance, ‘classical’ narratology is tradition-
ally interested in the nature of narrative in general, trying to define regulari-
ties and recurrent features which are shared by all narratives. As a conse-
quence, most research questions which are at the centre of the narratological
debate are simply too theoretical for scholars interested in storytelling as a
marketing tool or in narrative interviews as a method of data collection.
Even though ‘postclassical’ narratologists get excited when thinking of the
manifold underlying implications of identity formation through life stories or
corporate narratives, one has to accept that such phenomena transcend not
merely disciplinary or institutional boundaries but also the competencies and
research interests of ‘narrative’ sociologists or marketing experts.
A second explanation is that narratology, due to its foundation in literary
studies, has its roots in the theory of fictional narrative. The highly sophisti-
cated models and terminologies developed for the analysis of the novel,
plays, films, and poetry cannot be transferred to the analysis of non-fictional
storytelling without some serious modification. Here, narratology is still in its
infancy, despite the ground-breaking work by Monika Fludernik, David
Herman and other proponents of cognitive and linguistic approaches to nar-
rative and narratology. Even though more work is forthcoming in this field
(see Klein/Martínez 2009), we are still far from ‘integrating’ narrative re-
search in the sense of coordinating core interests, research questions and key
findings in a concerted effort to move beyond the current ‘Babelization’ of
narrative studies.
There is a third, institutional reason for the scarcity of truly interdiscipli-
nary dialogue. Most narratologists have been academically socialized exclu-
sively within the humanities, so their closest or most natural ‘allies’ beyond
the realm of literature or linguistics are colleagues from film studies, media
studies, gender studies and, since Hayden White, history. Disciplines engaged
Narratology and Interdisciplinarity 3
in empirical research (sociology, psychology) or computing (AI) normally

belong to different faculties, and the possible potential of cross-faculty interdis-
ciplinarity is only very rarely realized in practice. The reverse is equally valid,
of course: Few computer programmers interested in modelling storytelling
processes (a tiny minority in informatics, anyway) will have a professional
affiliation with the humanities. The respective methodologies of the humani-
ties allow for little common ground with regard to the standards and proce-
dures of empirical research and the criteria for valid results.
Finally, one should not forget that historians, psychologists or econo-
mists interested in narrative are still a minority in their respective disci-
plines—and that, until very recently, narratology was regarded as unfashion-
able even within literary studies (see Fludernik 2000: 83). This rather sober-
ing diagnosis gives way to a decidedly more optimistic outlook once one
starts limiting the range of collaborators. Although the grass seems always
greener on the other side, ‘narrative’ is quickly emerging as a paradigm which
unites the fields of inquiry mentioned above—within the humanities. It is this
type of ‘short-range’ interdisciplinarity which characterises most contribu-
tions to this volume.
If one tries to step back and describe in more abstract terms what is cur-
rently happening in cross-disciplinary narrative research (from a narratologi-
cal perspective), the relationship between narratology and its neighbouring
disciplines appears as what Uri Margolin (2007: 204) has recently described
as “a constant two-way horizontal transfer of concepts, models and claims
between same level domain-specific disciplines”. Margolin (ibid.) explicitly
mentions the exchange of concepts between literary and film narratologies as
an example of such a horizontal transfer. He also distinguishes the horizontal
exchange of concepts between theories from a vertical hierarchy of theories,
which may be situated on one of three distinct levels, according to their
range and degree of specification or abstraction:
Level I theories are […] mid-range, basically descriptive, and deal with one or more as-
pects, such as kinds of narrators, of a specific literary corpus. The claims made in them
are empirical in the sense of open to textual observation. Level II theories operate with
higher level concepts and theoretical constructs, such as the nature of the narrative func-
tion or the demarcation of narrative texts from other text types. While Level I theories
are specifically literary, Level II ones may have wider application [...], and in this sense
may be termed generic theories. Level III theories are generic semi interpreted ones such
as communication theory, semiotics, and general action theory. (ibid.)
This classification may further our understanding of the relationship between
narratology and the narrative research conducted in disciplines outside the
humanities. First of all, it is important to acknowledge that narratology is not
a Level III type of theory. Early structuralist visions of a ‘universal’ narrative
grammar or a ‘general’ poetics of narrative and current notions of the equally
fundamental ‘anthropological’ or epistemological functions of storytelling
display a tendency to encourage exaggerated expectations. But narratology is

first and foremost the study of narrative, not the mind, or the brain, or hu-
man nature, and this restricts its range to first and second level theories.
This is also valid for cognitive narratology which is not a subdiscipline of
the cognitive sciences but imports relevant concepts and ideas from the cog-
nitive sciences, usually via cognitive linguistics or frame and schema theories.
Do they represent the state of the art in cognitive research? Are they aware
of the latest neurological findings and psychological experiments? Probably
not, but this is not a problem, as long as one agrees that genuinely narra-
tological theories are situated on Levels I and II, and that they thus cannot
be expected to develop a “framework helping us to think of a whole class of
entities in a variety of domains” (ibid.). This means that it is not narratology’s
function to provide other disciplines with general research orientations (a
function exclusively preserved for Level III theories, according to Margolin),
and that narratology is not required to come up with a ‘master theory’ which
accounts for all things narrative.
Instead of down-playing the relevance or prospects of narrative research
across disciplinary boundaries, such a realistic definition of what can rea-
sonably be expected of narratology as well as of narrative research conducted
in other disciplines may both encourage further endeavours in this direction
and save narratology from becoming yet another “grand theory with a poor
knowledge base” (ibid.: 206). The fact that the key role of narratives for
coming to terms with personal experience, for constructing collective identi-
ties and for making sense of the past and the future is now widely acknowl-
edged, means that interesting work in this field will eventually be recognized
by others, even though an increased interest in narrative doesn’t automati-
cally coincide with an increased interest in (literary) narratology. But there is
no doubt that narratology has an excellent knowledge base when it comes to
narrative.
2. Controversies, Intermedial Applications of Narratology,

and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Theory:
The Contributions to this Volume
What exactly narratology is to do with this knowledge base, how and in

which directions it should be extended, and to which phenomena it should
be applied, is the topic of the first three contributions to this volume. They
represent opposed views with respect both to the present state and desirable
developments of narratology (restrictive vs. expansive, textual vs. contextual,
classical vs. post-classical positions), a debate which already surfaced in the
first volume of the Narratologia series, a collection of essays edited by Tom
Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003) under the seemingly simple, yet ulti-
mately controversial question: “What is Narratology?”
In his introductory essay, which was presented as a keynote speech to
the conference from which this volume emerged, Bo Pettersson takes up this
key issue in the ongoing debate between ‘restrictive’ and ‘expansive’ narra-
tologists, i. e. the convergence of narratology and hermeneutics. Pettersson
argues that the common distinction between two allegedly incompatible ap-
proaches focussing on formal issues from a synchronic perspective (theories
of narrative) on the one hand and contextual or diachronic perspectives on
the other (theories of interpretation) ignores the fact that both share an in-
terest in textuality. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, and referring to
Schleiermacher’s notion of interpretation, Pettersson proposes to combine
what he calls a “moderately intentionalist view of the literary work” with the
toolkit of post-classical narratology. The usefulness of this hybrid approach
to the analysis and interpretation of narrative fiction, termed “contextual
intention inference”, is then explored in a close reading of the ending of
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899).
This is followed by an equally programmatic critique of post-classical
narratologies by Tom Kindt which ends—tongue in cheek—with a move
“towards classical narratology”, the point of departure for all contextual nar-
ratologies. In keeping with the restrictive position in narratology, Kindt calls
for a strict separation of theories of narrative and theories of interpretation
and points out that narratologically informed interpretations of literary texts
don’t require a revision of existing narrative theory. He then rejects claims
that narratology might serve as a foundation for interdisciplinary narrative
research or that narrative theory might benefit from interdisciplinary applica-
tions, concluding that “we should leave narratology as it is”.
Ansgar Nünning’s plea for contextualist and cultural extensions of clas-
sical narratology takes a more pragmatic stance, encouraging further efforts
to develop narratology into a context-sensitive theory of narrative. Nünning
refutes binary oppositions such as text vs. context, form vs. content and top-
down approaches vs. bottom-up approaches as a false set of choices, arguing
for an alliance between postclassical and classical narratologies instead. He
emphasizes the achievements of postclassical approaches which have uncov-
ered new and productive lines of narrative in a variety of fields, from femi-
nist to postcolonial criticism, yet he also underlines that contextualist narra-
tology is still in its infancy. The crucial question of the future of narrative
theory and narratological analysis is closely linked to their ability to contrib-
ute to our understanding of culture as an ensemble of narratives.
Nünning’s final remarks on the challenges posed to narratology by the
cultural functions of narratives as crucial ways of making sense of the world
anticipate the theme of David Herman’s contribution to this volume. In his
article “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”, Herman investigates how inter-

preters create mental models of characters, situations and events (story-
worlds) in the reception process. This approach, which integrates cognitive
and transmedial approaches, is not restricted to a specific corpus of narra-
tives—Herman’s examples include face-to-face storytelling, a short story and
a graphic novel—but explores the referential properties of narrative in prin-
ciple. As Herman’s findings apply to all instances of world-making through
narrative, both in fictional and non-fictional discourse, and regardless of the
medium in which the story is conveyed, they will greatly increase narratol-
ogy’s applicability and usefulness in cross-disciplinary research projects.
Herman’s analysis of narrative world-making also reveals one major
blind spot in both classical and postclassical narratologies: the making of
narratives. Extratextual communication has traditionally been excluded from
narratology’s (intratextual) object domain, or it has been reduced to the re-
ception process, leaving the production side unattended. Roy Sommer inves-
tigates why this is the case, proceeding from an equivalence hypothesis
which assumes that writing stories involves similar cognitive processes and
knowledge structures as reading them. His essay looks at psychological crea-
tivity research, which distinguishes between aspects of person, field and do-
main, and argues that domain-specific studies of creative behaviour such as
storytelling have to rely on expert knowledge in order to yield relevant re-
sults. Sommer then shows how the narrative domain can be re-conceptua-
lized from a narratological perspective. His concept of narrative design ac-
counts for the influence of generic conventions, dramaturgical planning and
storyworld constraints in the storytelling process.
Monika Fludernik’s essay on narrative and metaphor has methodological
as well as theoretical implications. Using the example of the cage metaphor,
Fludernik shows how databases, widely used by corpus linguists, can enrich
narratological research. She demonstrates that metaphors can occur not only
on the levels of story and discourse, but can also be attributable to the ‘im-
plied author’, and that they may evoke alternative ‘mini-stories’. These prop-
erties pose a challenge to narrative theory which has traditionally neglected
metaphors and their functions.
Another suggestion for an extension of existing narratological models is
made by Wolfgang Hallet whose analysis of the multimodal novel calls for a
transmodal revision of the concept of novelistic narration. Following a com-
prehensive survey of novels which integrate non-verbal symbolic representa-
tions and non-narrative semiotic modes into verbal narrative, Hallet first
offers a definition of the concept of multimodality. He then explores the
functions of multimodality for, among others, the construction of plots and
characters, the representation of cognition and the contextualization of nar-
ratives. In conclusion, Hallet insists on the necessity of a transmodal narra-

tological concept of meaning construction.
Peter Verstraten revisits the controversy surrounding the narrativity of
film, reviewing several positions and concepts. Whereas historical studies
claim that, prior to the invention of cutting and editing techniques, film was
created and experienced as spectacle rather than narrative, other approaches
deny the possibility of non-narrative cinema. Other issues that pertain to the
narrativity debate are the relationship between form and content, especially
the functions of non-narrative spectacle and ‘excess’ (an abundance of stylis-
tic devices which are not motivated by the story). According to Verstraten,
‘excess’ is not a well-defined feature of film narration but largely a matter of
interpretation, and thus points to general questions of the relationship be-
tween story and style, dramaturgy and aesthetics across generic boundaries.
This is equally valid of the ‘travelling’ concept of focalization whose tex-
tual manifestations and potential effects Silke Horstkotte traces in her com-
parative analysis of two novels by Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten, 1909) and
Franz Kafka (Das Schloß, 1926) as well as their respective film adaptations by
Stephen and Timothy Quay (1995) and Michael Haneke (1997). Horstkotte
shows that whereas Kafka’s heterodiegetic narration makes use of consistent
internal focalization, this is absent from Haneke’s adaptation, despite its use
of voice over. In her readings both of Walser’s novel and of cinematic focal-
ization techniques (point of view shots, voice-over and mindscreen se-
quences), Horstkotte questions the strict theoretical distinction between nar-
ration and focalization. Her conclusion therefore emphasizes the interpretive
nature of narratological concepts, especially with respect to film narrative.
Whereas Verstraten’s and Horstkotte’s intermedial extensions of narra-
tology remain within the humanities, Sandra Heinen looks at interdisciplinary
applications of narratology in the social sciences. Her survey of recent case
studies concerned with non-fictional narrative allows for the distinction of
three types of applied narratologies, based on the respective status of narra-
tive: studies generally interested in understanding the storytelling process;
qualitative research projects, mainly interested in storytellers’ intensions and
motivations, which regard narrative as a way of making sense of lived experi-
ence; and, finally, studies focussing on the narrativity of scientific discourse,
especially within historiography, but also in legal studies and medical studies.
One example of a truly interdisciplinary approach within narrative re-
search is the field of cultural memory studies which brings together scholars
from the humanities and the social sciences. Astrid Erll looks at the various
intersections of narrative and individual as well as collective memory. She
first argues that classical narratology, despite its strong emphasis on narrative
time, tends to neglect issues of remembering and remembrance, which have
only recently been addressed more systematically by cognitive narratologists.
Erll then introduces current concepts of memory and demonstrates how

these apply to literature, as the various modes of remembering may be corre-
lated with the ways in which the past is represented in narrative fiction. In
her conclusion, Erll identifies areas for further research, such as a diachronic
survey of what she calls the ‘ideology of first person narrative’ or the inter-
medial analysis of narrative templates for autobiographical storytelling.
Julia Lippert’s essay on the ongoing reinvention and rehabilitation of
King George III shows how popular history makes use of narrative in verbal
and non-verbal media. Following a survey of narratological approaches to
historiography, Lippert turns to Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology as a theo-
retical framework for the study of experiential historical narrative. She then
offers a cognitive reading of the permanent exhibition on George III at Kew
Palace, distinguishing between framing devices (flyers, posters, internet ads
and the welcome building) and the multimedia presentation itself which
makes use of a wealth of audio material, including a narratorial commentary,
and a wide variety of objects.
Vincent Meelberg discusses whether narratology can serve as a medium-
independent analytical tool by applying it to music: can a musical listening
experience be described in terms of narrative understanding? Proceeding
from his definitions of narrative as a representation of a sequence of events
in time and of narrativization as the identification of temporal relations be-
tween events, Meelberg contends that structuring a piece of music as narra-
tive during the listening process may facilitate its comprehension. He further
claims that music can be regarded as a representation of crucial elements, such
as tension and resolution, and that we can speak of focalization in music,
although there are a number of crucial differences between literary focaliza-
tion and its musical counterpart, which Meelberg situates in performance.
Andreas Mauz underlines the key role of narrative (alongside other, non-
narrative, text types) for theology. Situating his work within the context of
modern Protestant systematic theology in German, Mauz first retraces the
heated debate on Christianity as a ‘narrative community’ (a term coined by
Harald Weinrich and Jean Baptiste Metz in 1973) which, interestingly, was
then closely linked to the notion of an emerging ‘post-narrative’ society.
Mauz subsequently gives a comprehensive overview over core aspects in
theological discussions of narrative and narration, which leads to his final
comments on the current role of narrativity for theology and the contribu-
tions of literary scholars to what might develop into an analytical ‘narrathe-
ology’.
The final essay addresses a number of issues which call for interdiscipli-
nary collaboration. Harald Weilnböck proposes an integration of psychologi-
cal and narratological approaches in what he calls Literary and Media Inter-
action Research (LIR). LIR’s ambitious research programme tries to build
bridges between the concepts of narrative in narratology on the one hand,

and psychotherapy research, psycho-trauma studies and developmental psy-
chology on the other. Weilnböck’s research questions demonstrate not only
the wide range of issues that may be addressed by LIR, including the correla-
tion of media interaction (aesthetic experience) with mental identity work,
but also the compatibility of LIR with cultural memory studies and cognitive
narratologies.
Looking at the contributions to this volume, one may detect three dis-
tinct developments within the overall framework of interdisciplinary narra-
tive research. The first trend seems to be the ongoing revision of existing
narratological models in the light of new or hitherto neglected phenomena
(such as storytelling and narrative templates, multimodality, stylistic meta-
phors and narrative levels or stylistic ‘excess’). A second development is
what Wolf (2005) has described as the ‘export’ of narratological concepts,
i. e. the application of (literary) narratology in transdisciplinary contexts (film
analysis, music, popular representations of historical events). Finally, despite
the criticism by ‘restrictive’ sceptics, there is a tendency to continue the de-
velopment of ‘hyphenated’ narratologies which combine narrative theory
with hermeneutics, linguistics, cognitive theory, or memory studies, to name
but a few options explored here. What unites these approaches to narrative
research is that they are sceptical whether the narrative poetics and narrative
interpretation can really be completely separated, and whether such a separa-
tion is desirable or even necessary. The dominant attitude in this volume
seems to be a pragmatic rather than programmatic one: it is the shared inter-
est in establishing common ground where narrative theory and analytical
practice can meet and mingle—to the benefit of both.
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BO PETTERSSON
(Helsinki)
Narratology and Hermeneutics:

Forging the Missing Link
Narratology and hermeneutics, the study of narrative and the study of inter-
pretation, have traditionally been considered separate areas of study. In this
paper I shall try to show that both could benefit from a rapprochement.
This essay will first briefly review some of the reasons why such a con-
vergence has not been forthcoming, and then attempt to show that a particu-
lar kind of hermeneutics can make a rapprochement possible. This requires,
however, that narratology revise some of its most deep-seated text-centred—
or textualist—notions. After presenting a number of avenues this rappro-
chement has taken and others that it could take, I will apply them to Kate
Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899). Finally I will draw some conclusions
for a more interdisciplinary view of literary studies in general and for a mer-
ging of narratology and hermeneutics in particular.
1. Narratology and Hermeneutics: Similarities and Contrasts
Some of the most obvious reasons for the de facto separation between nar-
ratology and hermeneutics bear on their different histories and theoretical
foundations.
Hermeneutics has a long and abiding association with biblical scholar-
ship—so much so that almost any search on hermeneutics on the net will
give you more hits on biblical than literary hermeneutics. Hence, it is no
surprise that it was Friedrich Schleiermacher, primarily a religious scholar,
who devised the first universal hermeneutics in the early nineteenth century.
His posthumously published major work in this field, Hermeneutik (1838),
shows that in his study of—literary and other—works Schleiermacher at-
tempted to combine linguistic and psychological (or intentional) approaches.
His disciple Wilhelm Dilthey went on to develop the psychological side of
hermeneutics and to include anthropological aspects—without, as is often
falsely claimed, completely abandoning its linguistic aspects (see e. g. Mak-
kreel 1992: 414-419). But by the early to mid twentieth century there was a
12 Bo Pettersson
kind of lull in literary hermeneutics, that is, before Hans-Georg Gadamer

and Paul Ricoeur revived the subject.
This was the time when structuralism was developed by, among others,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Leonard Bloomfield in linguistics,
based on the foundations laid by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de la linguisti-
que générale. As structuralism moved into literary studies, and narratology de-
veloped in the 1960s and 1970s under the leadership of Roland Barthes,
Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette and others, it became clear, however, that
it drew not only on the structuralist heritage but also on Aristotle’s Poetics,
Russian formalism and the Prague school. Not surprisingly, then, language
and text became the overriding metaphors for narratological frameworks
devised in a latter-day positivist, scientific spirit.
In the 1960s there were moves in the direction of interpretive relativism
in both hermeneutics and structuralism. In 1960 Gadamer published his
magnum opus Wahrheit und Methode, which argues on the basis of Heidegger’s
ontology for a reader-oriented view of hermeneutics. In France in the 1960s
and early 1970s Ricoeur wrote and taught on the interrelation between struc-
turalism, psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, in part inspired by Gadamer. But
other French scholars were more radical. By the end of the 1960s Barthes
and Jacques Derrida had discarded the scientific pretensions of structuralism
and opted for versions of what is now termed post-structuralism. In other
words, at this point in time (and some years following) a number of herme-
neuticists and literary scholars took similar theoretical and/or ideological
paths through the landscape of interpretive relativism. But note that—with
the possible exception of Ricoeur—structuralist narratology and hermeneu-
tics did not actually converge: Gadamer, for instance, never employed narra-
tive theory, and the later Barthes, who retained his narratological interest,
never entered the hermeneutic discussion, even though he had an abiding
commitment to interpretation.
In short, despite the fact that narratology and hermeneutics had similar
interests in the late twentieth century, they never really merged. Perhaps the
closest they came to a convergence—again, excepting Ricoeur—was in ap-
proaches that sought to reconcile hermeneutics with deconstruction, such as
Silverman and Ihde’s anthology on the topic (1985), the conversations re-
corded between Gadamer and Derrida (Michelfelder/Palmer 1989) and so-
me early works by Manfred Frank (e. g. 1997).
Structuralist narratology and twentieth-century hermeneutics, then, have
different historical and theoretical foundations. The one has primarily formal
interests, the other broadly interpretive ones. The one has positivist roots,
the other ontological ones which—in part due to an emphasis on the histori-
cal situatedness of readers—were bound to lead to interpretive relativism.
Narratology and Hermeneutics 13
The one takes for the most part a synchronic, non-contextual view, the other
a diachronic, contextual one.
What has less frequently been noted is that narratology and hermeneu-
tics have a common textual interest. Andrew Bowie (1990: 157) is right in
maintaining that Schleiermacher was in fact a precursor of the so-called lin-
guistic turn on account of his hermeneutics—and this more than a century
before structuralism became a prevalent tendency in the human sciences.
And, now that narratology has gone beyond its structuralist beginnings, there
is noticeably more of an interdisciplinary, diachronic and contextual focus in
recent work by, say, David Herman, Monika Fludernik and Ansgar and Vera
Nünning.
As for the relation between narrative and interpretation in general, a few
years ago there was an instructive debate in Poetics Today between David
Darby (2001) on the one hand and Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller
(2003) on the other. The latter criticized the former for advocating contex-
tualist narratology, since they felt it obscured “the epistemological difference
between narratological (descriptive) and interpretive operations in textual
analysis”, and they viewed narratology merely as “an interpretive heuristic”
(Kindt/Müller 2003: 416 and 416n). As we shall see at the beginning of the
next section, this kind of emphasis on narratology as a descriptive heuristic
subordinate to interpretation continues to neglect the interpretive moves
inherent in narratology.
In other words, even though some attempts have been made to combine
an interpretive angle with narrative-theoretical concerns, narratology and
hermeneutics are still a long way apart. Let me now consider some of the
most promising attempts to connect them.
All through his career Paul Ricoeur made important advances in the area
between narrative (as well as metaphor) and interpretation, and in mid-career
he even worked directly on hermeneutics. In 1970 he spoke of how “we”—
apparently meaning ‘we as scholars’—should “search—beyond a subjective
process of interpretation as an act on the text—for an objective process of
interpretation which would be the act of the text” (Ricoeur 1981a: 162, em-
phases original). This approach he found not only “objective” but also “in-
tra-textual” (Ricoeur 1981a: 162). In other words, Ricoeur was at that date
more influenced by structuralist thought than by (Gadamerian) hermeneu-
tics. Three years later, although his stance evidently still differed from Ga-
damer’s, his position had drawn closer.
The peculiarity of the literary work, and indeed of the work as such, is […] to tran-
scend its own psycho-sociological conditions of production and thereby to open it-
self to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in socio-cultural contexts
which are always different. In short, the work decontextualises itself, from the socio-
logical as well as the psychological point of view, and is able to recontextualise itself in
the act of reading. (Ricoeur 1981b: 91, emphases original)
14 Bo Pettersson
In claiming that the literary work goes beyond its conditions of production
Ricoeur here (and elsewhere) signals that he is critical of the hermeneutics of
Schleiermacher and Dilthey. Yet his view of the work as decontextualised
(even if recontextualised by reading) marks his way of combining structural-
ism and hermeneutics, since both usually view the work in isolation (even
though Gadamer had emphasised the relation of hermeneutics to tradition).
Ricoeur goes on to explicate what he terms “the status of subjectivity in in-
terpretation” and maintains that “[i]n sum, it is the matter of the text [a
phrase borrowed from Heidegger and Gadamer] which gives the reader his
dimension of subjectivity; understanding is thus no longer a constitution of
which the subject possesses the key” (Ricoeur 1981b: 94).
What Ricoeur did, then, during his mid-career interest in hermeneutics
was to suggest how structuralist narratology and hermeneutics could be
combined: both focus on the text and, by making the reader’s experience of
it “objective” and “intra-textual” and claiming that the reader’s subjectivity is
mainly triggered by the text, Ricoeur attempts to draw the two approaches
closer together. He even claims that “semiological models, applied in parti-
cular to the theory of the narrative” may help us understand that Dilthey’s
“ruinous dichotomy” between explanation and understanding can be over-
come (Ricoeur 1981b: 92).1
I think Ricoeur is right in pointing out that such a stark dichotomy does
not hold—and after the Science Wars I should by now be in good company.
But in other respects I feel that Ricoeur’s attempt at finding some common
ground for structuralist and hermeneutic approaches was misguided. Let me
briefly raise three objections. In my opinion, a literary work cannot decon-
textualise itself; interpreting a work can never remain ‘intra-textual’, let alone
‘objective’; and, as an artefact, a work cannot act as an agent by supposedly
providing readers with their ‘dimension of subjectivity’.
If Ricoeur’s starting-point in combining the two approaches was mainly
hermeneutic (despite his structuralist leanings), there was at least one notable
attempt in the same direction from the narratological camp. In 1978 Uri
Margolin published a paper on what he termed the “Significant Convergen-
ce” of literary structuralism and hermeneutics.2 He acknowledged their diffe-
rent points of departure, but referring to recent work by Tzvetan Todorov
and Jonathan Culler claimed to detect signs of a structuralist approach to
phenomenology and hermeneutics (see Margolin 1978: 179). This may be
rather surprising, since it was only a few years later that structuralist narra-
tology came to the end of its classical phase—which in turn was due not
least to the fact that narratologists had themselves started to see the truth in
1 Later in his career, Ricoeur (e. g. 1988: 157-179; 207-240) also discusses hermeneutics but in
ways that do not explicitly alter his view of its relation to the study of narrative.
2 I would like to thank Howard Sklar for this reference.
the objection that their focus on the formalist how often precluded the inter-
pretive why.
Margolin (1978: 181) went on to suggest that structuralism and herme-
neutics could converge through the “super science” of semiotics or commu-
nication theory by “giving primacy to the dynamic interference of readers’
and writers’ code over the text in isolation”. Understandably perhaps, he was
not able to show how this could be done, but his choice of semiotics—an
approach closely affiliated with structuralism—as a super science showed
that his way of effecting a convergence between structuralism and herme-
neutics was to subsume the latter into the former. It was with reference to
the work of the “Konstanz school of literary theory” (presumably meaning
Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss) that he finally put his cards on the
table: “I am in fact proposing to regard structuralism as a methodological
paradigm for hermeneutics, in the same way that linguistics was for structu-
ral poetics” (Margolin 1978: 183). Since Margolin (1978: 182) claimed that
structuralism with “its explicit and orderly nature” had “a clear advantage”
over hermeneutics, the convergence for him evidently meant that structura-
lism should hold sway but at the same time incorporate some features of
reception aesthetics in order to broaden its approach. It was in this context
symptomatic that Margolin did not refer to any hermeneutic scholar by na-
me.
As far as I can tell, Ricoeur’s and Margolin’s attempts to combine struc-
turalism and hermeneutics in literary studies were among the most explicit of
their kind. To be sure (as some names already mentioned suggest), in the
1970s and 1980s there were a number of efforts among scholars with a
structuralist or reception aesthetics background to blend formalist and inter-
pretive aspects in their approaches. But they were seldom interested in her-
meneutics as such and often had a firm textual focus.
Not until the 1990s did things really change. Or did they? In his wide-
ranging recent survey of the different kinds of narratologies of the last two
decades or so Ansgar Nünning (2006) shows how broad the field of narrato-
logy has become. The approaches are variously inspired by other areas of
study in human sciences and beyond (cultural studies, postcolonial studies,
ethics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, even artificial intelligence), or
by theories such as poststructuralism or feminism. The most prevalent ten-
dency is to combine formal study with an interest in what Nünning (2006:
154 et passim) broadly terms “cultural history”. Perhaps one could speak of
two kinds of move: one in which narratology broadens its structuralist ap-
proach by thematic, contextual or diachronic interests and another in which
there is a more pronounced effort to combine it with other disciplines. In
neither, however, have I detected any concerted effort to combine narratolo-
gy and hermeneutics. Nevertheless there have been other moves in that di-
16 Bo Pettersson
rection. Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel (1995: 189—see also Pettersson
2002), two authorities on literary structuralism and semiotics, have noted
that “poetics and aesthetics simply cannot keep feeding off intentional no-
tions, while pretending to ignore them”, thus implying a broader view of
interpretation not unlike the one I aim to present here. Peter Stockwell
(2005: 281 et passim) has also recently made a gesture towards combining
Gadamer’s hermeneutics with cognitive poetics and stylistics, but his appro-
ach still has evident structuralist roots. Perhaps the present state of the rela-
tion between narratology and hermeneutics is best portrayed by David Her-
man et al.’s wide-ranging and impressive Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory (2005). This includes a short and informative article on hermeneutics
(Ankersmit 2005), which however does not discuss the relation of that field
to narrative theory. Nor does the volume include an article on interpreta-
tion—which tallies with the deep-seated view that narratological study does
not make use of interpretation.
In other words, as far as the relation between narratology and hermeneu-
tics goes, things have not changed much. Neither party has engaged in ear-
nest with the other. The one really notable exception is Paul Ricoeur, but I
have already noted some misgivings about his approach, misgivings that
have to do with his grounding in Gadamer’s hermeneutics.
Now if the foremost twentieth-century hermeneuticists and classical and
post-classical narratologists have not been able to show how their areas of
study could be combined, can this really be done at all, and if so, how?
2. Forging the Link:

From Schleiermacher to Contextual Intention Inference
As I see it, there are two main obstacles in trying to combine narratology and
hermeneutics. The problem with narratology (which, as I have noted, still in
many ways includes structuralist traits) is its unwillingness to concede that it
entails interpretive decisions. For one thing, focusing on the formal features
of a narrative usually leads to a neglect of its thematic and ideological as-
pects. What is more, an emphasis on narrative chronology and the represen-
tation of consciousness is itself the result of interpretive decisions—evidence
enough that insights into some aspects of a literary work entail blindness to
others. This is one reason why many narratologists in the 1980s and 1990s
turned to thematics (see Pettersson 2002) and why, at the same time, the so-
called post-classical narratology (with related contextual and diachronic in-
terests) got under way. Nevertheless, as far as I can see, the role of interpre-
tation in narratology has not yet been adequately discussed. The other obsta-
cle is that even when hermeneutics has analysed particular literary works
(and on these rare occasions they have tended to be fictional), it has not no-
tably used narratological tools in doing so. I have suggested above that this
may have to do with the kind of hermeneutics that has prevailed since the
mid-twentieth century.
As my brief comments on Schleiermacher may already have suggested, I
hold that his hermeneutics laid the foundations not only for a more tenable
and useful kind of literary hermeneutics but also for one that can accommo-
date, and even in part merge with, narratology.
However, let me first briefly discuss Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s refutation
of Schleiermacher’s attempt to reconstruct the meaning of a work linguisti-
cally and historically. In Gadamer’s (1996: 167) words such an attempt is
“nonsensical” and “no more than handing on a dead meaning”. Repeatedly
Gadamer faults his predecessor—on whom he draws so heavily—for his
supposedly psychological focus, although when first discussing his work in
detail he admits that Schleiermacher’s combination of grammatical (linguis-
tic) and technical or psychological (intentional) interpretation is his “most
characteristic contribution” to hermeneutics (Gadamer 1996: 186). In using a
sentence of Schleiermacher’s highlighting the seminal role of language for
hermeneutics as a motto for the third (and last) part of his magnum opus,
Gadamer also recognizes this aspect of his predecessor’s position. In other
words, by diminishing the importance of his major forerunners (Dilthey as
well as Schleiermacher) through showing them as more simplistic than they
really are, Gadamer—like so many others in hermeneutics and literary the-
ory—attempts to make his own approach appear more novel and tenable.
Similarly, Ricoeur (1981c: 47) claims that according to Schleiermacher,
grammatical and technical interpretation “cannot be practised at the same
time” and that “[t]he proper task of hermeneutics is accomplished in this
second [technical or psychological] interpretation”. Thus he too makes of
Schleiermacher (1998: 229)—and even more so of Dilthey—a narrow-
minded intentionalist, not heeding that in his “General Hermeneutics”
Schleiermacher repeatedly emphasizes that “[t]hese [grammatical and techni-
cal interpretation] are not two kinds of interpretation, instead every explica-
tion must completely achieve both” and that “[p]recisely because in all un-
derstanding both tasks must be accomplished, understanding is an art”.3
Present-day hermeneutics is in the sorry situation that most readers have
accepted Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s thwarted views of two of the finest scho-
lars in the history of hermeneutics.
3 However, Andrew Bowie (1998: viii) is right in pointing out that “Schleiermacher thought both
types essential, but tended to change his mind on certain aspects of how each was to be carried
out”. Also, on balance, in his later career he especially developed his notion of divination (see
below).
18 Bo Pettersson
Since I aim to show that the attempt to approximate interpretive validity

by inferring contextual intention is related to an approach first championed
by Schleiermacher, and that such an approach goes well beyond “handing on
dead meaning”, let me now briefly mention some salient points in Schleier-
macher’s (1998) Hermeneutics of 1838 and other works.
As noted above, interpretation (more precisely, Auslegung or exposition)
for Schleiermacher takes two forms: the grammatical and the technical. Schlei-
ermacher’s point is that both are equal in status, and in order to understand a
(literary) work4 both are needed, just as an interpreter must combine the
objective and the subjective in his or her interpretive effort.
But even though one of Schleiermacher’s aims was to work out a general
hermeneutics, he is far from scientistic in his approach. In his hermeneutic
writings Schleiermacher’s interest lies partly in language (he even repeatedly
claims that there is no thinking without language) and he is at all times keen-
ly aware of the fact that language use is going on continuously and that any
individual learning a language by definition enters it in medias res. In fact,
Schleiermacher’s focus is precisely on language in use, often spoken langua-
ge, not on an abstraction like Saussure’s langue. And it is because no hard-
and-fast rules can be applied when interpreting utterances or works that he
calls explication an art of understanding (Kunst des Verstehens), as I have noted
above (see e. g. Schleiermacher 1995: 75-78).5
Since any work is mediated by language, it must be interpreted by means
of contextual historical as well as by hypothesizing divinatory reconstruction.
The ultimate task is, in perhaps the most famous phrase in all of Schleierma-
cher (1998: 23), “to understand the utterance at first just as well and then
better than its author”. Indeed the very marriage of the grammatical and
psychological accounts entails a historical contextualization of the work that
goes beyond the author’s conscious intention. As Gadamer (1996: 192) right-
ly observes, the critical effort “renders many things conscious of which the
writer may be unconscious” (see Thiselton 1992: 227). In this way Schleier-
macher attempts to deal with one of the major problems for any intentiona-
list account of interpretation, that of unconscious meanings. Perhaps he
would have agreed with Paisley Livingston’s (2005: 44-45) useful view that
artists’ (conscious and unconscious) intentions consist of “microplans” (e. g.
typing a word) and “macroplans” (e. g. writing a novel). Macroplans can
4 Unlike Andrew Bowie in his translation of Schleiermacher (1998), I translate Schrift as work
throughout, since text may sound anachronistic owing to the fact that in the last few decades it
has become so firmly anchored in (post)structuralist approaches. For a brief discussion of some
central terms in Schleiermacher and their translation see Pettersson (2005: 134).
5 We should, however, remember Andrew Bowie’s (1998: xxn) cautionary note that Kunst in
Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism also can mean ‘method’ or ‘technique’, but as I have
noted, Schleiermacher (1998: 11) emphasizes that hermeneutics is an activity that “cannot be
mechanised”.
include unconscious intentions and changes in intentions, and it seems that

Schleiermacher’s point may have been that hermeneutics should be able to
deal precisely with these.
Even these few remarks on some central interpretive notions may sug-
gest how modern Schleiermacher sounds. At a time when processual and
contextual views—in various pragmatic, pragmaticist and pragmatist
guises—finally prevail in contemporary linguistics, literary studies, semiotics
and philosophy, we can see that these developments had already been adum-
brated by Schleiermacher (as well as by Peirce, William James and Dewey,
among others). So even though the considerable rapprochement of intentio-
nalist and anti-intentionalist positions in philosophical aesthetics in the last
decade or so was not explicitly prompted by Schleiermacher’s work, his ba-
lanced and complex view of interpretation certainly figures in the back-
ground of some recent accounts (especially those of Peter Szondi, Manfred
Frank, Andrew Bowie and Wolfgang Iser).
As a matter of fact, Schleiermacher may have been more influential for
the literary studies of the last century than has hitherto been realized. I have
mentioned in passing that in his hermeneutic writings Schleiermacher repea-
tedly underlines that all thinking starts with language. It may not be an exag-
geration to claim that his emphasis on the centrality of language, as well as
the chain of influence joining him to Dilthey and Husserl, Sartre and Hei-
degger, and finally Gadamer and various poststructuralists, has been seminal
in the development of the fully-fledged ‘linguistic turn’ that has transformed
the humanities in the last fifty years or so (see Bowie 1990: 157). If there is
any truth in that, then it is surely ironical that Schleiermacher has been so
downgraded in recent literary studies and philosophy.
However, let me add another ironical twist. In my view, this is not the
reason why Schleiermacher is one of the foremost hermeneuticists ever. On
the contrary, I think the linguistic turn in its strong form has been one of the
most simplistic, even misguided movements in the history of the human
sciences, because of its autonomous view of language, exaggerated indeter-
minacy in meaning-making, agentless textuality, and disproportionate
emphasis on ideology and on a constructionist view of man (see Pettersson
1999a, 2005: 133-140). The linguistic turn that Schleiermacher was seminal in
starting has in fact led to a deplorably single-minded emphasis on language
and text in the human sciences.
But if so prevalent an approach is misguided, what can one offer in-
stead? Here Schleiermacher has provided us with certain prolegomena to a
better kind of hermeneutics, and even to a developmental account of inter-
pretation. In many of his works—the Ethik (1812/13) and Dialektik in par-
ticular—Schleiermacher (1990; 1976) has given us clues to the nature of the
psychological process of divination, the hypothesizing attempt to understand
20 Bo Pettersson
other people and their artefacts. This has not been lost on hermeneuticists
such as Herbert Schnädelbach (1984: 117-118), Frank (1997: 21-22) and Bo-
wie (1990: 163-165), who have commented on Schleiermacher’s (1995: 326-
327) developmental view of divining and comparing in the language usage
and comprehension of children. This divinatory process continues into adult
life, and in this context it is typical of Schleiermacher’s (1995: 328) praxis-
oriented and processual view to observe that, as an “art”, the sum of herme-
neutic experiences does not form absolute “rules” (Regeln) in human conduct
but only “advice” (Ratschlägen) (see Scholtz 1995: 97).
Schleiermacher could, then, be of help in devising a developmental ac-
count of literary interpretation. We do not simply become adult literary in-
terpreters just like that; we learn to interpret literature by our exposure to
various semi-literary genres in our childhood. The music, rhythm and rhyme
in ditties, nursery rhymes and lullabies prepare us for reading poetry. The
social element in human interaction that is so central in Schleiermacher can
be taken to suggest that dialogue and human interaction in general help us
understand drama and (some) fiction. Finally, so much of human communi-
cation is couched in narrative, both in speech and writing—and, if Damasio
(2000) is right, our very identity as persons is narrative—that this again, if it
is true, helps explain how readily we understand real life narratives as well as
those in fiction and non-fiction.6
What is more, we should remember that Schleiermacher not only por-
trayed the basis of literary interpretation but also gave us the keys to appro-
ximating interpretive validity by a number of procedures. In brief, he produ-
ced a broad account of interpretation that, perhaps better than any other
hermeneutic theory, combines a host of central aspects: linguistic and psy-
chological, subjective and objective, personal and social, historical and textu-
al, intellectual and imaginative, in a holistic processual approach.
Schleiermacher’s achievement, I would claim, offers the foundation for a
kind of hermeneutics that is more useful in literary-critical praxis than other
current approaches. But it requires a more definite perspective. This I have,
in earlier work, termed contextual intention inference.7 Most generally, and antici-
pating the more detailed discussion below, contextual intention inference constitutes
the meaning-making of a literary work by a detailed study of it in relation to the intentio-
nal, textual, social and cultural dimensions of its context of origin. This inferential
effort does not entail that interpreters should try to accomplish the impossi-
ble task of blindfolding the dimensions of their own predilections and con-
texts, but that they should use them as best they can for actively gaining an
understanding of the dimensions of the literary work in relation to its con-
text of origin. In the words of Robert D. Hume (1999: 141), who has presen-
6 For a discussion of narrative and other views of identity see Pettersson (2008).
7 The next two paragraphs are based on views first suggested in Pettersson (1999b).
ted a related contextual approach based on what he terms “old historicism”,

“[w]hen we reconstruct contexts we are building the best hypothesis we
can”. In terms of the current discussion of intention and interpretation in
aesthetics, contextual intention inference can, as a kind of up-to-date and
critical approach to philological study, be termed a moderate intentionalist
and moderate monist position.8
Where does interpretive validity come in, then? Following Kai Nielsen’s
(1996)—and others’—refinement of Nelson Goodman’s original concept of
reflective equilibrium, interpretive validity, when combined with contextual in-
tention inference, is approximated by a continuous intersubjective and corrective
critical pursuit drawing on similar efforts in ethics, philosophy and epistemol-
ogy. This kind of intersubjectively agreed position would fall under the usu-
ally unattainable ideal of wide reflective equilibrium.9 Suffice it to say at this point
that my approach differs from interpretivist advances by its combination of
historical contextualization, interpretive intersubjectivity and the self-
correction ideally inherent in critical praxis. In contrast to interpretivist rea-
dings, which by their relativist nature often invite obsolescence, literary stu-
dies focusing on interpretive validity stand a chance of being useful to future
readers. The goal is, in Wendell V. Harris’s (1996: 208-209) terms, to provide
cumulative scholarship rather than ephemeral criticism.
Now, more explicitly, how does this relate to narratology? What I have
presented is a view of literary interpretation based on a contextual and mo-
derately intentionalist view of the literary work. When joined with narratolo-
gy, such a hermeneutic can help narratology outgrow its abidingly structura-
list view of the literary text and its unidimensionally contextualized readings.
In other words, contextual intention inference can provide contemporary
narratology with an interpretive approach that would do its broader cultural
and historical aspects justice. I write approach rather than framework, let alone
theory, since I think Schleiermacher is right in claiming that interpretation is
an art rather than a science and thus in part reliant on the interpreter’s skill
and in part on the specific aspects of the object of interpretation—for the
interpretation of each literary work requires particular foci.
What is more, contextual intention inference requires the kind of detai-
led contextual, historically-anchored and interdisciplinary study of the literary
work that post-classical narratology and its multi-faceted toolkit is well
equipped to provide in the study of fiction. Hence, narratology and herme-
neutics can profitably be combined: classical narratology offers the textual
tools, post-classical narratology the contextual and cognitive tools, and a
hermeneutics based on contextual intention inference provides an account
8 For recent arguments for monist versus multiplist right interpretations see Krausz (2002).
9 See also moral objectivity or, more precisely, “objectivity humanly speaking” in Hilary Putnam
(1994: 151-181, 177n quote).
22 Bo Pettersson
that is able to deal with narratology’s interpretive features and approximate

interpretive validity.
Literary-critical praxis is the touchstone of any approach, not least one
that tries to forge a link between two schools as different as narratology and
hermeneutics. So let us see how contextual intention inference can deal with
a test case.
3. The Awakening as Test Case: Edna’s Final Swim
The ending of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899) has long been a
central bone of contention in Chopin studies. After providing some contex-
tual background on the novel and its protagonists, I shall, therefore, concen-
trate on that final section. By now considered a minor American classic, the
novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a bourgeois wife and mother in New
Orleans who, in the summer in which she learns to swim, falls in love with a
younger man, Robert Lebrun, and experiences a sexual awakening. Their
love is apparently not consummated, but Edna goes on to have an affair with
a roué called Alcée Arobin and finally realizes that no human relation will
last and that she is what the original title of the novel suggests, “A Solitary
Soul”. In the last pages she swims out to sea and apparently drowns.
Let me first contextualize Chopin’s novel in her oeuvre and Chopin cri-
ticism. By the time Chopin published The Awakening she was already an esta-
blished author with a novel (At Fault, 1890) and a collection of short stories
(Bayou Folk, 1893) mostly depicting rural life in the South. Her focus in these
stories is mainly on the relations between men and women, and although she
often focalises the action through her female characters, she has stories in
which the focalisation is evenly distributed in terms of gender, and even so-
me in which the male perspective dominates, such as “A Morning Walk”
(1897) and “Ti Démon” (written in November 1899). This suggests that the
common view of Chopin as a straightforwardly feminist author does not
hold in terms of the formal aspects of her fiction. A careful contextual rea-
ding of the ending of The Awakening also suggests that a narrow thematic
feminist interpretation of the novel does not do it justice.
One of the important aspects bypassed in many readings of The Awaken-
ing is Chopin’s deep-seated interest in science, especially in the works of
Charles Darwin, noted by a contemporary critic as early as 1894.10 Through-
10 In a presentation of Chopin published in 1894 William Schuyler stresses her strong scientific
bent: “[H]er reading [was] almost entirely scientific, the departments of Biology and Anthro-
pology having a special interest for her. The works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer were her
daily companions; for the study of the human species, both general and particular, has always
been her constant delight” (reprinted in Seyersted/Toth 1979: 117; see Seyersted 1969: 49).
out his critical biography Seyersted (1969: 90) shows how well-read Chopin
was in contemporary science and French realist authors—Flaubert, Zola and
especially Maupassant—and finally maintains that “[w]hat Kate Chopin
wanted was nothing less than to describe post-Darwinian man with the
openness of the modern French writers”—a point later developed by Bert
Bender (1991/2007). It is important to recognize this Darwinian aspect in
Chopin, because without it the female characters in her fiction—Edna Pon-
tellier in particular—may be viewed merely in their social role, especially in
relation to their male counterparts. That much Chopin criticism has ignored
this dimension is because of its emphatic focus on the women’s role. My
point, then, is that the social aspects of The Awakening should be seen in rela-
tion to Chopin’s broader view of humankind.
Among such social aspects the relation between men and women, espe-
cially adult heterosexual love, is one of the most important. Critics have ten-
ded to emphasize Chopin’s view of women’s emancipation as “her major
subject: the emergent selves of women defying the social securities and stric-
tures of the old South” (Papke 1990: 27), or more generally as “the female
struggle for identity” (Gilbert 1986: 18), or in The Awakening as “a woman’s
(female artist’s) struggle for her own identity” (Wheeler 2007: 120). These
are important aspects of much of Chopin’s work, but should be counter-
weighted by the fact that she often focuses on individual rights irrespective
of gender. For instance, in one of her most widely anthologised short stories,
“The Story of an Hour” (1894), which thematises a woman’s awakening after
hearing the news of her husband’s death, the narrator first focalises the pro-
tagonist’s thoughts, then comments on them:
There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for
herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with
which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-
creature. (Chopin 2006: 353, emphasis added)
What is more, as I have noted, in most of her fiction—both before and after
The Awakening—Chopin also focalises the action through her male charac-
ters. One instance is another celebrated story, “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892),
in which the two male and two female protagonists focalise the action (three
of them suffering pangs of jealousy) and finally form two couples. Out of
the four only Calixta cannot get the lover she actually wants (Alcée), but
makes do with another. In a sequel to the story, “The Storm” (written in
1898), in the sexually most explicit scene she ever wrote, Chopin (2006: 596)
allows Calixta, during a storm, to experience her consummation with the
lover who had previously spurned her. Afterwards they both go back to their
spouses and “everyone was happy”. (Understandably, Chopin never even
tried to publish this story.) Similar scheming, cunning and passion among
both men and women occur elsewhere in Chopin’s work, and at times
24 Bo Pettersson
women do not understand men, as the male protagonist of At Fault even

complains to his dearly beloved Thérèse (2006: part II: ch. 6, 816).11 Never-
theless, more often it is the female protagonists who feel their husbands or
lovers show no understanding of their needs and views, especially of eman-
cipation.
Now let us turn to the novel and consider it, and especially its ending, in
some detail. Between her first and final swims Edna is portrayed in different
social roles, as wife, lover, mother, daughter, sister, friend, hostess. In most
of these roles she is less than successful, at times wilfully so, at times despite
herself, dissociating herself from the company of others. As a wife she finds
she does not love her nice, but dull and possessive, husband. Like Jeanne
Vasseur in Guy de Maupassant’s (1922) story “The Awakening” (Maupassant
was Chopin’s favourite author), she stands between a young lover (Robert
Lebrun) and a seductive roué (Alcée Arobin), and finally realizes that neither
love nor sexual attraction will last. As a mother to her two small boys, she is
simply “not a mother-woman” but rather volatile, being “fond of her chil-
dren in an uneven, impulsive way”; her husband even speaks of “her habitual
neglect of her children” (ch. 4, 888; ch. 7, 899; ch. 3, 885). As a daughter and
sister, she has gloomy memories of her stern and selfish Presbyterian father,
the Colonel, to whom she does not feel “warmly or deeply attached” (ch. 23,
950). As a sister she refuses—without offering an excuse—to go to the wed-
ding of one of her two sisters (ch. 24, 954). As a friend, she is torn between
two women, both of whom she is fond of in some way, but neither of whom
is suitable as a role model for her: the beautiful madonna-like mother-
woman Madame Ratignolle and the artistic and emancipated but “disagreea-
ble” and “self-assertive” Mademoiselle Reisz, who has “a disposition to
trample upon the rights of others” (ch. 9, 905). As a hostess, she throws a
fine dinner-party at the end of the novel, having moved out of her marital
home, but even here she experiences solitude: she is “the regal woman, the
one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone” (ch. 30, 972).
In the light of Edna’s behaviour in these social roles, Nina Baym (1981:
xxxvi) thinks we must finally admit that Edna is “a wholly self-absorbed
character”. Since “[n]o large-scale growth in psychological, intellectual, or
spiritual freedom follows from Edna’s sexual awakening”, she concludes that
the novel is “best characterized not so much as a feminist work as an indivi-
dual and indecisive meditation on feminist themes, resisting translation into
ideology” (Baym 1981: xxxviii f.). Baym may be largely right that it is anach-
ronistic and exaggerated to read The Awakening as a feminist novel, but
11 Subsequent references to Chopin’s (2006) complete works will be included in the text by page
reference. As is customary in Chopin criticism, owing to the many editions of her works, refer-
ences to At Fault and The Awakening are given by both chapter and page.
whether Chopin was “indecisive” in penning it is more doubtful, as a careful

reading of the ending will suggest.
From the very start Edna’s face is portrayed as having “a contradictory
subtle play of features”, and in the first inkling of her awakening her behavi-
our is impelled by “two contradictory impulses” (ch. 2, 883; ch. 6, 893). Pau-
la A. Treichler (1993), among others, has studied the many ambiguities in The
Awakening, and I have touched above on a number of its dualities: two
lovers, two friends, two children, two sisters, two swims. Kathleen Wheeler
(2007: 130) summarizes her study of the novel’s “oppositions” as related to
different levels of structure, theme, character and style. All such dualities and
dichotomies would suggest that ambiguity in different guises is the central
literary technique of the novel. Neither in its feminist import, however, nor
in other aspects is this “indecisive”; on the contrary, it is carefully plotted in
Maupassant’s spirit.
Before focusing on Edna and her final swim, let me note that the other
major characters are also made more complex by being portrayed in contra-
dictory ways. This has not been remarked by Chopin critics, although many,
like Wheeler (1994/2007), discuss the pair-like juxtaposition of these charac-
ters. Even though she is depicted in predominantly negative terms, Made-
moiselle Reisz moves one and all, especially Edna, by her piano-playing. Ma-
dame Ratignolle may be beautiful and devoted to her husband, but she
shocks Edna by the way she coquettes with the Colonel (ch. 23, 951). The
boring and patriarchal Léonce Pontellier is nevertheless well-liked by all, who
consider him “the best husband in the world”, and even Edna must admit
that “she knew of none better” (ch. 3, 887). Although passionate and consi-
derate, Robert Lebrun turns out to be just as possessive as Edna’s husband
(ch. 36, 992). Doctor Mandelet, often considered Edna’s sympathetic confi-
dant, shows his prejudice against emancipated women when he asks Mr Pon-
tellier whether Edna has been “associating of late with a circle of pseudo-
intellectual women—super-spiritual superior beings” (ch. 22, 948).12 Across
the board, character description is another feature in the novel’s network of
ambiguities.
I have observed above some self-centred qualities in Edna, but she has a
number of other qualities, some of them redeeming, that make her the cen-
tral enigma on which all the ambiguities of the novel shed light. First of all, it
is important to notice that her duality and her predilection for solitude are
constitutional:
12 In his answer to the doctor Mr Pontellier notes that the trouble is that Edna “hasn’t been asso-
ciating with anyone” (ch. 22, 948). Thus, Chopin again stresses the solitary aspect in Edna’s
awakening.
26 Bo Pettersson
Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period
she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which con-
forms, the inward life which questions. (ch. 7, 893)
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which
never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. (ch. 16, 929)
What her awakening entails is that Edna refuses to keep on silencing the
thoughts and emotions of her “inward life”. With her engaging manner and
sensual, sensitive and artistic personality, Edna, like her husband, is popular
with both men and women. But it is her struggle to combine the conflicting
aspects of her life openly in a social context that makes her such a complex
and intriguing character. In an argument with Madame Ratignolle she epito-
mizes her emancipated stance: “I would give my life for my children; but I
wouldn’t give myself” (ch. 16, 929). However, when Edna remembers these
words immediately before going for her final swim, her children “appeared
before her like antagonists who had overcome her”, although “she knew a
way to elude them” (ch. 39, 999). The latter statement seems to suggest that
she has made a conscious decision, but that suggestion is withdrawn in the
very next sentence: “She was not thinking of these things as she walked
down to the beach”. Here we have an instance of Edna’s contradictory view
of her children—as well as of how she suddenly forgets the very important
issue of what her awakening entails for her relation to them.
As Tuire Valkeakari (2003: 209) has pointed out, “any critic’s view of the
two issues—the deliberateness of Edna’s suicide and the degree of Chopin’s
feminism—are interrelated”. Above I have suggested that Edna’s character,
her actions and motivations, thoughts and emotions are so contradictory and
ambiguous that any straightforward feminist reading of the novel fails to take
account of much of her personality. And I have shunned using the simple
word suicide for Edna’s last swim. Likewise, her sudden impulse to “elude”
her children seems to be swept away in the next sentence. Similarly, in the
final paragraphs the sea is portrayed in terms that echo earlier descriptions,
but with heightened ambiguity.
The water of the gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of
the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring,
murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white
beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing
was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling, disabled down, down to the
water.
Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded, upon its accustomed peg.
She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bath-house. But when she was there beside
the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and
for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun,
the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.
How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She
felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world it had never
known.
The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her
ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep,
but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The
touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
She went on and on. (ch. 39, 999-1000)
To be sure, there is evident emancipated, even ecstatic Whitmanian action
and imagery in this passage, relating to both Edna and the sea. A sudden
impulse makes her discard the bathing suit she has just put on. Savouring her
own nudity, she feels newborn and succumbs to the sea’s sensuous embrace.
But her rapture is deeply undercut. The sea still invites her into “abysses of
solitude” and tempts her like a serpent. The image of the bird flying away in
her fantasy of the naked man on the beach has turned into a maimed bird
helplessly falling into the sea. The final awakening as a “new-born creature”
is undermined by the fact that the previous day she has watched “the scene
of torture” of Madame Ratignolle giving birth and remembered how she
herself had “awaken[ed] to find a little new life to which she had given being,
added to the great unnumbered multitude that come and go” (ch. 38, 995,
994). Also, both on land and in the water, she is anything but comfortable:
the sun and breeze have no mercy on her; the sea is chill and deep.
What is more, there is little to imply that she makes a deliberate decision
to commit suicide. As she is swimming, Edna thinks of her near and dear
ones—of her husband and children, who “need not have thought that they
could possess her”; of Mademoiselle Reisz’s scornful reaction to such a no-
tion; of Robert, who “would never understand” her; and of Doctor Mande-
let, who might—until “it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her
strength was gone” (ch. 39, 1000). The fact that she sums up her social rela-
tions in this way may suggest that she is aware that she is approaching the
end of her life. But is this the result of a deliberate act? Treichler (1993: 309)
has shown how Chopin often makes Edna the grammatical object and em-
ploys “the distancing it was/there was construction” (ibid.: 317). In the phrases
just quoted we have instances of both, implying that although awakened in
many senses, Edna is at least as much acted upon as acting. And Treichler
(1993: 320), I think rightly, goes on to argue that the language of the novel
“continually asserts the existence of an independent, impersonal state of
affairs over which Edna has little control”. For Treichler (1993: 323), the
dread and source of oppression “lies in the reality of the female body”, and
“to awaken, as Edna has done, is to die” (ibid.: 325), which means that her
28 Bo Pettersson
“suicide” (ibid.: 325) is “a triumph, not a failure” (ibid.: 325)—a common

enough view of Edna’s last swim.13
However, as we have seen, there is much to suggest that the reasons for
her lack of control go beyond patriarchy and its oppression. I think Nancy
Walker (1994: 256) is closer to the mark in her assertion that “Chopin writes
The Awakening from the perspective of a naturalist, giving Edna little control
over her own destiny, and it is important to note that she is controlled by her
own emotions, not by men or society”. But when Walker (ibid.) detects “no
stance about women’s liberation or equality” in the novel, she rather down-
plays the feminist dimension in Edna’s awakening. Nevertheless, her empha-
sis on the naturalist tendency in the novel is significant. As we have seen,
much in Chopin points in this direction. Edna echoes typically disconsolate
naturalist views in her opinion that her children merely add to “the great
unnumbered multitude that come and go”. Moreover, when she first confes-
ses that she loves Robert (to Mademoiselle Reisz), Edna finds it as unfatho-
mable as Chopin does in her answer to the query “Is Love Divine?”: “[D]o
you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select?” (ch. 26, 964).
What Chopin seems to be saying here is that sexual selection may be a fact,
but it is certainly not conscious. But even though she still loves Robert dearly
as she is about to drown, Edna is well aware that he will never understand
her, that she is utterly alone. She also realizes that neither Robert nor Alcée
will be her last lovers, not least since Robert’s brother Victor made advances
to her at her final dinner-party, repeatedly singing the song with which his
brother had first won her heart (ch. 30, 974). Watching Victor’s advances to
Edna a minor character called Gouvernail murmurs two lines from Swin-
burne’s poem “A Cameo”, which suggest a rather cynical view of love: “The-
re was a graven image of Desire [/] Painted with red blood on a ground of
gold” (ch. 30, 973).14
Edna’s sexual awakening is nevertheless portrayed in terms of the Slee-
ping Beauty when she asks Robert “How many years have I slept?” and he
answers “You have slept precisely one hundred years” (ch. 13, 919). Howe-
ver, the fairytale aspect of her awakening is later qualified by the statement
that she starts to “comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up
of beauty and brutality” (ch. 28, 967). The very last lines of the novel are
often glossed over as mere childhood reminiscence, but I think they are mo-
re significant.
Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an
old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer
13 For a summary and discussion of different view of Edna’s ‘suicide’, see Wolkenfeld (1994).
14 The fact that a character called Gouvernail is trying to seduce the married protagonist in Cho-
pin’s story “Athénaïse” (1895) seems to strengthen such a reading.
clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky
odor of pinks filled the air. (ch. 39, 1000)
Elaine Showalter (1993: 186) is among the few critics who focus on this pas-
sage, arguing that “Edna’s memories are those of awakening from the free-
dom of childhood to the limitations conferred by female sexuality”. But, like
Treichler’s, her conclusions seem exaggerated: the image of the bees and
flowers is supposedly “a standard trope for the unequal relations between
women and men” (Showalter 1993: 186), and such images “decoy women
into slavery” (ibid.: 187). In fact, the end of the novel is alluding to the scene
in which Edna, before learning to swim and before her sexual awakening,
sits watching the sea and is reminded of a meadow that to her as a little girl
in Kentucky “seemed as big as the ocean”. The smell of the flowers may also
refer back to the first way the sea tempts her, not by its voice or touch as it
was to do later, but by its “seductive odor” (ch. 5, 892). And on that earlier
occasion she goes on to reminisce about her first romantic infatuation, the
object of which was a cavalry officer:
At a very early age—perhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grass—
she remembered that she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-
eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky. She could not leave his
presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face, which was some-
thing like Napoleon’s, with a lock of black hair falling across the forehead. But the
cavalry officer melted imperceptibly out of her existence. (ch. 7, 897)
This was her first awakening to romantic love, just as her desire for Robert
was her first awakening to sexual love. Its major significance and ultimate
defeat is symbolized by the comparison to Napoleon. But although some-
times called the American Madame Bovary, The Awakening is not a straightfor-
ward novel of the danger of romantic illusions. Just as Edna is about to go
for her final swim she realizes that “the day would come when he [Robert],
too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her
alone” (ch. 39, 999). Even when seen exclusively in relation to her social
bonds, Edna’s romantic and sexual awakenings both point to the same out-
come: solitude.
Thus, Edna’s final awakening—and the one Chopin criticism seldom fo-
cuses on—concerns her realization that romantic and sexual awakening leads
inevitably to a more encompassing insight: that every individual is (as Cho-
pin’s original title has it) “A Solitary Soul”. To be sure, Chopin describes a
woman’s awakening, and perhaps Seyersted is right that the bird imagery im-
plies that in a patriarchal society only “male freedom can fly” (1969: 159,
emphasis original). But so much of her other writing and her translations of
Maupassant (see below) seem to suggest that the final and most hard-won
awakening concerns the ultimate solitude of each and every human, irrespec-
tive of gender. Even though such an awakening seems to be too much for
30 Bo Pettersson
Edna, by depicting it in detail Chopin shows that she is able to face it—and
helps her readers face it.
My conclusion is, then, that critics detecting either straightforward tri-
umph (Treichler 1993) or pessimism (Seyersted 1969: 142, 149) in the depic-
tion of Edna and her final swim overlook the care with which Chopin struc-
tured her novel and its ambiguous end—despite the fact that both Treichler
and Seyersted stress Chopin’s use of ambiguity. Just as Maupassant in
“Night” leaves his first-person narrator entering the Seine (although since it
happened “yesterday” (Bonner 1988: 197), he must have survived), and just
as Maupassant’s narrator in “Solitude” cannot make up his mind whether the
man who feels an abiding horror for solitude is insane or not (see ibid.: 200),
Chopin, who translated both stories, leaves the ending of her novel supreme-
ly ambiguous. Of course, by the 1890s having ‘fallen’ women die or commit
suicide was a common ending in novels, but Chopin chooses only to inti-
mate her protagonist’s death—Edna is still swimming and reminiscing in the
final lines. What she seems to be implying is that Edna had necessarily to
experience her infatuation with—and later sexual desire of—men, since hu-
mankind, like all of nature, subsists only through such attraction. She opts
neither for rejoicing in nor deploring Edna’s awakening; rather, following
Darwin and the literary naturalists, she reports unsentimentally its results.
Like Yeats, Chopin casts a cold eye not only on death but on the solitary life
each individual must lead—an aspect neither Margo Culley (1994) nor Elaine
Showalter (1993) refer to in their respective readings.
Of the literary naturalists, Chopin held Zola in high regard, but in revie-
wing his novel Lourdes, she finds it “unpardonable” (698) that the author’s
view is so evident, since for her, as she notes elsewhere, “Thou shalt not
preach” is “an eleventh commandment” (703). Of the American authors she
especially liked the contemporary Southern-born author Ruth McEnery Stu-
art, in particular the “[s]ympathy and insight” she showed in her realist sto-
ries (712).15 In portraying Edna with sympathy and merciless insight Chopin
seems to be saying, with Maupassant in “Solitude”: “What a mystery is the
unfathomed thought of a human being; the hidden, free thought that we can
neither know nor lead nor direct nor subdue!” (Bonner 1988: 196) As we
have seen, so complex and carefully constructed is Chopin’s portrayal of
Edna’s awakening that the novel (and especially its ending) has been inter-
preted in a wide variety of ways. Inspired by Darwin, Whitman and Maupas-
sant, Chopin had by the late 1890s developed her craft as a writer to the
15 A detailed description of Chopin’s meeting with Stuart can be found in Toth (1991: 268-271),
who also notes: “Although she read carefully the writings of her American competitors—Ruth
McEnery Stuart, Mary E. Wilkins, Sarah Orne Jewett—Chopin’s model remained Guy de Mau-
passant” (ibid.: 272).
point that she was able to create one of the most multifaceted and compel-
ling female portraits in American literature.
4. Conclusion: A Kind of Link Forged
In what sense has this analysis of The Awakening been able to combine narra-
tology and hermeneutics? It made use of detailed study of the work, its lan-
guage and focalisation, and related it to other works of fiction and non-
fiction by Chopin. It studied its characters, especially the protagonist, and
central thematics, and drew interpretive conclusions on the basis of formal
and thematic traits, attempting in this way to contextually infer the intention
Chopin had in penning her novel. Furthermore, it referred to some of the
most astute Chopin critics and came to the conclusion that many have
rightly pointed out ambiguous traits in The Awakening. It proceeded to ad-
duce ancillary evidence substantiating and developing such claims: Chopin’s
reading of French fiction, especially Maupassant, her deep-seated interest in
Darwin and Whitman, her diary entries, all strengthen a reading of the novel
as focusing on the solitude of the individual; for human natural selection,
and the sexual awakening it is based on, prioritise the species and its survival
at the expense of personal happiness. In this way, the analysis aimed to show
that although American feminist critics have done a good job in contextual-
izing the novel, their ideological perspective has made them exaggerate its
feminist import. A multidimensional reading based on contextual intention
inference aspires to a greater approximation of interpretive validity. Indeed, I
would claim that such a reading could provide a firmer basis for any ideo-
logical interpretation. In the case of The Awakening one could demonstrate
how Southern patriarchy is portrayed in a balanced way, with Darwinian
thematics playing a central role.
The blend of narratology and hermeneutics illustrated in this reading
adds intentional and contextual parameters to both those approaches, hol-
ding in check the interpretive relativism of late twentieth-century textual
structuralism and hermeneutics. That is the kind of link I have tried to forge
between these two important traditions within the human sciences. I envisa-
ge that it could be extended in a number of ways: its developmental aspects
could be studied in order to better understand how humans make use of
narrative and how it is interpreted; its intentional aspects in order to better
understand how humans function as agents in creating and understanding
narrative; and its contextual aspects in order to better understand the role
sociocultural aspects play in writing and reading narrative.
It is up to the readers of this paper to see whether the metal I have used
in forging the link, and the welding I have made, are strong enough. If not, I
32 Bo Pettersson
invite them to do a better job in this or some other way. But one thing is
certain: the link between narratology and literary hermeneutics must be for-
ged if both approaches are to receive a more tenable foundation.
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TOM KINDT
(Göttingen)
Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents*

“Here comes the future and you can’t run from it
If you got a blacklist I want to be on it.”
(Billy Bragg: Waiting for the Great Leap Forward)
In the course of the last ten years, narratology has gained a popularity in the
humanities that it never enjoyed before, not even in the heyday of structural-
ism. Given the annual number of new monographs, anthologies and articles
devoted to questions of narrative theory, it stands to reason to adopt a term
coined by Manfred Jahn and Ansgar Nünning (1994: 300) and to speak of a
“narratological industry” that is currently experiencing boom conditions. As
is well known, once a field of study in the humanities becomes the object of
increased attention it runs the risk of decreased unity. Narratology’s recent
development seems to be an illustration of this rule. After the demise of
structuralism in the 1980s, narrative theory has not only experienced a re-
markable revival; at the same time, it has undergone extensive diversification.
What once was a more or less homogeneous domain of theorizing has be-
come a many-voiced field of debate; where once there was agreement at least
on crucial questions there is now controversy on almost everything.1
For some time now, narratologists have obviously felt more and more
uncomfortable with this situation and have therefore made intense efforts to
appraise and cautiously evaluate the proposals for a renewal of narratology
and its core concepts. In her “Afterthoughts” to the 2002 edition of her Nar-
rative Fiction Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 135) accurately observed: “A
reconsideration of narratology has become a genre of its own”. In what fol-
lows, I will contribute to this genre. In contrast to most of the existing at-
tempts to reconsider narratology, I am not going to provide a survey of new
approaches to remodeling narrative theory, be it in part or in whole. Instead,
I will address a claim that has, since the 1990s, been put forward in various
contributions to narratology, irrespective of their particular programmatic
* I would like to thank Tilmann Köppe and Jan Christoph Meister for their criticism of an earlier
draft of this paper.
1 See, for example, Herman (1999), Nünning (2000), Fludernik (2000), Nünning/Nünning
(2002a; 2002b), Kindt/Müller (2003a), Sommer (2004), Meister/Kindt/Schernus (2005).
36 Tom Kindt
background. To cut a long story short: my paper will analyze a trait of the
ongoing debates on the present and possible future state of narrative theory
which I will from now on refer to as ‘narratological expansionism’.
I will proceed by successively addressing what seem to be the two basic
varieties of the expansionist claim with regard to narratology. The first part
of this essay will criticize the idea of transforming narratology into a founda-
tional theory within the domain of literary studies, suitable in particular to
guiding and evaluating the interpretation of literary texts. The second part
will discuss the endeavor to reconceptualize narratology as a basic discipline
responsible for narrative phenomena in different fields of research. To pre-
vent the suspicion that I am once more, as David Darby (2003: 429) put it,
attempting “to close the barn door long, long after a number of purebred
[…] horses have escaped”, I will deal with both expansionist claims in a two-
step procedure, initially considering the actual state of affairs in literary stud-
ies on the one hand and in the humanities on the other, thereafter examining
the arguments for the proposed changes in the two fields of research.
1. Narratology and Literary Studies
Apart from some leftover structuralists, almost every narratologist in current

literary studies seems to be hooked by the idea of a fundamental renewal of
narrative theory. Although the proposals for such a renewal—the so-called
new, hyphenated or postclassical narratologies—are manifold and differ in a
number of respects, most of them have at least some features in common.2
In the present context, it will do to dwell on just one of these features,
namely, the expansionist claim that narratology is to be modeled as a theory
encompassing both the analysis and interpretation of literary narratives. This
is the central demand of the large subclass of new approaches to narrative
theory that have been, for some years now, categorized as ‘contextual narra-
tologies’.3 The claim can be traced back to Susan S. Lanser’s 1986 manifesto
for a ‘feminist narratology’4 and has, since then, been taken up in several
contributions that argue for a reorientation of narrative theory, e. g. in the
proposals for a ‘historical narratology’, a ‘postcolonial narratology’, or a ‘cul-
tural/intercultural narratology’.5 In my view, the claim should be rejected; in
the next paragraphs I shall explain why.
2 For a list of these features, see Nünning (2003: 243-244).
3 On this concept, see for instance Chatman (1990), Tolliver (1997), Darby (2001; 2003),
Kindt/Müller (2003c), Sommer (2007).
4 On the debate surrounding the conception of a ‘feminist narratology’, see Lanser (1986; 1988),
Diengott (1988), Prince (1996), Allrath/Gymnich (2002), Nünning/Nünning (2004).
5 See, for example, Nünning (2000), Erll/Roggendorf (2002), Birk/Neumann (2002), Sommer
(2007).
Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents 37
If one attempts to explicate what narratology is or should be, it seems

advisable to reconstruct at first how it is generally understood. A good start-
ing point for such a reconstruction is obviously to take a look at the usage of
narratological concepts in literary studies. To simplify matters, I will abstain
from examining these applications in any detail, confining myself to a single
finding: that the usage of narratological concepts has not fundamentally
changed since the days of Eberhard Lämmert, Franz K. Stanzel, and Wayne
C. Booth, when theorizing on literary narrative started to become a continu-
ous and coherent venture.6 Narratology has been and still is predominantly
applied in the context of textual interpretation, but it has not been and still is
not used as a theory of interpretation. People interested in interpreting a
literary narrative normally resort to narratological concepts, but at the same
time they will probably be aware of, to quote Mieke Bal (1985: x), “the need
for more theory beyond narratology”. While there is obviously no agreement
as to what can or should be the outcome of narratological analyses, there
seems to be a broad consensus that they cannot result in interpretations,
unless the analytical tools are combined with an interpretive approach. To
put it in a nutshell: in literary studies, narratology commonly serves as a tool
for preparing, initiating, or backing up interpretations; it is understood as a
heuristics but not as a theory of interpreting texts.7
So far, such a conception of narrative theory has only been outlined; its
relevance, however, becomes apparent in the casual programmatic commit-
ments of many narratologists, not least of prominent and influential ones.
Gérard Genette (1980: 265), for example, characterizes his own approach in
Narrative Discourse as “a procedure of discovery, and a way of describing” or,
in short, as “a method of analysis” (ibid.: 23).8 Picking up this theme in the
afterword to Narrative Discourse Revisited, he stresses again that he has no time
for the “impositions of ‘coherence’” that are usual in “interpretative criti-
cism”: “the function of narratology is not to recompose what textology de-
composes”.9 Franz K. Stanzel (1986: 237) at the end of his Theory of Narrative,
expressly emphasizes that his system of possible and historical narrative
forms can also “serve as a frame of conceptual reference for practical criti-
cism”. And in the introduction to his 2002 essay collection Unterwegs. Eine
Erzähltheorie für Leser, he professes that the aim of his contributions to narra-
6 On the history of narratology, see especially Stanzel (2002b), Cornils/Schernus (2003), Herman
(2005a), Fludernik (2005).
7 On this idea, see Kindt/Müller (2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2006).
8 As shown by, for example, the work of Eberhard Lämmert and Franz K. Stanzel in the 1950s
and 1960s, a corresponding understanding of narratology lay behind the German-language
study of narrative from an early date, see, for instance, Lämmert (1955: 17-18); Stanzel (1959:
127-128; 1964: 9-10). Only recently have efforts been made to explicate this idea, for example
in Stanzel (2002b), on which see Kindt (2003).
9 Genette (1988: 155).
38 Tom Kindt
tology has always been “to present concepts and theories that prove their
value as ‘discovery tools’ in dealing with specific works” (Stanzel 2002b: 19-
20).
The outlined explication is in principle an exhaustive answer to the ques-
tion what narratology is or should be; there is, in other words, no need for
further remarks on the issue. In the present context, however, it seems ad-
visable to add some conceptual comments on narratology. Such comments
might be of help here because heuristic usefulness with regard to interpreta-
tion is of course not a unique selling point for narratology and its concepts.
With regard to the interpretation of literary narratives, many different kinds
of thing may turn out to be heuristically valuable, even interpretations or
theories of interpretation. There are, for example, many deconstructive read-
ings of literary texts that draw on the results of existing hermeneutic inter-
pretations based on structuralist analyses of the works in question. Hence, it
seems reasonable to briefly explicate what kind of theory narratology is and
where the differences between theories like narratology and theories of inter-
pretation lie.
From a conceptual perspective, narratology is an object-theory; it is, in
other words, a more or less complex model of the object narrative, narration,
or the like. Normally, such a model rests on a conception of the necessary
and sufficient properties of its object, but it also contains an idea of its typi-
cal features, and different ways in which its main aspects can be shaped.10 By
virtue of providing object-models, theories like narratology can be under-
stood as methods or methodologies—in this case, the elements of the model
are conceived as components of instructions for analytical operations.11
However, no such analysis yields a fully fledged interpretation—and the rea-
son for this becomes obvious if one takes a look at the fundamental struc-
tural features of theories underlying literary interpretation. However differ-
ently theories of interpretation are conceptualized from a meta-theoretical
point of view, it seems to be a unanimous assumption that they basically
comprise (at least) two elements: a ‘conception of meaning’ specifying the
type of meaning sought (this could be called the “goal component” of an
interpretation theory) and a ‘conception of interpretation’ i. e. a set of as-
sumptions and rules as to how such meaning is to be identified (this could
be called the ‘methodological component’ of an interpretation theory).12
Even from this sketchy characterization it should be clear what the main
conceptual differences between theories of narrative and theories of inter-
pretation are: interpretation theories as a rule comprise object-theories but
10 See, for example, Jahn’s reconstruction of Genette’s proposal, Jahn (1995: 33).
11 See Kindt (2003).
12 On this idea, see Danneberg/Müller (1981; 1983; 1984a; 1984b), Stout (1982; 1986), Hermerén
(1983), Strube (2000).
do not coincide with them; narratology, in contrast, has neither a conception

of meaning nor a conception of interpretation at its disposal, and is therefore
unsuitable for either guiding or evaluating interpretations.
The preceding deliberations do not of course constitute a knock-down
argument against the attempt to reconceptualize narrative theory, but they do
point towards some questions anyone committed to the expansionist project
must answer. For instance, why should narratologists ignore the existing
links between narrative theory and adjacent areas of theory formation in
literary studies, such as theories of fiction, genre, interpretation, and so
forth? Why should they concern themselves with problems such as the rela-
tionships between texts and their contexts which have already been ad-
dressed and convincingly solved by many established approaches to textual
interpretation? Why should they obscure the differences between two dis-
tinct kinds of operation in textual analysis, namely, describing and assigning
meaning? Why should they reinvent the wheel and transform narrative the-
ory into yet another theory of interpretation?
At first sight it might be surprising that the supporters of reconceptualiz-
ing narrative theory as a theory of interpretation hesitate to ask, let alone to
answer, these questions. However, a closer look at the manifestos for such a
renewal of narratology quickly reveals that its advocates simply misunder-
stand their own aspirations; they seem to have other objectives than they
suppose themselves to have. What they are actually aiming at is not a fun-
damental transformation, but a diligent application of narrative theory. In
short, they stand for narratologically informed interpretations. There should
be no need to show in any detail that this reasonable goal can be achieved
without the slightest revision of narrative theory.
2. Narratology and the Humanities
As noted above, narratological expansionism is by no means restricted to

literary studies. The development that is now, following Martin Kreiswirth,
generally referred to as the ‘narrative’ or ‘narrativist turn’ in the humanities
has prompted another expansionist position that seeks to remodel narrative
theory as a foundational discipline for the humanities as such, one that deals
with narrative phenomena in different cultural spheres. This widening terri-
torial claim forms the basis of quite a number of recent proposals for a
transgeneric, intermedial or interdisciplinary narratology; but it is also im-
plied in many attempts to demonstrate the relevance of narrative in specific
disciplinary contexts.13 Since narrative seems to be a ubiquitous cultural phe-
13 See, with references to further reading, Nünning/Nünning (2002b), Meister/Kindt/Schernus
(2005), or Kindt/Köppe (2009).
40 Tom Kindt
nomenon, so the advocates of this type of expansionism argue, narratology

can appropriately play a constitutive role across all the human sciences.
After a very brief look at the current situation of narrative research in the
humanities, I shall address some consequences for narratology that are often
drawn from the narrative turn: first of all, I will examine the assumption that
the narrative turn gives reason to remodel narrative theory. Thereafter, I
shall consider the proposal to transform narrative theory into a foundational
discipline for the humanities; in doing so, I will specify why I doubt that
such a remodeling is worthwhile.
As early as 1992 Kreiswirth (1992: 629) noticed a trend in the human
and social sciences which he proposed to call the “narrative turn”: “there has
recently been a virtual explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing
about narrative; and it has been detonated from a remarkable diversity of
sites both within and without the walls of the academia”.14 Since then, this
interest has not leveled off—quite the contrary: today, it would be difficult
to spot a division within the humanities that does not deal with narrative in
one of its many manifestations. Historians focus on the narrative shaping of
their reports, psychologists investigate the relation between narrativity and
conceptions of the self, exponents of law examine the place of narrative in
the courtroom, philosophers reflect on the role of narrative in argumentation
and explanation, theologians consider the narrative structure of the Bible,
exponents of management studies discuss the potential of narrative to re-
solve business conflicts—and the list could go on.
In the course of this development it has become hard to ignore that the
phenomenon of narrative has evolved into a point of contact between a large
number of disciplines within the humanities. However, this observation has
not so far given rise to any noteworthy cooperation between different fields
of research that one might count as examples of interdisciplinary collabora-
tion, even allowing a permissive concept of interdisciplinarity. Beyond disci-
plinary efforts to come to grips with the phenomenon of narrative, there
have been at best a few attempts by individual scholars to combine methods
and concepts of multidisciplinary origin, accompanied by more insistent
proposals for dialogue and collaboration between different divisions of the
humanities.15
However, while the heightened awareness of narrative ubiquity has so far
not stimulated any considerable interdisciplinary enterprise, it has obviously
had a notable impact on the programmatic controversy about narratology
and its future conceptualizations. Quite a number of proposals for a renewal
of narrative theory have been put forward in the light of the narrative turn.
14 On the ‘narrative turn’, see Polkinghorne (1987), Nash (1990), Hinchman/Hinchman (1997),
Kreiswirth (2000; 2005), Fireman/McVay/Flanagan (2003).
15 See, for instance, Herman (1999; 2002; 2003; 2005b).
However different these proposals may be in some respects, they unani-

mously rest on a pattern of reasoning that one might call the ‘corpus argu-
ment’. The existing narratologies, so the argument goes, rely on sets of data
that are unsuitable to serve as a foundation for building a solid theory. More
concretely, the corpora of texts that have so far been taken into account by
narrative theories are either too small or too unbalanced or both. On this
account, the advocates of the corpus argument stand for a reconceptualiza-
tion of narratology based on more comprehensive, and thus more represen-
tative, data.
The corpus argument is normally developed not systematically but ex-
emplarily; in most cases, it is spelled out with reference to existing narratolo-
gies that are assumed to be in some way deficient. Following this vein, advo-
cates of the corpus argument, for example, claim that Genette’s narratology
is problematic and in need of revision because it almost exclusively refers to
a single literary narrative, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Or they
criticize Stanzel’s approach to narrative theory for relying solely on canonical
European novels of the 18th and 19th century. In some cases the corpus
argument is not put forward by addressing established narratologies but by
alluding to the results of the steadily increasing multidisciplinary research in
narrative. Within the framework of existing narrative theories, so some sup-
porters of the argument claim, one cannot take account of these results.
Based on such considerations Martin Kreiswirth (2005: 378), in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, gives the following explanation for a skepti-
cism with regard to classical narratology that has become prevalent in the age
of the narrative turn:
In the last decade narrative has become a significant focus of inquiry in virtually all
disciplinary formations, ranging from the fine arts, the social and natural sciences, to
media and communication studies, to popular therapy, medicine, and managerial
studies […]. Yet, with each shift in disciplinary orientation or research tradition, as
many new questions have arisen as answers. As soon as we begin to feel secure
about our findings, we learn that this or that subspecies has been forgotten, this
phenomenon or characteristic overlooked or suppressed, this function or structure
neglected.
At first sight, the corpus argument as outlined above might look convincing;
it simply seems evident that the corpus of texts on which a systematic ap-
proach to narrative relies should exert some influence on the theory’s shape.
However, closer consideration reveals that this impression is deceptive. If
one criticizes a narratological approach with reference to the corpus of texts
it is built on, one mistakes elements of the theory’s context of discovery (or
presentation) for elements of its context of justification. Narrative theories
use narrative texts like Proust’s À la recherche or the classic European novels
for heuristic or illustrative purposes, but they are not ‘based’ on them in the
strict sense of the word. There are serious reasons to doubt that the relation
42 Tom Kindt
between narrative theories and the corpora of texts they rely on should be
understood (as the advocates of the corpus argument suggest) by inter-
preting the concepts and models of narratology as empirical generalizations.
Such an interpretation might seem tempting, because empirical observations
do without doubt play an important role in the process of developing a nar-
rative theory. But it should not be concluded from this finding that narrative
theories are empirical theories. In fact, narratologies are not empirical gener-
alizations but more or less systematized schemes of conceptual stipulations.
Such conceptual schemes cannot be validated empirically; on the contrary,
they have to be evaluated with regard to criteria like applicability, simplicity,
coherence, unity, etc.
Keeping this in mind, it is also hard to see how the results of multidisci-
plinary narrative research should have the impact on narratology that the
adherents of the corpus argument suppose them to have. An exploration of
narrative structures necessarily presupposes at least a tentative conception of
narrative. On this account, narrative research in whatever discipline or field
of study cannot supply good reasons for a reconceptualization of established
notions of narrativity: it either rests on those very notions or is based on
rival concepts right from the start. Of course, this does not mean that narra-
tive research in, for instance, historiography, philosophy or psychology
might not provide reasons for modifying existing narrative theories; but such
modifications would not be what the advocates of the corpus argument had
in mind when they put forward their claim.
As indicated above, the corpus argument serves as a starting point for a
number of different proposals for a renewal of narratology. With reference
to their particular idea of what a reshaping of narrative theory should look
like, it seems reasonable to distinguish between moderate and radical varie-
ties of such proposals. In this last paragraph of my paper, I will confine my-
self to considering a radical consequence for narrative theory that is often
drawn from the narrative turn, namely, the expansionist idea of a narratology
possessing foundational status within the human sciences. To avoid any mis-
understanding: my comments on this idea are not intended to demonstrate
that such a conception of narratology is theoretically flawed and cannot be
made to work; rather, I will try to highlight two more or less basic limitations
to the proposed modeling of narrative theory—the limitations of fundamen-
tality and functionality.
The limitation of fundamentality: Roland Barthes (1966) was surely right,
when, in his seminal essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narra-
tive” he claimed narrative to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. However, his
followers obviously overstated the matter by asserting that “narrative is eve-
rywhere” (Richardson 2000: 168). The plain fact is: narrative is not every-
where. And, what is more, even if narrative is somewhere, it is often of sub-
ordinate or even no importance to the subject at hand. As Peter Lamarque

showed in his impressive article “On Not Expecting Too Much of Nar-
rative”, narrative and narrativity do not always play a central role whenever
they appear or can be identified. To presume the opposite is a false assump-
tion that follows from taking “some particular modes of narrative, notably
fictional narrative, as arche-typal” (Lamarque 2004: 406). The consequences
of these observations for the narratological approach are obvious: the theory
appears to be much less fundamental than its supporters tend to assume; at
best, the approach might be justified in claiming responsibility for narrative
whenever it occurs, but not for all the cultural contexts in which it occurs.
The limitation of functionality: The advocates of the proposal in question not
only misconceive the fundamentality of the theory they are striving for; they
also seem to have no clear conception of its scope or structure. Given the
tremendous diversity of manifestations of narrative that such a theory would
have to take into account, there can be no doubt that it would consist of
nothing more than a very broad and therefore insignificant notion of narra-
tive or narrativity.16 Due to its lack of complexity the proposed narratology
would be of restricted usefulness, to say the least. It is evident that a narra-
tive theory which merely coincides with a basic notion of narrative can nei-
ther adequately describe nor explain the various manifestations of narrative
that different fields of research are dealing with. There seems to be just one
function left for a narratology conceived as a foundational discipline for the
humanities, namely, that of providing a benchmark for identifying narrative
in different cultural spheres.
The history of the humanities can inter alia be interpreted as a history of
failed attempts to implement a foundational discipline. Narratologists are
well advised to try and save their theory from becoming yet another episode
of that history. In the wake of the narrative turn, it has not only become
common to expect too much of narrative but, likewise, of narratology.
3. Towards a Classical Narratology
To sum up: I have sought to characterize and criticize two central types of
narratological expansionism. Firstly, I have aimed to show the inconsistency
of the claim that narrative theory can provide a theory of interpretation; sec-
ondly, I have attempted to demonstrate some of the consequences of the
narrative turn for narratology, and specifically to highlight the limitations of
the idea of reconceptualizing narratology as a foundational discipline within
16 In the light of the difficulties that have emerged in the debates on the definition of narrower
concepts of narrative, like, for example, that of literary narrative, one might question whether
going after an all-embracing notion of narrative is a promising project.
44 Tom Kindt
the human sciences. It should have become apparent along the way that the
two types of expansionist proposal are, in fact, at odds with each other: the
first type amounts to an endeavor to make narrative theory more specific,
the second type attempts to make it more general. In my view, we should
leave narratology as it is.
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ANSGAR NÜNNING
(Giessen)
Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies:

Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials1
1. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?”
In the title of an essay published in Poetics Today in 1990, Seymour Chatman

raised the question “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?”
Anyone who tries to survey the field almost twenty years later will have to
admit that we still do not really know. What is worse, we do not even know
for sure what ‘contextualist narratology’ really is. Since structuralist narratol-
ogy was interested in anything but context, ‘contextualist narratology’ may
sound suspiciously like an oxymoron. Anyone trying to provide a survey of
contextualist narratologies is therefore well advised to add a somewhat cau-
tious and tentative subtitle. As the word ‘towards’ in my subtitle already indi-
cates, I am well aware of the fact that all one can hope to offer at this stage is
a rough outline of some of the approaches and concepts associated with the
notion of a contextual, cultural or historical narratology, but I will certainly
not reach the as yet only dimly discernible outlines of the winning-post. It is
a consoling thought, however, that for some time many narratologists and
other literary theorists have been on the move towards some end or other.
In fact, narratologists always seem to be moving towards new destinations,
but apparently they hardly ever get there, as is shown by the impressive
number of titles of books and articles beginning with the word ‘towards’.
Among the dozen or so examples that I have come across are Mary Louise
Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), Andrew Gibson’s
Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996), Manfred Jahn’s “Towards a
Cognitive Narratology” (1997), Susan Lanser’s double move “Toward a
Feminist Narratology” (1986) and “Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative
Voice” (1999), and a volume called Toward a Critical Narratology (Fehn et al.
1992).
1 The present essay is an updated, revised and expanded version of ideas first broached in some
of my earlier articles; see e. g. Nünning (2000; 2003; 2004). I should like to thank Simon Cooke
and Roy Sommer for their valuable suggestions.
Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies 49
It may be worth mentioning in passing, however, that narratologists are

not alone in their unflagging restlessness, always moving towards some
specified, but apparently unattainable destination. In fact, they move in very
good circles, perhaps in more ways than one, as a brief glance at some
prominent scholars from other disciplines who have chosen similar titles
may illustrate. In 1973 Clifford Geertz was still plodding along “Towards an
Interpretive Theory of Culture”, but at least discovering ‘Thick Descriptions’
on his way, Lionel Gossman has for some time been moving Towards a Ra-
tional Historiography (1989), and Stephen Greenblatt’s heroic quest “Towards a
Poetics of Culture” (1989) has by now turned into a veritable pilgrimage of
thousands of ‘New Historicists’. Given that with the possible exception of
Monika Fludernik, who has definitely made it Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology
(1996), no one has yet managed to return with the holy grail, I feel no need
to apologize for the fact that I won’t either.
Though it may be a consoling thought that even such luminaries as
Geertz, Gossman, and Greenblatt, as well as eminent narratologists like
Fludernik, Gibson, and Lanser, seem to have been content with moving
towards some goal or other, mere movement ‘towards’ can be anything but
satisfactory for anyone seriously interested in developing a new approach
such as a contextualist or cultural narratology. It hardly comes as a surprise,
therefore, that proponents of contextualist narratology have been taken to
task for failing to deliver the goods. As Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller
(2003b: 210) rightly observe, “programmatic proposals for a contextualist
narratology are often advanced but rarely implemented”. Similarly, Roy
Sommer (2007: 66) bluntly but rightly emphasizes that “the ubiquity of
‘across’, ‘towards’ or ‘beyond’ in the titles of (contextualist) narratological
essays doesn’t signal exciting future developments but, soberingly, unfin-
ished business. If we want progress rather than movement, those queuing up
for ‘departure’ will eventually have to show up at ‘arrivals’.” The fact that
even an ardent and versatile advocate of postcolonial and intercultural narra-
tologies like Sommer has begun to get impatient with the unfinished busi-
ness of contextualist narratology should not only give us reason to pause, but
should be understood as a clarion-call that it is high time to move beyond
programmatic proposals.
Using this as a point of departure, the present article will make a modest
attempt to survey the approaches associated with the notion of a contextual,
(inter)cultural, postcolonial and historical narratology, and provide an outline
of some of their main concepts and promises. Instead of offering yet an-
other wide-ranging survey of recent developments in narratology,2 I shall
2 For informative overviews of the state of the art in narratology, or the various narratologies for
that matter, see Barry (1990), Fludernik (1993; 1998; 2002a), Herman (1999a; 1999b), Kindt/
50 Ansgar Nünning
argue that in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research, narratology

would stand to gain a lot by taking various contexts into account, and that
cultural analyses and context-sensitive interpretations of narratives would
stand equally to gain by actually applying and refining the categories pro-
vided by narratology. The present essay pursues two modest goals: first to
sketch out some of the premises, concepts and methods of a contextualist or
cultural narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narratology
to the service of a context-sensitive interpretation of narrative, and second to
indicate how narratological categories may be used in order to tease out the
epistemological, ethical and normative implications of narrative.
After a brief discussion of some of the problems and pitfalls involved in
the project of a contextualist narratology (section 2), section 3 will provide a
survey of the main approaches conveniently subsumed under the wide um-
brella-term ‘contextualist narratology’. Section 4 is devoted to a delineation
of some of the main premises and concepts that provide the backbone of
contextualist or cultural approaches to narrative. The brief conclusion argues
that a cultural narratological framework holds a number of distinct promises,
opening up narratology to the various fields of cultural history (section 5).
2. Problems and Pitfalls of Programmatic Proposals
Anyone who wants to sing the praises of yet another new approach to narra-
tology might be well-advised, however, to begin by admitting that there are
many unresolved problems surrounding the project of a contextualist narra-
tology. The most pressing of these seems to be that the relation between
literary texts and what used to be called ‘contexts’ is under-theorized at best
(see Fohrmann 1997; Glauser/Heitmann 1999). This should not, however,
discourage anyone from exploring areas around which traditional narratolo-
gists put up notices declaring ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. What struc-
turalist narratology ignored and left unanswered is the crucial question of
“how literary production is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural con-
struction” (Bender 1987: xv). Though I will certainly not be able to resolve
the many complex problems with which neither New Historicism nor other
approaches interested in contextualization (see Gymnich/Neumann/Nün-
ning 2006) have effectively come to grips, I hope the argument advanced
below will go some way towards crossing the border between narratology
and the various contexts of cultural history, bridging a gap that has so far
separated the two disciplines to the detriment of both.
Müller (2003a), Nünning (2000; 2003), Onega/García Landa (1996), Richardson (2000). See
also the two volumes edited by Nünning/Nünning (2002a; 2002b).
Anyone seriously interested in promoting the cause of a contextualist

narratology that relates narratives to their cultural contexts must have been
somewhat dismayed by David Darby’s controversial article “Form and Con-
tent: An Essay in the History of Narratology” (2001), which pits classical
narratology, viewed historically, against the history of German narrative the-
ory. Although Darby argues that narratology should be remodelled into a
contextualist theory of interpretation, his essay does not provide much in the
way of enlightenment as to how this could actually be done.
It thus comes as no surprise that other narratologists have criticized both
Darby’s presentation of German narrative theory and his suggestion that a
“contextualist narratology” necessarily requires the ill-defined concept of the
implied author. Monika Fludernik (2003) has pointed out that German con-
tributions to narrative studies are much broader and more varied than
Darby’s essay suggests. And Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003)
have taken Darby to task for failing to give convincing reasons either for a
change in narratology’s aims or for the purported need to widen its research
domain.
More recently, there have been heated debates about the pros and cons
of contextualist approaches like feminist, intercultural and postcolonial nar-
ratologies. While narratologists interested in both narrative theory and the
analysis and interpretation of narrative texts have argued for the develop-
ment of feminist, intercultural and postcolonial approaches to narrative,3
present-day classical structuralist narratologists have expressed severe doubts
about the whole project of a contextual narratology. Tom Kindt and Hans-
Harald Müller (2003) have repeatedly complained about what they regard as
“narratological expansionism and its discontents”, as the title of Kindt’s con-
tribution to the present collection has it, arguing that the idea of a contextual
narratology rests on a number of fundamental misunderstandings about
what narratology is (see Kindt/Müller 2003a) and what it is not. Their an-
swer to the question of ‘whether we need an intercultural narratology’
(Kindt/Müller 2004) is both clear and short: ‘no, we don’t’. Roy Sommer
(2007), on the other hand, has convincingly argued against any such strict
distinctions between foundational narratological research exclusively con-
cerned with theoretical modelling, and contextualist approaches studying the
cultural embedding of narratives in specific cultural and historical contexts.
These controversies and the different accounts the participants have of-
fered of the history of narrative theory and of the pros and cons of contex-
tualist, intercultural and postcolonial narratologies are not only interesting
from the point of view of the light they shed on the complex developments
3 See, for example, Fludernik (1999), Nünning (2000, 2004), Birk/Neumann (2002), Erll/Rog-
gendorf (2002), Nünning/Nünning (2002a; 2004), Orosz (2004), Orosz/Schönert (2004), and,
most recently, Sommer (2007) and Birk (2008).
52 Ansgar Nünning
and international ramifications of narratology. They also metonymically illus-

trate what is at stake in current debates about the directions in which narra-
tology is moving. Hard-core structuralist narratologists are very sceptical
about the so called “new narratologies” collected in David Herman’s excel-
lent volume Narratologies (Herman 1999a), suspecting that they will inevitably
lead to a contamination that infects ‘pure’ and ‘neutral’ description with the
taint of ideology and relativism. In contrast to the purists who want to make
“the world safe for narratology”, as John Bender (1995) aptly put it, practi-
tioners of the various contextualist narratologies intrepidly rush in where
structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they are fools in doing so, may be
an open question, but their work has arguably uncovered productive lines of
research for both narrative theory and the analysis and interpretation of nar-
ratives.
Nonetheless, one cannot fail to notice that the question asked in the title
of an illuminating collection of articles edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-
Harald Müller, What is Narratology?, has recently received quite different and
even contradictory answers. There no longer seems to be a consensus either
about the main aims and objectives of narratology or about the extension of
its research domains. Echoing Christine Brooke-Rose’s title “Whatever
Happened to Narratology”, one may at this stage well ask “Whither narra-
tology?”, be it contextualist narratology or one of its many siblings.
Instead of reviewing these debates, or trying to act as arbiter of their
hostilities, I should like to argue that such dichotomies as the one between
“the uncontaminated fields of ‘classical’ narratology” and the “contextualist
dimensions of contemporary ‘postclassical’ narratological scholarship” (Dar-
by 2001: 423) should not be exaggerated. They present us, surely, with a set
of false choices: between text and context, between form and content as well
as form and context, between formalism and contextualism, between bot-
tom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between ‘neutral’ description
and ‘ideological’ evaluation. The problem with such binarisms is not so
much the ingrained structuralist fear that the formalist and descriptivist
paradigm will inevitably be polluted by the invasion of ideological concerns,
as the failure of such rigid distinctions to do justice to the aims and com-
plexities of textual analysis, interpretation, and cultural history. It is the at-
tempt to address these complexities, to cross the border between textual
formalism and historical contextualism, and to close the gap between narra-
tological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis that is the mo-
tivating and driving force behind the project of a contextualist narratology
sensitive to the cultural and historical contexts, as well as the ideological and
epistemological implications, of narratives.
My project in the next sections will be to argue that classical narratology
and context-sensitive analyses and interpretations of narrative, despite their
contrasting theoretical and methodological assumptions, are not as incom-

patible as is suggested by their respective practitioners, who tend to ignore,
or violently attack, each other’s work. I will argue that the more narratologi-
cal interpretation and contextualisation become and the more culturally and
historically oriented narratological theory and analysis become, the better for
both. An alliance between narratology and cultural history can open up pro-
ductive new possibilities for the analysis both of the dialogic relationship
between novels and their cultural contexts and of the epistemological, his-
torical, and cultural implications of narrative strategies.
3. Surveying Contextualist Narratologies and their Main Concerns
In comparison to the main variants of structuralist or ‘classical’ narratology,

which share key theoretical and methodological assumptions, the many and
disparate approaches of ‘postclassical narratology’ testify to the erosion of
any structuralist and narratological consensus. Given the plethora of new
directions and approaches in narrative theory, the sheer number of which
might make one rub one’s eyes in astonishment, it definitely looks as though
narratology has not only survived the challenges of poststructuralism, femi-
nism, the New Historicism, and postcolonialism, but has also developed in a
number of interesting new directions. As Herman (1999b: 14ff.) has shown,
however, in his concise overview of new “Directions in Postclassical Narra-
tology”, there has not only been a proliferation of new approaches, the field
of narrative theory has also undergone a number of sea changes which have
ushered in new phases in the study of narrative.
First, the development of narratology has followed a course away from
the identification and systematization of the ‘properties’ of narrative texts in
the direction of a growing awareness of the complex interplay that exists not
only between texts and their cultural contexts but also between textual fea-
tures and the interpretive choices and strategies involved in the reading
process. Second, classical narratology’s preference for describing textual fea-
tures within a structuralist and formalist paradigm has given way to a general
“move toward integration and synthesis” (Herman 1999b: 11) and towards
‘thicker descriptions’, to adopt Clifford Geertz’s well-known metaphor.
Third, while structuralist narratology was a more or less unified discipline
interested mainly in the synchronic dimension of the poetics of narrative and
managing to evade both moral issues and the production of meaning (see
Ginsburg/Rimmon-Kenan 1999: 71), most of the new approaches that have
been subsumed under the wide umbrella of the term ‘postclassical narratolo-
gies’ represent interdisciplinary projects which display a keen interest in the
changing forms and functions of a wide range of narratives as well as in the
54 Ansgar Nünning
dialogic negotiation of meaning. Fourth, postclassical narratology tends to

focus on issues like context, culture, gender, history, interpretation, and the
reading process, highlighting those aspects of narrative bracketed out by
structuralist narratology. Moreover, significant methodological advances
have been made, lucidly summarized by Manfred Jahn as follows:
where classical narratology preferred an ahistorical/panchronic vantage, postclassi-
cal narratology today actively pursues historical/diachronic lines of inquiry; where
many first-generation narratologists insisted on an elementarist (or analytic, or com-
binatorial, or ‘bottom-up’) approach […] postclassical narratology today welcomes
the uses of synthetic and integrative view […]; and, finally, where classical narratol-
ogy assumed a […] retrospective stance, there is an increasing tendency today to
pick up the thread of Sternberg’s and Perry’s explorations into the cognitive dynam-
ics of the reading process. (Jahn 1999: 169)
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the various new di-
rections in narrative studies should actually be designated ‘narratologies’, I
have elsewhere tried to provide provisional classifications of the different
kinds of new approaches in the form of a model or map (see Nünning 2003).
Since the focus of the present essay is on contextualist narratologies, I will
have to ignore such exciting approaches as cognitive and transmedial narra-
tology, focussing instead on a range of innovative trends which bear directly
on the topic in hand, i. e. on approaches that can at least for convenience
sake be subsumed under the umbrella of the term ‘contextualist narratology’.
The following list presents a selective and schematic survey of the most
important new directions in contextualist narrative studies and its applica-
tions as well as of the names of some of the major proponents or practitio-
ners of the respective trends. While some of the approaches mentioned in
the list have already produced a significant body of scholarly work (e. g.
feminist narratology), the labels of some other narratologies are merely ad
hoc coinages. Approaches that belong to this category are put in quotation
marks, with the name of those who have coined or used the respective
phrase in parentheses, whereas new narratologies that are fairly well estab-
lished by now are printed in small caps. In some cases I have used single
inverted commas in order to indicate that the labels I have used are merely
provisional.
Contextualist, Thematic, and Cultural Approaches:

Applications of Narratology in Literary and Cultural Studies
“Contextualist Narratology” (Seymour Chatman)

“Narratology and Thematics” (Ian MacKenzie)
“Comparative Narratology” (Susana Onega/José Ángel García Landa)
“Applied Narratology” (Onega/García Landa, Monika Fludernik)
‘Marxist Narratology’ – Fredric Jameson, John Bender

FEMINIST NARRATOLOGY – Mieke Bal, Alison Booth, Alison Case, Su-
san Lanser, Kathy Mezei, Robyn Warhol, Gaby Allrath, Andrea Guten-
berg, Marion Gymnich
‘Lesbian and Queer Narratology’ – Marilyn Farwell, Judith Roof, Susan
Lanser
‘Ethnic Narratology’ – Laura Doyle
Intercultural Narratology – Magdolna Orosz, Jörg Schönert, Roy Som-
mer
POSTCOLONIAL (APPLICATIONS OF) NARRATOLOGY – Monika Fluder-
nik, Marion Gymnich, Roy Sommer, Hanne Birk, Birgit Neumann
“Socio-Narratology” (Mark Currie)
COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY – Jonathan Culler, Monika Fludernik,
David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Menakhem Perry, Meir Sternberg, Ralf
Schneider
‘NATURAL’ NARRATOLOGY – Monika Fludernik
“New Historical Narratologies” (Mark Currie) – Nancy Armstrong, John
Bender, Susan Suleiman
“Cultural and Historical Narratology” (Ansgar Nünning) – Ansgar
Nünning, Carola Surkamp, Bruno Zerweck
‘Diachronic Narratology’/Applications of Narratology to the Rewriting
of Literary History – Monika Fludernik, Ansgar Nünning, Christoph
Reinfandt, Werner Wolf, Bruno Zerweck
Hardcore, that is ‘real’, narratologists will probably argue that most of the
approaches listed here are not really ‘narratologies’ at all, but merely applica-
tions of narratological models and categories to specific texts, genres, or
periods. With the possible exception of feminist narratology, which has ar-
guably contributed genuinely narratological insights,4 shedding new light on
“narrative qua narrative” (Prince 1995a: 79), most of the contextualist, cul-
tural, thematic, and ideological approaches have been concerned with issues
that are not really germane to narratology. I should therefore like to suggest
that mere applications should be distinguished from ‘narratology proper’,
while hastening to add, of course, that this distinction between narratology
and ‘narratological criticism’ is meant to be entirely value-free and neutral
and does not constitute a binary opposition but rather a gliding scale be-
tween the poles of ‘narratology proper’ and ‘applications of narratology’ or
‘narratological criticism’.
Though many contextualist narratologies, in other words, can be con-
ceived of as applications of narratological categories to the context-sensitive
4 For balanced accounts, see Prince (1995a; 1995b). For overviews of feminist narratology, see
Lanser (1992; 1995; 1999), Allrath (2000), and Nünning (1994).
56 Ansgar Nünning
analysis and interpretation of narratives, it is by no means the case that narra-

tologists interested in exploring the relations between narrative and its vari-
ous contexts are in principle unable to make valuable contributions to narra-
tology or have failed to do so. On the contrary, as the exciting developments
in feminist narratology, the more recent variant of a narrative theory in-
formed by gender studies (Nünning/Nünning 2004), and the directions
known as ‘intercultural’ and ‘postcolonial narratology’ have by now amply
demonstrated,5 proponents of contextualist approaches have “successfully
engaged with theoretical issues” (Sommer 2007: 65). What is more, they have
shown that the application of narratological categories, models and methods
to a context-sensitive analysis and interpretation of narratives can yield fruit-
ful results, throwing new light, for instance, on the cultural specificity of
narrative forms, as well as forms of memory and remembering (see e. g. Birk
2008).
4. Premises and Concepts of Contextualist

and Cultural Narratologies
To present the outlines of what I have provisionally called a contextualist

and cultural narratology, we need to historicize and contextualize the debates
in which I propose, however modestly, to intervene. When narratology was
invented in the late sixties, three of the things that were lost were context,
cultural history and interpretation. Although we have recently witnessed
both a cultural turn and a great revival of interest in the study of narrative
across various disciplines, narratology and context-sensitive interpretations
of narratives still seem oceans apart. This holds especially for classical narra-
tology, whereas rhetorical approaches to narrative like those championed by
James Phelan (1996; 2004) and some of the better developed recent ap-
proaches in contextualist narrative theory, e. g. feminist and postcolonial
narratology, are more intensely committed to interpretive concerns.
From today’s vantage-point, it definitely looks as though narratology has
not only survived the challenges of deconstruction and poststructuralism, it
has also developed in a number of interesting directions. One of the reasons
why narratology survived the onslaughts of deconstruction, having recently
risen as a phoenix from its ashes, is that the critical climate has become in-
creasingly receptive to genuine narratological concerns. Narratology has ar-
guably benefited from “the return to history” (Currie 1998: 76), from “the
Revival of Narrative” (Burke 1991) in historiography, and from the renewed
interdisciplinary interest in storytelling, both as an object of study and as a
5 See e. g. Fludernik (1999), Sommer (2001; 2007), Birk/Neumann (2002), and Birk (2008).
mode of scholarly writing. Moreover, a number of wide-ranging changes or

“turns” in literary and cultural theory have been conducive to the growth of
interest in both narratology and the cultural and historical significance of
narrative. These “cultural turns” (Bachmann-Medick 2006), complex changes
in the theoretical and critical climate, which have been dubbed respectively
the “historical turn”, “anthropological turn”, “ethical turn”, and “narrative”
or “narrativist turn”, have greatly increased interest in what Jerome Bruner
(1991) called “The Narrative Construction of Reality”. The incorporation of
new methodologies and the concomitant widening of the scope of narrative
theory has led to such a proliferation of new approaches that it seems per-
fectly justified to speak of a “narratological renaissance at this juncture” (Her-
man 1999b: 2), or of a “renaissance in narrative theory and analysis”
(Richardson 2000: 168).
Given the plethora of new narratological approaches, however, it no
longer seems appropriate to talk about narratology as though it were a single
approach or a monolithic discipline. As the programmatic and felicitous use
of the plural—Narratologies—in the title of the collection of essays recently
edited by David Herman (1999a) indicates, in the age of interdisciplinary
narrative research there is no longer one capital-“N” narratology. What was
once a more or less unified structuralist enterprise has branched out into
different fields, producing a wide diversity of new approaches, many of
which display little if any family resemblance to their formalist great-
grandfather.6 Some surveys of recent developments in narratology have set
out to chart the new worlds created by what Barry (1990) aptly called “Nar-
ratology’s Centrifugal Force”. But the sheer wealth of new approaches in
narrative theory, many of which are as important as they are difficult to cate-
gorize, precludes any single account of the development(s) of and in narra-
tive theory. Any given story could trace only one “of the countless possible
plots” in a field that has recently turned into “a garden of forking paths”
(Onega and García Landa 1996: 36):
The actual evolution and development of narrative theory cannot begin to be graf-
ted onto the master narrative of critical theory as told by the poststructuralists. In-
deed, the story of modern narrative theory does not fit well into the frame of any
narrative history. There are far too many story strands, loose ends, abrupt turns, and
6 For the use of the plural, see Herman (1999b) and Fludernik (2000); Currie (1998: 96) vaguely
refers to “the new narratologies”. For short, but excellent, overviews of the various new direc-
tions in postclassical narratology, see Herman (1999a) and Fludernik (2000). As I have else-
where (Nünning 2000a; 2003) provided both a critique of the inflationary use of the term ‘nar-
ratology’ and some modest proposals for its future usage, I should merely like to reiterate that
the various new approaches developed in the interdisciplinary study of narrative on the one
hand, and such key terms as ‘narrative studies’, ‘narrative theory’, ‘narratology’, and ‘narra-
tological criticism’ on the other, should be much more clearly distinguished from each other
than is generally the case.
58 Ansgar Nünning
unmotivated reappearances of forgotten figures and theoretical approaches to fit

easily within any one narrative structure. The history of modern narrative theory is
more accurately depicted as a cluster of contiguous histories rather than a single,
comprehensive narrative. (Richardson 2000: 172)
The message is clear—which is why, instead of telling one particular story
about narratology,7 I have elsewhere tried to pinpoint the main differences
between structuralist (‘classical’) narratology and the new ‘postclassical narra-
tologies’ and to reassess and systematize recent developments in the field by
providing a preliminary synchronous map of the new theoretical approaches
that have emerged, dividing them into eight groups.8 Most of the new narra-
tologies have either resulted from modifications, elaborations, and applica-
tions of previous insights and models, or they have been produced by fruit-
ful encounters between structuralist narratology and other theoretical ap-
proaches or critical schools from which various features have been assimi-
lated into narratology. Monika Fludernik and Brian Richardson (2000) divide
recent work on narrative, by approach or emphasis, into ten groups: Struc-
turalist and Linguistic Approaches; Rhetorical, Bakhtinian, and Phenome-
nological Accounts; New Interdisciplinary Approaches; Postmodern Narra-
tology; Ideological Approaches; Psychological Approaches; Poststructuralist
Approaches; Popular Culture; Asian Poetics; Important Anthologies. Heuris-
tically useful as such a provisional classification no doubt is, the groups des-
ignated ‘Structuralist and Linguistic Approaches’ and ‘Rhetorical, Bakhtinian,
and Phenomenological Accounts’ would arguably deserve further subdivi-
sion, being far too heterogeneous to warrant the umbrella term ‘group’,
whereas ‘Postmodern Narratology’ and ‘Poststructuralist Approaches’ share
so many features that one might as well lump them together.
Two of the results of the current diversification of approaches have been
an increasing interest in the forms and functions of narrative within cultures
and a shift of attention towards the question of how narrative forms con-
tribute to our understanding of such phenomena as gender, history, and sub-
jectivity. While the merely systematic and formalist analysis of narrative
(once the focal point of narratology) has largely gone out of fashion, narra-
tive theorists have begun to turn their attention to what Mieke Bal (1999) has
called ‘cultural analysis’. Many practitioners of such new contextualist ap-
7 For a brief informative and perspicacious history of theories of the novel (Romantheorie), narra-
tive theory (Erzähltheorie), and narratology in Germany, see the illuminating article by Anja
Cornils and Wilhelm Schernus (2003), which throws new light on the history and international
ramifications of narratology. See also Fludernik (2000), Nünning (2000a), and Richardson
(2000).
8 See Nünning (2000; 2003). In the new concluding chapter to the second edition of her invalu-
able textbook Narrative Fiction, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 142) has reproduced the table
in which I tried to systematize those features that set the new postclassical narratologies off
from the structuralist paradigm of classical narratology.
proaches as feminist narratology, intercultural narratology, or postcolonial

narratology are now putting the analytic toolkits of narratology “to the ser-
vice of other concerns considered more vital for cultural studies”, as Bal put
it in an article tellingly entitled “The Point of Narratology” (Bal 1990: 729).
Bal was herself the first narratologist to ask the question, as invaluable as it is
simple, “what’s the point?” (729)
Quite a number of the ‘new narratologies’, e. g. feminist narratology and
postcolonial narratology, have demonstrated what the point of narratology
might be by applying its insights and categories to the analysis of a broad
range of texts. Shifting its attention to the ways in which narrative forms
function as an active cognitive force in their own right—and one that is in-
volved in the actual generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, values,
and ways of thinking—cultural narratology focuses on what structuralist
narratology ignored and, therefore, left unanswered: viz. the crucial question
“of how literary production is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural
construction” (Bender 1987: xv). For want of a better term, I have elsewhere
suggested that one might call such an approach “cultural and historical narra-
tology” (see Nünning 2000a). The following suggestions are offered as a
rough outline—but that, at least, is greater detail than previous uses of the
term ‘cultural narratology’ have displayed9—of some conceptual and meth-
odological premises for a context-sensitive and cultural approach to narra-
tives that is still rooted in narratology.
By contextualist narratology I mean a kind of integrated approach that
puts the analytical tools provided by narratology to the service of a cultural
analysis of narrative fictions. Focusing on “the study of narrative forms in
their relationship to the culture which generates them” (Onega and García
Landa 12), cultural narratology explores “cultural experiences translated into,
and meanings produced by, particular formal narrative practices” (Helms
2003: 14).
Drawing upon the categories of narrative theory and the many new in-
sights and research strategies developed in cultural history, such an approach
can arguably shed light on both the semantic potential of narrative forms
and the changing functions that narrative strategies have fulfilled. It is the
task of such a project to contextualize literary fictions by situating them
within the broader spectrum of discourse that constitutes a given culture. It
is time for narratology to catch up with the cultural turn in literary criticism
9 As far as I know, the terms ‘cultural narratology’ and ‘historical narratology’ are still anything
but firmly established; for brief, albeit very vague and unspecific uses of the term, see Currie
(1998: 96), Onega and García Landa (1996: 12), and Bal (1999: 34), who talks about “a narra-
tology of culture”. See, however, the well-developed ideas about a cultural narratology put for-
ward in Helms (2003), which are very similar to those outlined here; I am grateful to the late
Gabriele Helms for drawing my attention to her use of the concept, of which I knew nothing at
the time I started developing the idea of a ‘cultural narratology’.
60 Ansgar Nünning
and theory, but cultural studies and cultural history can also profit from
drawing upon the analytical tools provided by narratology. As Bal (1999: 39)
pointedly observed, what is needed is “a narratological analysis of culture”
and “a cultural analysis of narratives”.
The project of a contextualist narratology is, of course, deeply indebted
to the various new narratologies that have recently emerged. It has most in
common with the approaches subsumed under such headings as “Thematic
Narratology” (Fludernik 2000), “Contextualist and Thematic Narratologies”
(see Chatman 1990; Nünning 2000a: 351) or “Ideological Approaches”
(Fludernik/Richardson 2000: 319) in some of the previous surveys of the
state of research in this blossoming field. Helms (2003: 15) is certainly right,
however, to emphasize firstly that the term ‘cultural narratology’ should be
set clearly apart from what Chatman called ‘contextualist narratology’—by
which he means approaches that focus exclusively on “the acts in the real
world that generate literary narratives” (Chatman 1990: 310)—and secondly
that the project of a cultural narratology has “its roots in narratology”
(Helms 2003: 15). Each of these new narratological approaches moves, in its
own way, from a description of textual phenomena to broader cultural ques-
tions and contexts. According to Herman, the differences between struc-
turalist narratology and the new narratologies “point to a broader reconfigu-
ration of the narratological landscape. The root transformation can be de-
scribed as a shift from text-centered and formal models to models that are
jointly formal and functional—models attentive both to the text and to the
context of stories” (Herman 1999b: 8).
At the risk of oversimplification, one can attempt to provide a sketch of
the parallels of concern that contextualist narratologies share with other new
narratologies. Although the dichotomy between ‘classical narratology’ and
‘postclassical narratologies’ suggests unwarranted assumptions of homogene-
ity, and does not do justice to the diversity, breadth and scope of the differ-
ent approaches subsumed under the wide umbrellas of the two terms, it may
serve to highlight some of the innovative trends that have recently emerged.
First, the development of narratology has followed a course away from the
systematic description of the properties of texts in the direction of a growing
awareness of the complex interplay that exists both between texts and their
cultural contexts and between textual features and the interpretive choices
involved in the reading process. Second, classical narratology’s preference
for describing textual elements within a structuralist paradigm has given way
to a general “move toward integration and synthesis” (Herman 1999b: 11).
Proceeding from the assumption that an analysis of narrative forms can
shed new light on the ideological and epistemological implications of narra-
tive, cultural narratology strives to cross the border between textual formal-
ism and historical contextualism, and, as I suggested above, to close the gaps
between narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis

by putting the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of
context-sensitive interpretations of novels. Though the ubiquity of narrative
makes it difficult to establish the boundaries of such a culture-oriented pro-
ject, it is possible to outline some of the conceptual and methodological con-
sequences that it entails.
First, a cultural narratological framework conceptualizes culture not as
‘text’, but as an ensemble of narratives. From this point of view, cultures are
not so much ‘imagined communities’ (sensu Anderson 1983) but ‘narrative
communities’, i. e. communities forged and held together by the stories their
members tell about themselves and their culture as well as by conventional-
ized forms of storytelling and cultural plots. In what is arguably the best nar-
rative or narrativist theory of culture to date, Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2002:
53) has argued that cultures differ not only with regard to the subjects and
themes they are particularly interested in, but also with regard to their fa-
voured modes of storytelling, their ways of constructing narratives. Müller-
Funk has therefore made the valuable suggestion that cultures should be
conceptualized as ‘narrative and memorial communities’:
Without any doubt it is narratives that form the basis of collective, national memo-
ries and that constitute politics of identity and difference. Cultures should always
also be conceived of as narrative communities which are distinguished from each
other by their reservoir of narratives.10
Second, though it leaves the narrow confines of structuralist taxonomy, a
contextual and cultural narratological framework is informed by a critical
practice that only the toolbox of classical narratology and thorough training
in the precise semiotic analysis of narratives can provide. Denying or ignor-
ing the many achievements of structuralist narratology would thus be fool-
ish, a way of throwing the conceptual baby out with the formalist bathwater.
As the controversy between Dorrit Cohn (1995) and John Bender (1995) in
New Literary History has shown, it does make a difference whether we can es-
tablish a consensus about textual features or not, and it is the descriptive
toolkit of narratology that provides us with the terminological categories
needed for rational argument.
Third, questioning the traditional notion that the relationship between
fiction and reality is based on mimesis, cultural narratology proceeds from
the assumption that it is more rewarding to conceptualize narrative as an
active force in its own right: one that is involved in the actual generation of
the ways of thinking and attitudes that stand behind historical development.
10 Müller-Funk (2002: 14; my translation): “Zweifelsohne sind es Erzählungen, die kollektiven,

nationalen Gedächtnissen zugrunde liegen und Politiken der Identität bzw. Differenz konstitu-
ieren. Kulturen sind immer auch als Erzählgemeinschaften anzusehen, die sich gerade im Hin-
blick auf ihr narratives Reservoir unterscheiden.”
62 Ansgar Nünning
In his seminal work Imagining the Penitentiary, in which he argued that wide-
spread attitudes towards prison were formulated in English fiction, and that
these facilitated the conception of the eighteenth-century penitentiary,
Bender sums up this new understanding of the active and constitutive role
that fictions play in the process of forming institutions and shaping mentali-
ties:
I consider literature and the visual arts as advanced forms of knowledge, as cogni-
tive instruments that anticipate and contribute to institutional formation. Novels as
I describe them are primary historical and ideological documents; the vehicles, not
the reflections, of social change. (Bender 1987: 1)
Conceptualizing narrative fictions as cognitive forces, cultural narratology
thus explores the ways in which the formal properties of novels reflect and
influence the unspoken mental assumptions and cultural issues of a given
period. It focuses on the power of narrative fictions “to represent a medley
of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for cultural space”
(Scholes 1998: 134). Such problems as the relationship between the poly-
phonic structure of novels and their challenge to dominant cultural dis-
courses require narratological tools for their description and analysis. It may
be noted in passing that, despite two decades of intense reception of Bak-
htin’s works, his theory of dialogism, which has perhaps been hovering at
the back of many narratologists’ minds for some time, has only recently been
incorporated into feminist and cultural narratology.11
As Gabriele Helms (2003) has convincingly demonstrated, the frame-
work of a cultural narratology is germane to both Bakhtin’s intense concern
with social norms and values and to his perceptive attempts to relate the
dialogic structure of novels to the world views and ideologies of the societies
in which they originated. Helms argues that the “term ‘cultural narratology’
describes the place where dialogism and narrative theory meet, allowing the
analysis of formal structures to be combined with a consideration of their
ideological implications” (Helms 2003: 10). In contrast to other narrative
theorists who use the term ‘cultural narratology’ without developing or ex-
plaining it, Helms is one of the first narratologists to provide a conceptual
and methodological outline of a cultural narratology and to actually test its
usefulness.
Such an approach implies, of course, that formal techniques are not just
analyzed as structural features of a text, but as narrative modes which are
highly semanticized and engaged in the process of cultural construction. As
Helms (2003: 7) emphasizes, “a cultural narratology would enable us to rec-
ognize that narrative techniques are not neutral and transparent forms to be
filled with content, and that dialogic relations in narrative structures are ideo-
11 See the collection of articles edited by Kathy Mezei (1996) and Gabriele Helms’ (2003) brilliant
monograph on dialogism and narrative technique in Canadian novels respectively.
logically informed”. In this respect the project of a cultural narratology can

draw on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the “ideology of the form” (Jameson
1981: 141), which implies that “form is immanently and intrinsically an ide-
ology in its own right”:
What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as content.
The study of the ideology of form is no doubt grounded on a technical and formal-
istic analysis in the narrower sense, even though, unlike much traditional formal
analysis, it seeks to reveal the active presence within the text of a number of discon-
tinuous and heterogeneous formal processes. But at the level of analysis in question
here, a dialectical reversal has taken place in which it has become possible to grasp
such formal processes as sedimented content in their own right, as carrying ideo-
logical messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of
the works. (Jameson 1981: 99)
If one accepts the idea of a semanticization of narrative forms, any literary
and cultural historian who wants to address ethical, ideological, or political
issues raised in or by narratives can, therefore, profit from the application of
the toolbox that narratology provides. Context and form, content and narra-
tive technique, are, after all, more closely intertwined than structuralist narra-
tologists have tried to make us believe. It is not only the problem of the re-
ception of literary character that inevitably draws critics’ attention to the
interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also the key questions
asked by postcolonial, feminist, and Afro-American studies.
Moreover, cultural and historical analyses of narratives require thicker
descriptions than those offered by structuralist narratology, descriptions
which take into account both thematic and formal features of texts and the
ways in which epistemological, ethical, and social problems are articulated in
the forms of narrative representations: “The political enters the study of
English primarily through questions of representation: who is represented,
who does the representing, who is object, who is subject—and how do these
representations connect to the values of groups, communities, classes, tribes,
sects, and nations?” (Scholes 1998: 153) Such questions have always been
genuine concerns of narratology, and the categories and models created by
narratology for the analysis of narrative provide useful tools for getting to
grips with them. Key narratological concepts like focalization, unreliable
narration, and narrative perspective have proved very fine descriptive tools,
but they need to be applied before they can yield the insights considered vital
for literary and cultural history. As Bruno Zerweck (2001) has shown, the
development of narrative forms like unreliable narration can fruitfully be
interpreted as a reflection of changing cultural discourses.
Given the foregoing conceptual underpinning, it would certainly be de-
sirable to outline some practical directions of research that the kind of con-
textual and cultural narratology delineated above might open up. As I have
elsewhere tried to show (Nünning 2004), the postmodern genre of the his-
64 Ansgar Nünning
torical novel that Linda Hutcheon (1988: 5) christened “historiographic

metafiction” provides a particularly fruitful paradigm for testing the useful-
ness of “a cultural-narratological approach” (Helms 2003: 20) in that it is
dialogically related to the cultural discourses of the last two decades and at
the same time deeply involved in telling and rewriting history. Moreover,
historiographic metafiction often challenges hegemonic cultural discourses
by recontextualizing them and offering alternative versions, thus foreground-
ing the epistemological and ethical questions involved in writing history (see
Kotte 2001). Using historiographic metafiction as a case-study, I have at-
tempted to demonstrate that the analytical tools provided by classical narra-
tology can be of great use for the cultural analysis and context-sensitive in-
terpretation of historiographic metafictions (and of course of other narra-
tives), as well as for the further concerns of contemporary ‘postclassical’
narratologies, including generic categorization.12 The narratological catego-
ries that are particularly helpful in the attempt to come to terms with the
epistemological, historiographic and ethical implications of postmodern his-
torical novels—but arguably also of novels from other periods and cul-
tures—include the structure of narrative transmission, especially unreliable
narration, and the notion of the perspective structure of narrative texts.13
5. Potentials of a Contextualist and Cultural Narratological Framework:

The Opening of Narratology to Cultural History, Economics and Politics
What’s the point, then, of a contextualist or cultural narratology? Cultural

narratology recognizes that, since “ideology is located in narrative structures
themselves” (Helms 2003: 14), analyses of the semanticization of narrative
forms can shed light on the unspoken assumptions, attitudes, and ideologies,
as well as on the values and norms prevalent in any given text, genre and
period. Once narrative forms are understood as socially constructed cogni-
tive forces, narratives become valuable sources for cultural history and cul-
tural studies, because analyses of “their narrative forms provide information
about ideological concepts and world views” (Helms 2003: 14). Helms has
lucidly summarized the main reasons why a cultural narratology promises to
be able to cross the border between narratology and cultural history and to
bridge the gap that has so far separated the two disciplines, to the detriment
of both, one might add:
A cultural narratological framework holds two distinct promises: (1) the semanticiz-
ing of narrative forms will move narratology beyond its notorious a-historicity; and
12 See e. g. Fludernik (2000), who has convincingly demonstrated how useful narratological tools
can actually be for the purposes of generic categorization.
13 See Nünning/Surkamp/Zerweck (1998), Nünning (2000b), and Nünning/Nünning (2000).
(2) by providing adequate descriptive tools, it will enable cultural critics to attend to
the specific tools and strategies that are characteristic of narratives in a wide range
of media. (Helms 2003: 15)
What I hope to have shown in my own argument is that contextualist and
cultural narratology does indeed provide useful descriptive and analytical
tools enabling literary and cultural critics to attend both to the narrative
forms and strategies that are characteristic of different kinds of narrative,
and to the epistemological and ethical issues involved in them. Rather than
being an end in itself, the kind of contextual and cultural narratology concep-
tualized here can open up fertile areas of investigation for literary and cul-
tural history, provided, however, it leaves behind the self-imposed fetters
that have prevented narratology all too long from dealing with questions
relevant to a better understanding of the cultural dimensions of narratives
and of literary and cultural history at large. Offering a preliminary and very
skeletal sketch of a contextualist narratology, I have tried to outline a few
directions in which the cultural investigation of narrative forms might be
pursued. Nevertheless, the various approaches that have come to be known
as (inter)cultural, historical, and postcolonial narratologies still have the bulk
of their work ahead of them.
I should like to conclude by emphasizing once again that both the ana-
lytical toolbox provided by structuralist narratology and the new postclassical
narratologies can be of great practical value to literary criticism, genre theory
and cultural history. However, it is high time that narratologists made more
sustained efforts to contextualize the texts that they subject to such close
scrutiny, and to historicize their critical practice: in short, to demonstrate
“the usefulness of narratology” (Bal 1990: 729)—something that Gabriele
Helms, for instance, has convincingly done in her seminal cultural-
narratological monograph Challenging Canada. Dialogism and Narrative Technique
in Canadian Novels (2003).14
The pace at which the proliferation of new narratologies has been pro-
ceeding testifies to the current “return to narratology” (Bal 1999: 19, 39), but
it also shows that it is still too early to assess the usefulness and success of
the various contextualist approaches that have recently been developed.
Given the widespread interdisciplinary interest in the “narrative construction
of reality” (Bruner 1991) and the ubiquity, as well as importance, of narra-
tives in contemporary media cultures, there is certainly every reason to share
Fludernik’s (1993: 757) “measured optimism” about narratology’s continued
survival. In a short-lived age like ours, in which the time-span between the
invention of new theoretical approaches and their expiry is continuously
14 For other successful attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of a cultural-narratological frame-

work, see Warhol (1999), who has demonstrated “What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cul-
tural Studies”, Sommer (2001), Zerweck (2001), Birke (2008) and Birk (2008).
66 Ansgar Nünning
shrinking, it is impossible to predict whether or not the various new narra-

tologies will actually fulfil the high hopes that many of their proponents cur-
rently hold; but the kind of cultural narratology outlined and applied above
promises to show what the point of narratology is, or at least what it could
be. It seems wise, however, to leave at least the penultimate word to John
Bender, who strikes the right sort of balance between, on the one hand, ac-
knowledging the undoubted usefulness of the narratological toolbox and, on
the other, emphasizing both the need to move beyond a merely descriptive
poetics of narrative and the benefits of understanding that the crossing of
disciplinary boundaries affords:
If the opening of literary studies to cultural history is to continue [...], we must value
the finely crafted tools but leave the boundaries behind. A world made perfectly
safe for narratology may offer the delights of Candide’s garden to the wise. But their
contentment should not be bought at the cost of denying others the risks of intel-
lectual travel. (Bender 1995: 33)
As far as the promises of a contextualist and cultural narratological frame-
work are concerned, what is arguably more important than anything else,
therefore, is that such a framework should draw narratologists’ and cultural
theorists’ attention to issues that are of crucial importance in an age both of
interdisciplinary narrative research and of inter-, multi- and trans-culturalism.
With regard to interdisciplinary cooperation, the framework delineated above
opens up new possibilities for fruitful collaborative ventures between narra-
tology and narrative inquiry in other areas and disciplines like cultural his-
tory, cultural memory studies, psychology, ritual studies, and interdisciplinary
research into identity-formation.
In an age in which even economists and politicians have for some time
realized the crucial importance of storytelling and narratives to the modern
economy, to organizations and to the world of politics,15 it certainly seems
high time that narrative theorists should also begin to leave behind the
boundaries that structuralist narratologists seem so keen to retain. Anyone
who wants to come to terms with the wide-ranging and important cultural
and ideological functions that narratives and storytelling actually fulfil in our
present-day media culture needs to take into account the contexts on which
contextualist approaches to narrative are currently focusing. ‘Narrative’, ‘nar-
rativity’ and ‘storytelling’ have been travelling concepts for quite some time
now, and in an age of intense interdisciplinary interest in narratives and sto-
rytelling, narrative theory would stand to gain a lot if narratologists started to
do some travelling as well. Only then will they be in a position to take ac-
15 For an excellent overview, see Salmon (2007), who summarizes the main developments, and
the works of Stephen Denning, the ‘guru’ of the storytelling approach in management. See also
Denning (2005) and Brown et al. (2005).
count of the contexts as well as the cultural functions of narratives as crucial

ways of world-making.
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DAVID HERMAN
(Columbus)
Narrative Ways of Worldmaking
1. Synopsis
This essay begins from the assumption that mapping words onto worlds is a
fundamental—perhaps the fundamental—requirement for narrative sense
making. To explore how people use storytelling practices to build, update,
and modify narrative worlds, the essay extends Goodman’s (1978) account
of “ways of worldmaking.” Narrative worldmaking, I argue, involves spe-
cific, identifiable procedures set off against a larger set of background condi-
tions for world-creation—irrespective of the medium in which the narrative
practices are being conducted.
Using three kinds of storytelling practices to suggest the transmedial
scope of my analysis—a print narrative, face-to-face storytelling, and a
graphic novel—I outline basic and general procedures for world-construc-
tion in narrative contexts. More specifically, my concern is with the cognitive
processes underlying narrative ways of worldmaking. Focusing on how sto-
ries are launched, I suggest that configuring narrative worlds entails mapping
discourse cues onto WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN dimensions of a mentally
configured storyworld—dimensions whose interplay accounts for the onto-
logical make-up and spatiotemporal profile of the world in question. Study-
ing narrative ways of worldmaking requires analysts to synthesize ideas from
multiple fields of inquiry, while conversely revealing the importance of narra-
tive scholarship for a range of disciplines, from philosophy, linguistics, and
comparative media studies, to historiography, ethnography, and the arts.
2. Narrative Worldmaking: A Sketch
The classical, structuralist narratologists failed to come to terms with the

referential or world-creating properties of narrative, partly because of the
exclusion of the referent in favor of signifier and signified in the Saussurean
language theory that informed the structuralists’ approach. By contrast, over
72 David Herman
the past couple of decades, one of the most basic and abiding concerns of
narrative scholars has been how readers of print narratives, interlocutors in
face-to-face discourse, and viewers of films use textual cues to build up rep-
resentations of the worlds evoked by stories, or storyworlds. Such worldmak-
ing practices are of central importance to narrative scholars of all sorts, from
feminist narratologists exploring how representations of male and female
characters pertain to dominant cultural stereotypes about gender roles, to
rhetorical theorists examining what kinds of assumptions, beliefs, and atti-
tudes have to be adopted by readers if they are to participate in the multiple
audience positions required to engage fully with fictional worlds, to analysts
(and designers) of digital narratives interested in how interactive systems can
remediate the experience of being immersed in the virtual worlds created
through everyday narrative practices.
This ongoing re-engagement with the referential, world-creating poten-
tial of narrative can be characterized as a subdomain within “postclassical”
narratology (Herman 1999). At issue are frameworks for narrative inquiry
that build on the work of classical, structuralist narratologists but supplement
that work with concepts and methods that were unavailable to story analysts
such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan To-
dorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution. In the case of re-
search on narrative worldmaking, analysts have worked to enrich the original
base of structuralist concepts with ideas either ignored by or inaccessible to
the classical narratologists, thereby developing new strategies for studying
how storyworlds are made and remade. Indeed, accounts of the world-
creating potential of narrative have received impetus from theoretical studies
in a number of fields—studies conducted by philosophers, psychologists,
linguists, and others concerned with how people use various kinds of symbol
systems to refer to aspects of their experience.
In the present essay, I draw on some of this work to explore the range of
cognitive processes that support inferences about the modal status, inhabi-
tants, and spatiotemporal profile of a given storyworld. I also consider which
processes constitute distinctively narrative ways of worldmaking, in contrast
with the forms of world-construction enabled by syllogistic arguments, sta-
tistical analyses, or descriptions of the weather. In this context, and in paral-
lel with the account developed in Herman (2002: 9-22), I use the term story-
world to refer to the world evoked implicitly as well as explicitly by a narra-
tive, whether that narrative takes the form of a printed text, film, graphic
novel, sign language, everyday conversation, or even a tale that is projected
but is never actualized as a concrete artefact—for example, stories about
ourselves that we contemplate telling to friends but then do not, or film
scripts that a screenwriter has plans to create in the future. Storyworlds are
global mental representations enabling interpreters to frame inferences about
Narrative Ways of Worldmaking 73
the situations, characters, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned in or

implied by a narrative text or discourse. As such, storyworlds are mental
models of the situations and events being recounted—of who did what to
and with whom, when, where, why, and in what manner. Reciprocally, narra-
tive artifacts (texts, films, etc.) provide blueprints for the creation and modi-
fication of such mentally configured storyworlds.1
In discussing the scope and nature of processes of narrative worldmak-
ing, I present here a kind of thumbnail sketch of some of the ideas explored
in greater detail in a forthcoming book, Basic Elements of Narrative (Herman
2009). The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of stories;
drawing on several frameworks for inquiry, including theories of categoriza-
tion processes, sociolinguistic research on communicative interaction, and
ideas from the philosophy of mind, the study also suggests that narrative can
be viewed under several profiles: as a cognitive structure or way of making
sense of experience, as a type of text (i. e., a text-type category [Herman
2008]), and as a resource for communicative interaction. I then use this mul-
tidimensionality of narrative as a basis for analyzing it into its fundamental
elements. I specify four such elements, arguing that they will be realized in
any particular narrative in a gradient, “more-or-less” fashion; hence the fol-
lowing elements in effect constitute conditions for narrativity, or what makes
a story (interpretable as) a story:
A prototypical narrative can be characterized as
(i) A representation that is situated in—must be interpreted in light
of—a specific discourse context or occasion for telling.
(ii) The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw infer-
ences about a structured time-course of particularized events.
(iii) In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of dis-
ruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or
human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fic-
tional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc.
(iv) The representation also conveys the experience of living through this
storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or
imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue.
Thus—with one important proviso—it can be argued that narrative
is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of
mind to refer to the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or some-
1 Hence, as discussed in Herman (2002: 9-22), the notion storyworld is consonant with a range of
other concepts proposed by cognitive psychologists, discourse analysts, psycholinguists, phi-
losophers of language, and others concerned with how people go about making sense of texts
or discourses. Like storyworld, these other notions—including deictic center, mental model, situation
model, discourse model, contextual frame, and possible world—are designed to explain how interpreters
rely on inferences triggered by textual cues to build up representations of the overall situation
or world evoked but not fully explicitly described in the discourse.
74 David Herman
thing to have a particular experience. The proviso is that recent re-

search on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the na-
ture of consciousness itself.
For convenience of exposition, I abbreviate these elements in my account as
(i) situatedness, (ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/world disrup-
tion, and (iv) what it’s like. The focus of the present essay is on (aspects of)
the third element, or worldmaking/world disruption. Further, in referring
to narrative representations, I have in mind all representations that can be in-
cluded within the text-type category ‘narrative’, regardless of the semiotic
environment in which a given representation is designed or disseminated.
Hence my use of illustrative narratives presented in several storytelling me-
dia—in particular, three case studies that I should now go on to describe in
somewhat more detail.
In Daniel Clowes’ 1997 graphic novel Ghost World, the narrative focuses
on two teenage girls, Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, trying to
navigate the transition from high school to post-high-school life. Closer in
spirit to the female Bildungsroman than superhero comics, Ghost World,
which was originally published as installments in the underground comics
tradition and subsequently assembled into a novel, overlays a graphic format
on content matter that helped extend the scope and range of comics storytel-
ling generally. For its part, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1987
[1927]) centers on a conversation between an unnamed male character and
Jig, the woman who has been impregnated by the male character (the reader
assumes). As they wait for the train to Madrid, the two characters briefly
discuss the appearance of the landscape surrounding them (specifically, Jig
mentions that the hills across the valley look like white elephants), then order
drinks and engage in a sometimes tense conversational exchange about the
possibility of Jig’s having an abortion. Finally, the story that I have titled
UFO or the Devil (based on a phrase used by the storyteller in the first line, or
what Labov 1972 would term the “abstract” of the story) was told as part of
a larger sequence of narratives through which Monica cumulatively presents
a portrait of herself.2 The narrative that I have excerpted from this much
more extended interaction (the total duration of the tape-recording is more
than 145 minutes) concerns not only Monica’s and her friend’s encounter
with what Monica characterizes as a supernatural apparition—a big, glowing
orange ball that rises up in the air and pursues them menacingly—but also
2 The narrative was recorded on July 2, 2002, in the mountainous western portion of the state of
North Carolina, near where the events being recounted are purported to have occurred. The
storyteller is identified as “Monica,” a pseudonym for a 41-year-old African American female. A
full transcript of the story, together with an account of the transcription conventions used in
my analysis and discussion, can be found on the following webpage: http://people.cohums.
ohio-state.edu/herman145/UFO.html.
Monica’s and Renee’s subsequent encounter with Renee’s grandmother, who

disputes whether the girls’ experience with the big ball really occurred.
3. Narrative Worldmaking
across Media, Genres, and Communicative Contexts
Storytellers use the semiotic cues available in a given narrative medium to

design blueprints for creating and updating storyworlds.3 In print texts, the
cues include the expressive resources of (written) language, including not just
words, phrases, and sentences, but also typographical formats, the disposi-
tion of space on the printed page (including spaces used for section breaks,
indentations marking new paragraphs, etc.), and (potentially) diagrams,
sketches, and illustrations. In graphic novels, by contrast, the non-verbal
elements play a more prominent role: the arrangement of characters in repre-
sented scenes, the shapes of speech balloons, and the representations of the
scenes in panels that are part of larger sequences of images and textual ele-
ments can convey information about the storyworld that would have to be
transmitted by purely verbal means in a novel or short story without a com-
parable image track. Meanwhile, storytellers in face-to-face interaction can
use gestures as well as utterances to prompt the construction of narrative
worlds—recruiting from elements of the here-and-now circumstances of a
current interaction as scaffolding for the world-building process. Recipro-
cally, interlocutors in contexts of face-to-face storytelling, readers of short
stories and novels, and members of the audience watching a film draw on
such medium-specific cues to build on the basis of the discourse or sjuzhet a
chronology for events, or fabula (what happened when, or in what order?); a
broader temporal and spatial environment for those events (when in history
did these events occur, and where geographically?); an inventory of the char-
acters involved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters
to experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that con-
stitute a core feature of narrative representations, which may in turn be more
3 In characterizing narrative texts as blueprints for building storyworlds, I am drawing implicitly

on Reddy’s (1979) critique of what he termed the conduit metaphor for communicative pro-
cesses (see Green 1989: 10-13 for a useful discussion). According to this metaphor, linguistic
expressions and other means for communication are viewed as mere vessels or vehicles for
channeling back and forth thoughts, ideas, and meanings. Reddy suggested, instead, that sen-
tences are like blueprints, planned artifacts whose design is tailored to the goal of enabling an
interlocutor to reconstruct the situations or worlds after which the blueprints are patterned.
Further, in contrast with the conduit metaphor, which blames miscommunication on a poorly
chosen linguistic vessel, the blueprint analogy predicts that completely successful interpretation
of communicative designs will be rare—given the complexity of the processes involved in plan-
ning, executing, and making sense of the blueprints.
76 David Herman
or less reportable within a particular discourse context or occasion for tell-

ing.4
At the same time, interpreters seeking to build a storyworld on the basis
of a text will also take into account complexities in the design of the blue-
print itself—complexities creating additional layers of mediation in the rela-
tionship between narrative blueprint and the storyworld that it evokes. (Here
I am touching upon issues connected with the first basic element of narrative
listed in my previous section, i. e., situatedness.) Such mediation affects the
interpretive process in, for example, cases of unreliable narration such as
Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” where the teller of a story cannot be taken
at his or her word, compelling the audience to ‘read between the lines’—in
other words, to scan the text for clues about how the storyworld really (or
probably) is, as opposed to how the narrator says it is. Likewise, in Clowes’s
Ghost World, during a sequence in which Enid fantasizes about one of her
teachers, Mr. Pierce, the use of a distinctive font or typeface within the
speech balloons (not to mention the content of the sequence—e. g., Enid
naked in the shower with Mr. Pierce clad in a formal suit) indicates that the
represented scenes and utterances are ones that Enid has imagined, rather
than events that took place within the storyworld to which the characters
orient as actual or real (Clowes 1997: 32). Both of these examples entail
complex processes of worldmaking. On the one hand, the Browning poem
compels readers to sift out from the Duke’s elliptical, distorted version of
events a divergent or, rather, more complete account of what happened,
affording through these indirect means a blueprint for building the domain
of factual (or at least probable) occurrences. The world that emerges through
this process is one in which the Duke, despite or indeed because of his own
best efforts at spin or damage control, figures as an insanely jealous, homi-
cidally possessive and controlling spouse. On the other hand, Enid’s erotic
fantasy demonstrates in another way the multifacetedness of storyworlds,
which typically encompass not just worlds that are socially and institutionally
defined as ‘given’ but also private worlds (Ryan 1991) or subworlds (Werth
1999) consisting of characters’ beliefs, desires, intentions, memories, and
imaginative projections. Some of these subworlds may never be expressed
outwardly to other characters, as is likely the case with Enid’s fantasy—
hence Clowes’s use of a typeface that distinguishes this sequence from other
conversational exchanges represented in the text.
4 On the notion of ‘what it is like’ as a term of art used to describe the states of felt, subjective
awareness associated with the having of conscious experiences, see Nagel (1974) and Herman
(2009: chapter 6). Further, on the relationships between narrativity (or the degree to which a
representation is amenable to being interpreted as a story), occurrences that disrupt the canoni-
cal order of events in a storyworld, and reportability or tellability, see, again, Herman (2009:
chapter 6).
But what would a more general account of how narratives evoke story-
worlds look like? And how do narrative ways of worldmaking differ from
other representational practices that involve the construction or reconstruc-
tion of worlds, in a broad sense? In other words, when it comes to world-
creation, what distinguishes narrative representations from other contexts in
which people design and manipulate symbol systems for the purpose of
structuring, comprehending, and communicating aspects of experience? The
four basic elements—i. e., the gradient, “more-or-less” conditions for narra-
tivity—of situatedness, event sequencing, worldmaking/world disrup-
tion, and what it's like can be redescribed as procedures specific to narra-
tive ways of worldmaking. In lieu of a fuller explication of all these proce-
dures (see Herman 2009), the remainder of my analysis dwells on just a few
of the salient aspects of the process of building storyworlds viewed as a spe-
cial type of world-creation.
4. Background Conditions for Narrative Worldmaking:

Nelson Goodman’s Account
In his study Ways of Worldmaking, the philosopher Nelson Goodman devel-

ops ideas that afford context for my analysis. Adopting a pluralist instead of
a reductionist stance, Goodman argues that “many different world-versions
are of independent interest and importance, without any requirement or pre-
sumption of reducibility to a single base” (Goodman 1978: 4), for example,
the world-version propounded in physics. As Goodman puts it, “[t]he plural-
ists’ acceptance of [world-versions] other than physics implies no relaxation
of rigor but a recognition that standards different from yet no less exacting
than those applied in science are appropriate for appraising what is conveyed
in perceptual or pictorial or literary versions” (1978: 5). More generally,
Goodman asks,
In just what sense are there many worlds? What distinguishes genuine from spuri-
ous worlds? What are worlds made of? How are they made? What role do symbols
play in the making? And how is worldmaking related to knowing? (Goodman 1978:
1)
Arguing that worldmaking “as we know it always starts from worlds already
on hand; the making is a remaking,” Goodman goes on to identify five pro-
cedures for constructing worlds out of other worlds (7-16): composition and
decomposition; weighting; ordering; deletion and supplementation; and de-
formation. Brief definitions and examples of each procedure follow:
composition and decomposition: “on the one hand [...] dividing
wholes into parts and partitioning kinds into subspecies, analyzing com-
plexes into component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand
78 David Herman
[...] composing wholes and kinds out of parts and members and sub-
classes, combining features into complexes, and making connections”
(7). Ethnographic investigation of an indigenous population, for exam-
ple, may uncover the presence of several subcultures where only one had
been recognized previously; conversely, the formation of new ‘hybrid’
disciplines or subdisciplines (algebraic geometry, biochemistry, informa-
tion design) results in new, more complex world-versions.
weighting: “Some relevant kinds of the one world, rather than being
absent from the other, are present as irrelevant kinds; some differences
among worlds are not so much in entities comprised as in emphasis or
accent, and these differences are no less consequential” (11). From a
macrohistorical perspective, the shift from a religious to a secular-
scientific world-version entailed a re-weighting of the particulars of the
phenomenal world, which came to occupy a focus of attention formerly
reserved for the noumenal or spiritual realm.
ordering: “modes of organization [patterns, measurements, ways of
periodizing time, etc.] are not ‘found in the world’ but built into a world”
(14). Taxonomies of plants, animals, or other entities are in effect world-
versions built on a hierarchical system of categories that may be more or
less finely grained (and more or less densely populated), depending on
whether one has expert or only a layperson’s knowledge of a given do-
main (Herman and Moss 2007). My world-version currently contains
names for (and concepts of) only a few common types of insects, in con-
trast with the world-version of an entomologist.
deletion and supplementation: “the making of one world out of an-
other usually involves some extensive weeding out and filling—actual
excision of some old and supply of some new material” (14). I might
study entomology, and supplement my world-version with new knowl-
edge and new beings; alternatively, if because of climate change an insect
species becomes extinct, the entomologist’s world-version will undergo
compulsory excision.
deformation: “reshapings or deformations that may according to point
of view be considered either corrections or distortions” (16). Here one
may think of arguments for a new scientific theory in favor of an older
one (e. g., the geocentric vs. the heliocentric models of the solar system)
from the perspective of those who are parties to the debate.
As my examples of each worldmaking procedure indicate, there is nothing
distinctively story-like about the worlds over which Goodman’s account
ranges, though there is nothing about the analysis that excludes storyworlds,
either. Narrative worlds, too, might be made through processes of composi-
tion and decomposition: think of allegories fusing literal and symbolic
worlds, or decomposition in texts such as The Canterbury Tales, where the
narrative ramifies into a frame tale that constitutes the main diegetic level
and, embedded within it, various hypodiegetic levels created when characters
within that frame tell stories of their own. Weighting may also be a genera-
tive factor: consider postmodern rewrites that evoke new world-versions by
reweighting events in their precursor narratives, as when Jean Rhys’s Wide
Sargasso Sea generates a new storyworld on the basis of Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre by using as a metric for evaluating events not Jane Eyre’s or Ed-
ward Rochester’s perspective (as refracted through Jane’s telling) but rather
Antoinette Cosway’s. So too with ordering: narrative worlds can be made
when new time-scales are deployed, as when Alain Robbe-Grillet as a practi-
tioner of the nouveau roman in France produced novel worlds by drastically
slowing the pace of narration (Robbe-Grillet 1965 [1957; 1959]), or when the
average shot length in Hollywood films diminished over time to produce
more rapid cuts between scenes (Morrison [forthcoming]). Deletion and
supplementation likewise find their place in the building of storyworlds. I
may tailor my recounting of my own life experiences to adjust for differences
among groups of interlocutors, going into more detail among close friends
and less detail when asked a question during a job interview. And as for de-
formation, Terry Zwigoff’s (2001) film version of Ghost World can be viewed
as a reshaping of the graphic novel version, and more generally any adapta-
tion of a prior text in another medium for storytelling will result in altera-
tions of the sort that Goodman includes under this rubric (see Genette
1997).
Against the backdrop afforded by Goodman’s broad, generic account of
worldmaking procedures, operative in both non-narrative and narrative con-
texts, my next section zooms in on the way narrative openings trigger par-
ticular kinds of world-building strategies. These strategies cut across storytel-
ling media and narrative genres, but they are also inflected by the specific
constraints and affordances of various kinds of narrative practices.
5. Narrative Beginnings as Prompts for Worldmaking:

Taking up Residence in Storyworlds
Story openings prompt interpreters to take up residence (more or less com-

fortably) in the world being evoked by a given narrative. Openings from
different story genres can be compared and contrasted along this dimension,
underscoring how part of the meaning of “genre” consists of distinctive
protocols for worldmaking—though again, the approach being outlined in
this essay predicts that a common core of worldmaking procedures, specific
to the narrative text type, cuts across such generic differences. Likewise, the
model predicts that distinctively narrative processes of world creation obtain
80 David Herman
in various media for storytelling. Here the issue is how the analyst, when
comparing and contrasting a variety of narrative openings, might distinguish
generically narrative from medium-, genre-, and even text-specific worldmak-
ing procedures.
Consider the beginning of “Hills Like White Elephants”:
[1] The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. [2] On this side
there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the
sun. [3] Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the
building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open
door into the bar, to keep out flies. [4] The American and the girl with him sat at a
table in the shade, outside the building. [5] It was very hot and the express from
Barcelona would come in forty minutes. [6] It stopped at this junction for two min-
utes and went to Madrid. [7] “What should we drink?” the girl asked? [8] She had
taken off her hat and put it on the table. (211)
How do these eight sentences evoke (a fragment of) a narrative world? What
specific textual cues allow readers to draw inferences about the structure,
inhabitants, and spatiotemporal situation of this world? Further, how does
the worldmaking process here differ from that triggered by the following 7-
sentence paragraph at the beginning of Richard Morgan’s science fiction
novel Altered Carbon?
[1a] Chemically alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden table for
the fiftieth time that night. [2a] Sarah’s Heckler and Koch shard pistol glinted dully
at me in the low light, the butt gaping open for its clip. [3a] It was an assassin’s
weapon, compact and utterly silent. [4a] The magazines lay next to it. [5a] She had
wrapped insulating tape around each one to distinguish the ammunition: green for
sleep, black for the spider-venom load. [6a] Most of the clips were black-wrapped.
[7a] Sarah had used up a lot of green on the security guards at Gemini Biosys last
night. (Morgan 2002: 3, emphases added)
As Paul Werth points out (1999: 56), story openings that like Hemingway’s
and Morgan’s include noun phrases with definite articles and demonstrative
pronouns (the American and the girl, that night) can be aligned with what the
philosopher David Lewis (1979) termed the process of accommodation.
Through accommodation, a text can economically evoke the storyworld (or
“text world” in Werth’s terms) to which readers of a fictional text must
imaginatively relocate if they are to interpret referring expressions (a curtain,
the open door, the hardware, the scarred wooden table, the spider-venom load, etc.) and
deictic expressions (on this side, last night) properly5—mapping them onto the
world evoked by the text rather than the world(s) that the text producer and
text interpreter occupy when producing or decoding these textual signals.
Thus, readers of Morgan’s text assume that the scarred wooden table in sen-
tence 1a occupies the world inhabited by the earlier, experiencing-I but not
5 Deictic terms like I, here, and now are expressions whose meaning changes depending on who is
uttering them in what discourse context.
(necessarily) the world of the older, narrating-I looking back retrospectively

on this scene. Likewise, in sentence 7a the phrase last night has to be inter-
preted in light of what some narratologists have termed the story-NOW,
rather than the discourse-NOW: last night refers to the night prior to the one
in which Sarah and the experiencing-I sit together at the table, not the night
prior to the moment occupied by the narrating-I at the time of the telling.
But if readers rely on similar sorts of textual cues to accommodate to
Hemingway’s and Morgan’s story openings, this being part of what it means
to interpret both texts as members of the text-type category narrative, the
process of accommodation unfolds differently in each case—in ways that
can be correlated with the generic differences between the texts. Ryan’s
(1991) account of “fictional recentering,” and her related notion of the prin-
ciple of minimal departure, can be used to explore the differences involved.
In Ryan’s account, developed under the auspices of a possible-worlds ap-
proach to narrative, the storyworld evoked by a fictional narrative can be
described as an alternative possible world to which interpreters are openly
prompted to relocate, such that, for the duration of the fictional experience,
“the realm of possibilities is [...] recentered around the sphere which the
narrator presents as the actual world” (Ryan 1991: 22). The world evoked by
the text may be more or less accessible to the world(s) in which that narra-
tive is produced and interpreted, providing the basis for a typology of genres
(31-47).
As compared with the reference world of a news report, for instance, the
storyworld evoked by a science fiction novel about a superrace with teleki-
netic powers—or for that matter, a world in which Heckler and Koch shard
pistols can shoot spider-venom loads—is less accessible to (less compatible
with the defining properties of) the world of the here and now. Yet if no
textual or paratextual indicators block their default interpretive stance, read-
ers or film viewers will abide by what Ryan terms the principle of minimal
departure, which states that “when readers construct fictional worlds, they
fill in the gaps [...] in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional
worlds to their own experiential reality” (2005: 447). Thus readers of He-
mingway’s story assume that the interlocutors are human beings rather than
murderous aliens who have bodysnatched male and female earthlings in or-
der to dupe the waitress and the other people at the bar. Even more cru-
cially, perhaps, readers assume that the Ebro in the story is the same Ebro
that exists in the actual world and runs through a particular valley in Spain
(1). By contrast, in the case of Morgan’s text readers are prompted, not only
by the book’s opening paragraphs but also by the futuristic design on its
cover as well as its placement in the science fiction section of the library or
local bookstore, to engage in strategies for worldmaking that are not fully
continuous with those used to make sense of their everyday experience. In
82 David Herman
this world (set 500 years in the future), different kinds of ammunition for the
same gun have either a narcotizing effect or a lethal deadliness (2a); what is
more, the use of chemical stimulants to enhance alertness is so common that
it can be mentioned elliptically in a subordinate clause, as in sentence (1a).
Yet the principle of minimal departure continues to apply. Unless cued to do
otherwise, readers will assume that Sarah’s use of the sleep-inducing ammu-
nition instead of the spider-venom variety reflects her commitment to killing
only when necessary—not, say, a perverse fixation on putting people to
sleep, or a mere random tic on her part.
Hemingway’s and Morgan’s texts show how a common stock of proce-
dures for narrative worldmaking can be inflected differently when different
genres are involved. By the same token, worldmaking procedures in narrative
contexts are also affected by differences of medium. Consider the opening
of Monica’s story:
Monica: (1) So that’s why I say..UFO or the devil got after our black asses,
(2) for showing out.
(3) > I don’t know what was <
(4) but we walkin up the hill,
(5) this ^way, comin up through here.
Interviewer 1: (6) Yeah.
Monica: (7) And..I’m like on this side and Renee’s right here.
In this context, procedures for worldmaking are affected by a different sys-
tem of affordances and constraints than the system that impinges on written
narrative texts, whatever their genre. On the one hand, properties associated
with written discourse, particularly its deliberate or “worked-over” nature in
contrast with the relative spontaneity of spoken discourse (Chafe 1994), al-
low producers of literary narrative to situate participants in quite richly de-
tailed storyworlds—of the sort already evoked in a single paragraph from
each of the two texts cited above. The increased span of time separating the
production of the narrative from its interpretation, and for that matter the
longer span of time allowed for interpretation of literary narratives, facilitates
denser concentrations of detail than would be typical for face-to-face story-
telling (Herman 2004). Yet contexts of face-to-face narration are enabling
when it comes to other worldmaking procedures—procedures that are, con-
versely, subject to constraints imposed by the nature of written communica-
tion.
Producers of fictional narratives (in whatever genre) have to rely on the
process of accommodation and the principle of minimal departure to
prompt readers to relocate to the distinct spacetime coordinates of the world
evoked by a written text. In contrast, because she is telling her story on-site
or where the events being recounted are purported to have occurred, by
using deictic expressions such as this way and here in line 5 and this side and
right here in line 7 Monica can prompt her interlocutors to draw on informa-
tion available in the present interactional context—specifically, information
about the layout of the scene and its terrain—to build a model of the overall
spatial configuration of the storyworld she is attempting to evoke. In this
way, in the case of spatial deictics—expressions like here and there—face-to-
face storytelling affords more options for anchoring texts in contexts of in-
teraction than do literary narratives. To help their interlocutors assign refer-
ents to such expressions, storytellers can cue their interlocutors to draw
analogies between the spatial configuration of the storyworld and that of the
world in which the narrative is being told and interpreted. Thus, in using the
deictic expressions I have highlighted in lines 5 and 7, Monica prompts her
interlocutors to project a storyworld-external space onto a storyworld-inter-
nal space, and vice versa. Arguably, these hybrid or blended locations are
richer than those that readers can access through the process of accommoda-
tion triggered by spatial deictics in a written, literary narrative such as He-
mingway’s or Morgan’s. As is characteristic for literary narratives, accommo-
dation in these texts results not in a blending of spatiotemporal coordinates
but rather a deictic shift (see Segal 1995; Zubin/Hewitt 1995; Herman forth-
coming a) from the here and now orienting the act of interpretation to that
orienting participants in the storyworld.6
In Clowes’s Ghost World, meanwhile, still other medium-specific affor-
dances and constraints (along with particular textual and paratextual cues)
impinge on the process of narrative worldmaking. Exploiting the visual di-
mension of graphic storytelling, the cover of the novel features uncaptioned
images of the two main characters that serve immediately to orient readers
within the storyworld evoked by the text. The cover signals the complex life-
situation of protagonists who are struggling to make the transition from ado-
lescence to adulthood: Rebecca is shown blowing a bubble with her chewing
gum, while Enid is portrayed with serious-looking thick-framed glasses that
she perhaps wears to appear older than she actually is. The front matter of
the volume continues to shape readers’ inferences about what kind of story-
world they are about to enter, drawing on the verbal as well as the visual
information track to do so. One panel represents what can be assumed in
retrospect to be Enid’s bookshelf, with a heterogeneous set of texts ranging
from 2000 Insults to Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Oedipus Rex, and
Scooby Doo, to Nora Brown’s novel Henry Orient (the basis for a 1964 comedy
6 Although literary narratives do not allow for ‘blended’ spatial deixis of this sort, narrative fic-
tions told in the second person can in some cases create analogous effects by way of person
deixis. More specifically, some instances of narrative you can create blends by referring simulta-
neously (and ambiguously) to a narrator-protagonist and to a current recipient of the story, su-
perimposing the spacetime coordinates of a storyworld-internal entity upon those of a story-
world-external entity, and vice versa (see Herman 2002: 331-71).
84 David Herman
starring Peter Sellers), to a CD by the French pop singer France Gall—

suggesting not only Enid’s eclectic tastes but also the bewilderingly diverse
narratives circulating in the culture and converging on the two characters as
they try to navigate surrounding social expectations, family and educational
contexts, and their own evolving relationship. Two other images (without
accompanying text) included in the front matter show Enid and Rebecca at a
younger age standing in front of a cemetery marker—again, in retrospect,
readers can assume that this is Enid’s mother’s grave—and then the two
characters dressed in their caps and gowns for high school graduation, with
Enid making an obscene gesture at something (the entire graduation scene?)
toward which she and Rebecca are facing.
Accordingly, by the time readers get to the first page of chapter 1 of the
novel, the visual and verbal cues already provided up to this point provide
crucial context for narrative worldmaking. True, local links between
neighboring panels assist with basic aspects of the world-creation process, as
when, in the first panel, Enid asks “Why do you have this?” and is then seen
holding a copy of Sassy magazine in the next panel. Here the image of the
magazine is a correlative, in a different semiotic medium, of the particular
features of the landscape to which Monica points when she uses forms like
this way and this side to launch her own story. But more than this, when Enid
critiques Rebecca’s purchase of the magazine by asserting that “These stupid
girls think they’re so hip, but they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck-up pre-
school bitches who think they’re ‘cutting edge’ because they know who
‘Sonic Youth’ is!” (Clowes 1997: 9), this remark carries world-creating impli-
cations because of the context already afforded by the cover and the front
matter. Whereas in another storyworld an utterance of this sort might be
interpreted as a digression about a character’s pet peeves, given Enid’s life
experiences and the contents of her bookshelf her comment can be con-
strued as one that bears on her and Rebecca’s central concerns, the questions
they seek to answer (and it is this questioning process that drives the narra-
tive forward): namely, how to position themselves relative to more or less
dominant social norms and practices, including those that seek to pass them-
selves off as counter-cultural trends but that in actual fact contribute to the
masking and thus perpetuation of the status quo.
My most general point about the opening of Ghost World is that Clowes
exploits the medium-specific resources of graphic storytelling to facilitate
readers’ relocation to this narrative world. Clowes relies on both images and
words to enable this process of accommodation or rather transportation,
which can also be accomplished through particular kinds of verbal expres-
sions, as in written fiction, or a combination of verbal and gestural produc-
tions, as in face-to-face storytelling. Yet in my previous paragraph I have also
begun to touch on other, more complex dimensions of narrative worldmak-
ing—dimensions that arise from a temporally extended experience of, and

not just one’s initial migration to, a storyworld. Given the scope of the pre-
sent essay, I cannot address here these aspects of world-construction, but
must instead refer readers to the fuller discussion in the study mentioned
previously (Herman 2009). Chapter 5 of that study suggests how ideas from
various perspectives can throw light on this more temporally extended pro-
cess of experiencing narrative worlds.
6. Narrative Worldmaking, Postclassical Narratology,

and Interdisciplinary Narrative Research
The approach sketched in this essay seeks to weave together two strands of
postclassical narratology, namely, transmedial narratology (Herman 2004; Ryan
2004) and cognitive narratology (Herman 2003; 2007; forthcoming b; Jahn 1997;
2005). Transmedial narratology is premised on the assumption that, although
narrative practices in different media share common features insofar as they
are all instances of the narrative text type, stories are nonetheless inflected by
the constraints and affordances associated with a given medium (e. g., print
texts, film, comics and graphic novels, etc.). Unlike classical narratology,
transmedial narratology disputes the notion that the story level of a narrative
remains wholly invariant across shifts of medium. However, it also assumes
that stories do have ‘gists’ that can be remediated more or less fully and rec-
ognizably—depending in part on the semiotic properties of the source and
target media. Meanwhile, cognitive narratology can be defined as the study
of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices, wherever—and by what-
ever means—those practices occur. As this definition suggests, cognitive
narratology, too, is transmedial in scope; it encompasses the nexus of narra-
tive and mind not just in print texts but also in face-to-face interaction, cin-
ema, radio news broadcasts, computer-mediated virtual environments, and
other storytelling media. In turn, ‘mind-relevance’ can be studied vis-à-vis
the multiple factors associated with the design and interpretation of narra-
tives, including the story-producing activities of tellers, the processes by
means of which interpreters make sense of storyworlds evoked by narrative
representations or artifacts, and the cognitive states and dispositions of char-
acters in those storyworlds. In addition, the mind-narrative nexus can be
studied along two other dimensions, insofar as stories function as both (1) a
target of interpretation and (2) a means for making sense of experience—a
resource for structuring and comprehending the world—in their own right.
Research on narrative worldmaking affords opportunities for story ana-
lysts working in both of these areas—transmedial narratology and cognitive
narratology—to integrate concepts and methods that promise to be richly
86 David Herman
productive if brought into a more synergistic interplay. Reciprocally, the

study of narrative as both a tool and a target for sense-making procedures
operative in a variety of discourse genres and communicative contexts has
cross-disciplinary relevance, enabling closer dialogue between theorists of
narrative and scholars in other fields. In short, exploration of the protocols
for making, unmaking, and remaking storyworlds is one of the exciting new
frontiers of narratology in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research.7
Works Cited
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. The Flow and Displacement of Conscious
Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clowes, Daniel. 1997. Ghost World. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books.
Genette, Gérard. 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa New-
man and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Green, Georgia M. 1989. Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Hemingway, Ernest. 1987 [1927]. “Hills Like White Elephants”. In: The Complete Short Stories of
Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 211-214.
Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction”. In: D. H. (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narra-
tive Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, p. 1-30.
Nebraska Press.
Herman, David (ed.). 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, CA: Publications
of the Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Herman, David. 2004. “Toward a Transmedial Narratology”. In: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.).
Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, p. 47-75.
Herman, David. 2007. “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cognitive Narratology, Discur-
sive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” In: Narrative 15:4, p.
306-334.
Herman, David. 2008. “Description, Narrative, and Explanation: Text-type Categories and
the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence”. In: Poetics Today 29:3, p.
437-472.
Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herman, David (forthcoming a). “Teaching Time, Space, and Narrative Worlds.” In: D. H.,
Brian McHale, and James Phelan (eds.). Options for Teaching Narrative Theory.
Herman, David (forthcoming b). “Cognitive Narratology”. In: John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg
Schönert, Peter Hühn (eds.). The Living Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter.
7 Parts of this essay are based on material contained in my book Basic Elements of Narrative (Her-
man 2009). I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to use this material.
Herman, David and Susan Moss. 2007. “Plant Names and Folk Taxonomies. Frameworks for
Ethnosemiotic Inquiry”. In: Semiotica 167:1/4, p. 1-11.
Jahn, Manfred. 1997. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives.
Towards a Cognitive Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 18, p. 441-468.
Jahn, Manfred. 2005. “Cognitive Narratology”. In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-
Laure Ryan (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, p.
67-71.
Labov, William. 1972. “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax”. In: Language
in the Inner City. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 354-396.
Lewis, David. 1979. “Scorekeeping in a Language Game”. In: Journal of Philosophical Logic 8, p.
339-359.
Morgan, Richard. 2002. Altered Carbon. New York: Del Rey.
Morrison, James. (forthcoming). “Narrative Theory in the Film Studies Classroom; or, Old
Movies and the New Disorder”. In: David Herman, Brian McHale and James
Phelan (eds.). Options for Teaching Narrative Theory.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In: The Philosophical Review 83:4, p. 435-
50.
Reddy, Michael J. 1979. “The Conduit Metaphor – a Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language
about Language”. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 284-324.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965 [1957, 1959]. Two Novels, by Robbe-Grillet [La Jalousie and Dans le
Labyrinthe]; trans. R. Howard. New York: Grove Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). 2004. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Possible-Worlds Theory”. In: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and
Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Rout-
ledge, p. 446-450.
Segal, Ernest M. 1995. “Narrative Comprehension and the Role of Deictic Shift Theory.” In:
Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder and Lynn E. Hewitt (eds.). Deixis in Narrative. A
Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 3-17.
Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds. Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.
Zubin, David; Hewitt, Lynn E. 1995. “The Deictic Center. A Theory of Deixis in Narrative”.
In: Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder and Lynn E. Hewitt (eds.). Deixis in Narrative.
A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 129-155.
Zwigoff, Terry. 2001. Ghost World. MGM.
ROY SOMMER
(Wuppertal)
Making Narrative Worlds:

A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Literary Storytelling
1. Introduction: Narrative Composition and Narrative Comprehension
The title of this essay makes reference to Richard Gerrig’s study Experiencing
Narrative Worlds (1993) and David Herman’s chapter on “Narrative Ways of
Worldmaking” in this volume as well as to Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories
(2002). These three works, and many others which may be subsumed under
the broad heading of ‘cognitive approaches to narrative’ or ‘cognitive narra-
tology’, have helped to expand our understanding of the reception process
by pointing out that acts of reading are framed by narrative schemata which
are part of our mental disposition, and that such frames or schemata are
triggered through textual cues. It is the aim of this essay to explore whether
such cognitive principles may also be usefully applied to the creative process.
To what extent can narrative composition, i.e. the process of writing narra-
tive fiction, be modelled and described in analogy to narrative comprehen-
sion, the act of reading a fictional narrative? Are there parallels between
these processes which, according to well-established communication models
of narrative fiction, constitute the core of extratextual literary communica-
tion?
Such questions clearly transcend the traditional boundaries of structural-
ist narratology. The ongoing cognitive turn in literary narratology and the
emergence of interdisciplinary narrative research, however, enable us to see
narrative composition and narrative comprehension as two distinct, but
structurally related, sense-making activities. In the introduction to his seminal
study Story Logic, Herman (2002: 1) observes that “story recipients, whether
readers, viewers, or listeners, work to interpret narratives by reconstructing
the mental representations that have in turn guided their production”. Simi-
larly, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (2005: 180) contends that “all normally de-
veloping humans capable of understanding stories are capable of telling sto-
ries, and vice versa. In other words, telling a story requires and engages the
same cognitive software as listening to a story”.
Making Narrative Worlds 89
Based on schema theory and early linguistic studies of text comprehen-

sion in the 1970s and 1980s, cognitive narratology has developed sophisti-
cated models of this ‘software’ used by readers in the process of narrative
comprehension. Less attention, however, has been paid by narratologists to
the processes involved in the generation of stories. Narrative researchers in
other disciplines have explored creativity in general and storytelling as a crea-
tive activity in particular from the perspectives of psychological and artificial
intelligence research. From the cross-disciplinary take on narrative which this
volume seeks to establish, bringing the research from these disciplines to-
gether seems a very promising endeavour. While cognitive narratology might
benefit from incorporating concepts of creativity and models of storytelling
into its theoretical framework, other disciplines might be interested in the
state of the art in literary narratology in order to refine existing concepts
such as the ‘domain’ of literary creativity and the phase of ‘narrative design’
in models of the creative process.
This paper takes a first step towards such a cross-disciplinary model of
story generation or narrative composition. The overall aim is to refine our
understanding of what happens in the process of storytelling.1 Restrictive
narratologists might object, of course, that storytelling and narrative design
belong to the realm of creative writing. The aims and methodological stan-
dards of narratological approaches to storytelling, however, differ considera-
bly from those of creative writing. Whereas creative writing is aimed at en-
couraging and supporting aspiring writers and at improving their creative
output, narratology provides systematic descriptions of the elements of nar-
rative and their functional relationships and of the cognitive processes in-
volved in their reception (and, as suggested here, also in their production)
within an overall framework of a general theory of narrative.
Apart from the cognitive turn in narratology, two narratological ap-
proaches have transcended the structuralist focus on narrative poetics in
favour of a more holistic view of the interaction of author, text and reader:
these are, firstly, the communication model of narrative fiction and, sec-
ondly, rhetorical approaches to narrative based on linguistic speech act the-
ory. The potential and the limitations of these approaches for a model of the
storytelling process will be discussed in section 2. Section 3 will then offer a
survey of creativity research which provides conceptual alternatives to com-
munication theory and speech act theory as a starting point for a concept of
narrative production. The survey will also demonstrate, however, that psy-
1 ‘Narrative comprehension’ and ‘story generation’ are the terms used in linguistics and artificial
intelligence respectively to designate what is commonly known as ‘storytelling’. Despite their
slightly different connotations, these three terms are treated as synonyms in this paper, whereas
the term ‘narrative design’ (which is sometimes used as another synonym of storytelling in crea-
tive writing) refers to a specific stage of the storytelling process (cf. section 5).
90 Roy Sommer
chological research lacks the domain-specific knowledge required for an

analysis of storytelling. Section 4 will therefore propose a concept of narra-
tive design which integrates psychological and narratological research.
2. Narratology and Extratextual Literary Communication:

Communication Models, Speech Act Theory and Cognition
In their discussion of levels of communication in narrative fiction, Neumann

and Nünning (2008: 25) proceed from an understanding of literature as a
specific form of communication: “From a communicative perspective, narra-
tive fiction is regarded as an interaction between an author and the readers
through the medium of a text.” Simple communication models assume that
an addresser (author) sends a message which makes use of a material me-
dium of transmission and is based on a code shared by all participants in the
communicative process to an addressee (reader). Narratological models of
literary communication realize that there are significant differences between
face-to-face oral communication and written communication, such as the
time lag between production and reception and the lack of direct interaction
between addresser and addressee (ibid.: 26). A third, equally important dif-
ference between verbally transmitted messages in everyday communication
and literary communication via literary texts results from the specific charac-
teristics of fictional narratives which themselves stage communicative pro-
cesses.
Narratologists have accounted for this phenomenon by making a clear
distinction between extratextual literary communication on the one hand,
and intratextual communication on the other. The latter is usually conceived
in terms of two hierarchically structured levels of textual communication in
relation to the storyworld (diegesis): the extradiegetic level of narrative me-
diation or narratorial discourse, and the intradiegetic level of the story. The
distinction between the participants in extratextual communication (real
author and real reader) and intratextual communication (extradiegetic narra-
tors and narratees, and/or implied author and implied reader, depending on
the preferred theoretical framework) is a key concept of narratological mod-
els of literary communication. The concepts and categories introduced by
rhetorical theories of narrative appear to be less rigid in this respect, but at
least in principle the distinction between the two types of communicative
processes involved in literary communication also applies here.
Although models of the narrative-communication situation acknowledge
that the real author and the real reader, both situated “outside the narrative
transaction as such” (Chatman 1980: 151), are “indispensable to it in an ulti-
mate practical sense” (ibid.), and that the author is a vital concept for the
understanding of relationships between texts and their historical and cultural

contexts,2 the focus of narratological research has traditionally been on in-
tratextual communication (cf. Nünning 1989). The inclusion of the ‘level’ of
extratextual communication in narratological models is, then, a matter of
systematics rather than a reflection of genuine narratological research inter-
ests. This explains why narratology has so far been content with using the
same concept of communication (the rule-based transmission of a message
from a sender to a recipient) for extratextual and intratextual communica-
tion, although there can be little doubt that there are significant differences
between actual exchanges between authors and readers (for instance in the
context of a public reading or a creative writing workshop), the ‘communica-
tion’ between an author and his or her text in the creative process, or the
‘communication’ between readers and texts on the extratextual ‘level’ of
story comprehension on the one hand, and the literary staging of communi-
cative acts involving narrators, narratees and characters within a novel on the
other.
Whereas communication models don’t elaborate on the nature of ex-
tratextual literary communication, rhetorical approaches to narrative con-
ceive of narrative as “a purposive communicative act” (Phelan 2006: 300),
postulating “a recursive relationship among authorial agency, textual phe-
nomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response” (ibid.). Rhe-
torical approaches to narrative, then, offer a more holistic view of literary
communication, which integrates the author within its theoretical framework
instead of drawing a strict boundary between extratextual and intratextual
communication:
Texts are designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways; those de-
signs are conveyed through the words, techniques, structures, forms and intertextual
relations of texts; and reader responses are a function of and, thus, a guide to how
authorial designs are created through textual phenomena. (ibid.)
In his survey of the theoretical foundation of what he terms ‘rhetorical narra-
tology’, Michael Kearns (1999) describes how speech act theory locates
meaning in the use to which an utterance is put and how it allows us to see
the author’s illocutionary stance towards his or her work as the key to fic-
tionality. Building on Marie-Louise Pratt’s (1978) work on speech act theory
and literary discourse, as well as on cognitive linguistics, Kearns then shows
how situational and cultural contexts need to be taken into account when
analysing narratives, and discusses which cognitive and communicative prin-
2 Cf. Neumann/Nünning (2008: 29f.): “It is generally understood today that the author is the
central link between a narrative text and its historical context: The analysis of the interplay be-
tween narrative fiction and its pertinent cultural context necessarily entails the recognition of the
author.”
92 Roy Sommer
ciples help to establish meaningful communication between authors, texts

and readers.
As rhetorical criticism tends to view a work of fiction as an intentional
utterance, the role of the author as “flesh-and-blood person” (Booth 2005:
76) is stronger in this theoretical framework than in the more text-oriented
narratological models of literary communication. As a consequence rhetori-
cal critics have introduced concepts such as authorial audience or intended
audience in order to account for an author’s intentions, and have defended
the controversial concept of the implied author as necessary for a “complete
description of a narrating situation”.3 Despite the theoretical insistence on
the author and his or her role in literary communication, however, rhetorical
criticism is more concerned in practice with how readers approach and un-
derstand narratives than with how authors produce them. When extratextual
communication involves the author, he or she tends to be viewed through
the lens of reconstructed intentionality, as a reader construct.
A discussion of the implied author is not required here, firstly, because
all the arguments have been exchanged over and over again without critics
and proponents of the ‘implied author’ succeeding in convincing the oppos-
ing side of the concept’s adequacy or inadequacy—despite continued efforts
to shed “new light on stubborn problems”, as the section on unreliability in
Phelan and Rabinowitz (2005) is titled; and secondly, because the debate
itself has recently been reviewed systematically and in great detail in Kindt
and Müller’s (2006) study. Thirdly, for the purpose of the present essay the
phenomenon traditionally described by the implied author, namely the con-
struction of an author image by a reader as the source of an intentional liter-
ary speech act, diverts attention from the main question addressed in this
essay, i.e. how, to quote Phelan (2006: ix), “living gets converted into […]
telling”.
Phelan’s phrase succinctly expresses the change of perspective explored
in this paper, a shift of attention from the well-researched relationship be-
tween text and reader, or reader and (implied) author, to the author’s side of
extratextual literary communication. The focus is not on how the author’s
intention can be reconstructed from the narrative structure, but on how the
flesh-and-blood person ‘dissolves’ in narrative, metaphorically speaking,
leaving (intentionally?) sufficient textual traces of his or her (implied) per-
sonality (such as authorial irony, authorial audiences, or narrative excess) to
remind us that, despite all theoretical justifications of the structuralist move
3 Cf. Kearns (1999: 28): “The traditional concept of a single, live author is necessary for any
meaningful discussion of constructive intention, while the concepts of authorship as a socially
constituted role and author as implied by any speech act or text are needed for a complete de-
scription of a narrating situation.”
from work to text (cf. Barthes 2001 [1971]), at least in the eyes of the ‘ideal’
or ‘intended’ reader, the text always also remains a ‘work’.
As has been shown above, both communicative and rhetorical ap-
proaches to the analysis of fictional narrative acknowledge the importance of
the author in principle, either as a link between the text and its cultural con-
text or as the source of the fictional discourse; neither approach, however,
provides a starting point for a well-constrained description of the storytelling
process, as their core interests, where extratextual communication is con-
cerned, lie with model readers and the reception process rather than with
model authors and narrative composition. Extending narratological research
from the reception to the production of narrative therefore requires a third
component.
This missing link is provided by cognitive approaches to the study of
narrative, both within literary narratology and in related disciplines such as
cognitive psychology (cf. Bortolussi/Dixon 2003), psycholinguistics (cf. Ger-
rig 1993) and artificial intelligence research (cf. Dartnall 1994, Turner 1994).
Important work in this field includes the studies by Fludernik (1996),
Schneider (2000) and Herman (2002), and the contributions in Herman
(2003). A short survey of cognitive approaches to narrative can be found in
Jahn (2005). These cognitive approaches should not be considered as a theo-
retical and methodological alternative either to communication models or to
rhetorical narratology, which view similar phenomena from different per-
spectives, using different theoretical frameworks, concepts and terminol-
ogies. Cognitive research functions, rather, as a ‘meta-discourse’ or founda-
tional discipline which provides both text-oriented and contextual narratolo-
gies either with concepts for explaining narrative phenomena which tran-
scend textual boundaries, such as unreliability, or with models of interaction
between texts and readers.
Cognitivist studies of narrative fiction have so far concentrated mainly
on narrative comprehension. The fundamental nature of the mental pro-
cesses involved in reading, as well as the generic nature of the narrative
frames and schemata which are activated in the reception process—Kearns
(1999) even talks of “ur-conventions”—suggest that the generation of stories
should follow similar, though presumably not identical, rules and procedures.
Phelan (2005: 49), for instance, assumes that “if readers need conceptual
schema [sic] to construct interpretations, authors also need conceptual
schema [sic] to construct structural wholes”. Gerrig and Egidi (2003: 41)
discuss more explicitly how authors may benefit from knowledge of sche-
mata applied in the reading process, as their confirmation or violation allows
for efficient representations of characters, actions and objects as well as for
94 Roy Sommer
subtle indications of deviations from expected behaviour.4 Michelle Scalise

Sugiyama contends that “art behaviors are cognitively discrete” (2005: 179)
and encourages us to “think of art behaviors in terms of the cognitive and
physical features involved in their generation or processing” (ibid.).
To sum up, it seems likely that similar, though not identical, mental
schemata are at work in the processes of creating and interpreting narrative
worlds, and that these processes differ in complexity: storytelling involves
more factors and variables than story comprehension, where we are ‘merely’
concerned with the interaction between readers and texts. Existing models of
extratextual literary communication, however, are not sophisticated enough
to account for the processes involved in narrative composition. Speech act
theory does not provide a good starting point, either, as existing rhetorical
approaches to narrative don’t deal with pre-textual phenomena. For a de-
scription of the storytelling process an alternative theoretical framework is,
therefore, required. As there can be no doubt that storytelling, especially the
production of fictional stories, is a creative activity, the following section will
introduce some psychological theories of creativity and creative behaviour.
3. Creativity and Storytelling
Creativity has been defined by behavioural scientists as “the ability to pro-

duce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e.
useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (Sternberg/Lubart 1999: 3). In
their survey of psychological theories, Sternberg and Lubart discuss and
evaluate six approaches to creativity: pragmatic, psychodynamic, psychomet-
ric, cognitive, social-personality and confluence approaches. Proponents of
pragmatic approaches, most famously Edward de Bono, are rejected for their
lack of interest in theoretical and methodological issues and their commer-
cialization of creativity theory. Psychodynamic approaches which, due to
their psychoanalytical roots, are situated outside the mainstream of scientific
psychology, are accused of theoretical and methodological shortcomings.
Whereas the psychodynamic approaches rely on case studies of eminent
creative people, psychometric approaches have devised and conducted tests
to evaluate a person’s creative skills. The results may be valid as far as they
go, yet these simple problem-solving tests only yield trivial results which
cannot shed light on more complex creative processes.
4 Cf. Gerrig/Egidi (2003: 41): “Reader’s use of schemas provides at least two benefits to authors.
First, as we have noted, schemas allow them to delineate a scene with quick gestures. Once, for
example, a restaurant scene has been minimally set, waiters, clattering trays, and wandering vio-
linists can be addressed with little cognitive cost. Second, schemas allow authors to call quiet at-
tention to departures from the norm. It is not, for example, an ordinary event to be served food
in a restaurant which one has not ordered.”
Having rejected pragmatic, psychodynamic and psychometric approach-

es, Sternberg and Lubart then turn to three alternatives which seem to be
more promising. Cognitive approaches to creativity distinguish between a
generative and an exploratory phase of creativity and analyse the mental
processes which characterise creative invention, such as processes of re-
trieval, association, synthesis, transformation, analogical transfer, and cate-
gorical reduction (cf. ibid. 7f.). Social-personality approaches focus both on
the sources of creativity (personality variables, motivational variables, so-
ciocultural environment) and its motivation (e.g. intrinsic motivation or the
need for order or achievement).
Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, Sternberg and Lubart con-
clude, neither approach can explain and evaluate creativity on its own.5 What
is needed, they consider, is a confluence of approaches proceeding from the
assumption “that multiple components must converge for creativity to oc-
cur” (ibid.: 10). The examples of such approaches cited by Sternberg and
Lubart include studies analysing the confluence of intrinsic motivation, do-
main-relevant knowledge and abilities and creativity-relevant skills (cf. Ama-
bile 1983), or the developmental evolving-systems model for understanding
creativity (cf. Gruber 1988). A third confluence approach, and the one which
will be discussed in detail here as it lends itself best to the requirements of an
overall framework model for narrative design, is Csikszentmihalyi’s (1997)
sociological theory of creativity, which is based on the distinction between
field, domain and person.6
Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 23) points out that definitions of creativity tend
to be too vague to be useful, with usage ranging from the inner assurance of
a person that what he or she does or has achieved is new and valuable to the
belief that this inner assurance must be confirmed by experts in the field
before we can agree to call a person creative and his or her effort new and
valuable: “The problem is that the term ‘creativity’ covers too much
ground”. As a consequence, Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of creativity turns to
systems theory in order to restrict the range of phenomena to be defined.
Csikszentmihalyi argues that “creativity can be observed only in the in-
terrelations of a system made up of three main parts” (1997: 27) namely the
‘domain’ (i.e. a set of symbolic rules and procedures), the ‘field’ (i.e. the insti-
tutions and persons who act as gatekeepers to the domain) and the creative
5 Cf. Sternberg/Lubart (1999: 9): “The cognitive and social-personality approaches have each
provided valuable insights into creativity. However, if you look for research that investigates
both cognitive and social-personality variables at the same time, you will find only a handful of
studies. The cognitive work on creativity has tended to ignore or downplay the personality and
social system, and the social-personality approaches have tended to have little or nothing to say
about the mental representations and processes underlying creativity.”
6 Csikszentmihalyi’s findings are based on interviews with 91 exceptional creative individuals
including scientists, artists, musicians and writers.
96 Roy Sommer
person: “Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given do-
main such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or
sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field
for inclusion into the relevant domain.” (ibid.: 28) These three elements of
creativity defined by Csikszentmihalyi and others from a sociological and
psychological angle—person, field and domain—will now be examined more
closely and correlated with corresponding literary theories and concepts of
author, literary system and narrativity.
3.1 Approaching the Creative Personality:

Flesh-and-Blood Authors and Reader Constructs
There is a general consensus that human beings are not equally creative.
Psychological research has tried to establish degrees of creativity, to distin-
guish more and less creative personalities, to compare the motivational pat-
terns of creative individuals, and to discover evidence of a creative disposi-
tion in individuals.7 Although there seems to be a relationship between intel-
ligence and creativity,8 researchers today agree that a person’s creativity de-
pends on the context in which they work, i.e. the interaction between the
individual and his or her chosen domain and the field: “the essence of crea-
tivity cannot be captured as an intrapersonal variable” (Sternberg/Kauf-
man/Pretz 2002: 1).
Although creativity is not an intrapersonal variable, there is also a con-
sensus that creativity can be measured and developed in some degree (cf.
Sternberg 2006: 2). Psychologists continue to study behavioural and devel-
opmental variables in order to correlate personality with creativity (cf.
Baer/Kaufman 2006: 18). Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 57f.) holds that creative
people adapt to new situations easily, they have learnt to operate in the sym-
bolic system of their domain intuitively, they manage to gain access to the
field (through communicative competence and good connections), and they
are characterised by the ability to reconcile contrasting personality traits. He
then identifies ten pairs of “antithetical traits that are often both present in
such individuals and integrated with each other in a dialectical tension” (ibid.:
1997: 57f.).9 Other researchers have assembled lists of personality traits asso-
7 References to the relevant psychological research can be found in the brief ‘state of the art’ in
Sternberg/Kaufman/Pretz (2002: 1f.).
8 Cf. the survey by Baer and Kaufman (2006: 15) who point out that “creative people tend to
have above-average IQs” but also find that “[a]bove an IQ level of 120, the correlation between
IQ scores and creativity appears to weaken”.
9 These ten antithetical pairs are (1) a great deal of (focused) physical energy vs. long phases of
idleness and reflection, (2) being smart and naïve at the same time, (3) responsibility and irre-
sponsibility, (4) alternation between imagination and a rooted sense of reality, (5) extroversion
ciated with creativity, such as “independence of judgements, self-confidence,

attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, tolerance for ambiguity,
openness to experience, psychotism, risk taking, androgyny, perfectionism,
persistence, resilience, and self-efficacy” (cf. Baer/Kaufman 2006: 17f.).10
Recently, creativity studies have also paid attention to intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation of creative behaviour (cf. ibid.: 18).
In literary studies, the author as ‘person’ has been a problematic and, at
times, highly controversial issue ever since Wimsatt and Beardsley (1947)
exposed the ‘intentional fallacy’ (i.e. drawing conclusions from text to au-
thor) and thus initiated the move towards the text which characterised the
school of New Criticism and its method of close reading. The sole focus on
the text was also characteristic of structuralist narratology from the 1960s to
the early 1990s. Context-oriented approaches such as the New Historicism
likewise discard the author as the originator of the literary text, turning to
Foucault’s discourse theory instead. Those approaches that still insist on
talking of “flesh-and-blood authors” (Booth 2005) usually do so within the
frameworks of intentionality and ethical criticism, whereas most critics re-
gard the (implied) author predominantly as a reader construct, i.e. as the
image(s) of the author which readers develop in the reception process (cf.
Jannidis 2005).
3.2 Surveying the ‘Field’: Schmidt’s Empirical Theory of Literature
Systems theory provides the link between social psychology and the conflu-
ence approach to creativity on the one hand, and literary theory and existing
models of extratextual literary communication on the other. The general
structure of the literary field and domain-specific constraints have been de-
scribed exhaustively by Schmidt (1991 [1980]), whose empirical theory of
literature includes an in-depth analysis of the preconditions of literary com-
munication. Schmidt (ibid: 72) differentiates between general and specific
aspects that can influence the writing process.11 The former include a variety
of competencies and skills (linguistic competence, writing skills, concentra-
tion, empathy, knowledge of values and norms, relevant cultural discourses,
vs. introversion, (6) modesty and pride, (7) dominant and submissive behaviour (‘psychological
androgyny”), (8) traditionalism and conservativism vs. rebellious and iconoclastic behaviour, (9)
attachment vs. detachment with respect to one’s work, and (10) suffering and pain vs. enjoy-
ment (cf. Csikszentmihalyi 1997: 58-76).
10 Piirto’s list of personality traits, based on a survey of the literature, offers similar results (2005:
4f.).
11 Cf. Schmidt (1991 [1980]: 71): “Die Bedingungen des K[ommunikations]-Voraussetzungs-
systems können generell eingeteilt werden in allgemeine und spezielle Handlungsbedingungen,
denen Kommunikationsteilnehmer zum Handlungszeitraum unterliegen”.
98 Roy Sommer
standards of communication etc.), motivations, needs and intentions, as well

as four types of contextual constraint.12
Schmidt (ibid.: 262ff.) identifies economic conditions (both in a general
sense of the dominant economic system, e.g. socialism or capitalism, and in
the specific sense of personal income and the author’s dependence on—or
independence from—the economic success of his/her literary work), includ-
ing the situation of the literary market and the availability of media for liter-
ary content; social conditions, i.e. the influence of institutions such as schools
and universities, the court, literary schools and circles, as well as the domi-
nant author images in a society; political conditions (political system, class
structure and class of author); and, finally, cultural conditions (values and
norms, dominant aesthetic theories and religious beliefs, as well as the indi-
vidual author’s knowledge of literary traditions, forms and genres). In addi-
tion to these general preconditions of literary communication, a variety of
specific aspects may influence the production of literary texts, including the
writer’s assumptions about the competencies, skills, motivations and expec-
tations of other participants in the system of extratextual literary communica-
tion (such as editors, publishers and readers), the writer’s awareness of his or
her own role within the literary system, and his or her psychological and
physical dispositions.
3.3 The ‘Domain’: Prototype Theory and Equivalence Hypothesis
The concept of the ‘domain’ has been defined as “a formally organized body
of knowledge that is associated with a given field” (Feldman/Csikszentmi-
halyi/Gardner 1994: 20) and, somewhat more precisely, as “a set of symbolic
rules and procedures” (Csikszentmihalyi 1997: 27). Sternberg (2005: 301)
supports the latter definition, holding that “a domain is probably better de-
fined as a combination of mental representations and processes rather than
solely in terms of the mental representations (i.e. symbol systems)”. Whereas
fields consist of people, institutions and cultural practices, domains, there-
fore, are symbolic systems defining rules and procedures for creative activi-
ties. As Piirto (2005: 2) points out, fields may contain several domains:
“Mathematics is a field, but algebra, geometry, number theory, are domains.
Literature is a field, but poetry is a domain.” Her examples, however, reveal a
problem characteristic of psychological discourse on domains: a subdisci-
pline in mathematics is not necessarily equivalent to a literary genre. And a
literary genre, as will be argued in section 4, does not necessarily constitute a
domain within the literary field, but rather a field of its own.
12 Schmidt’s list of contextual factors mixes aspects of person, field and domain which I prefer to
call ‘constraints’ rather than ‘frames’ (unless specific cognitive parameters are meant).
The underlying problem here is the realization in more recent research

that creativity cannot be considered as a domain-independent personality
trait, as early psychometric approaches in the 1940s assumed. Proceeding
from the assumption that creativity is neither wholly domain-specific nor
wholly domain-general, experts in creativity research have come to the con-
clusion that domain-specific elements need to be examined more closely:
“The potential to be creative may have some domain-general elements, but
to gain the knowledge one needs to make creative contributions, one must
develop knowledge and skills within a particular domain in which one is to
make one’s creative contribution.” (Sternberg 2006: 2). As the domains in-
clude such diverse things as algebra and poetry, it comes as no surprise that
“the important skills, attitudes, ways of working, guiding metaphors, and
standards for assessing creative performance vary widely from domain to
domain” (Kaufman/Baer 2005b: xiv). On the other hand, according to
Kaufman and Baer (ibid.), “[e]ven in domains that seem closely related, such
as writing poetry and writing short stories […], it appears that the underlying
processes may be quite different”.
The domain-specific nature of creativity is one part of the challenge, the
ongoing extension of the objects of psychological studies of creativity an-
other. According to Kaufman and Baer (2005b: xiv), creativity “has a much
wider purview than it once did; no longer confined to just a few areas in the
arts and sciences, creativity is now considered important in performances
and products of all kinds.” In order to cope with the “sometimes confusing
theoretical diversity that domain specificity has spawned” (ibid.), psycholo-
gists need either to concentrate on domain-general aspects of creativity or to
collaborate more closely with experts on domain-specific systems, rules and
procedures in the arts, sciences and other fields involved.
An example of the first type of study is the Routledge Companion to Creativ-
ity (Rickards/Runco/Moger 2009) which brings together a wide range of
commissioned articles on different aspects of creativity in organizational and
professional domains. By concentrating on a specific type of domain, the
editors manage to establish thematic coherence between contributions. The
propulsion model of kinds of creative contribution, developed by Sternberg,
Kaufman and Pretz (2002), is an example of the second type: here, the focus
is on the quality of creative contributions, regardless of the field and domain:
“The examples we give are from science and technology, arts and letters, and
popular culture, but we believe that the model applies to creativity in all
fields” (ibid.: 4). The results of such an approach will probably be judged
differently in different fields; from the point of view of literary studies it is
rather questionable whether the claims made here would stand (or even de-
serve) closer scrutiny—questions such as “Is Agatha Christie more creative
than James Joyce?” are insignificant for the field, and the generic conven-
100 Roy Sommer
tions which are used in this study to measure the ‘novelty’ of a novel fail to
do justice to the complexity of the domain.
These examples help to demonstrate that creativity research, when it in-
volves domains rather than general personality traits, needs to use domain-
specific criteria in order to yield coherent and relevant results. The difficulty,
of course, is that psychologists are only experts in their own domains and
have to draw on other disciplines and discourses in order to avoid theoretical
or methodological shortcomings. Sternberg (2005: 300) argues that “exactly
what a domain is has never been defined very well”. While it is probably true
that domains have not been defined by psychologists, it is very likely that
experts in the respective fields have a clear understanding of the specific
features of their domains. Narratology, for instance, offers very sophisticated
theories of narrativity and models of forms and functions of narrative struc-
ture which have so far been ignored in creativity research.
It is equally true, however, that literary scholars don’t offer their knowl-
edge to other disciplines such as psychology in a systematic way. There are
no entries for ‘creativity’ and ‘domain’ in the prestigious Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory, for instance, as these are not established concepts within
narratological discourse. Thus psychologists, even if they were interested,
would be hard pressed to realize the significance of narrative theory for defi-
nitions of the novelist’s domain. Cross-disciplinary collaboration requires
some effort to ‘translate’ and ‘label’ disciplinary knowledge in such a way that
it becomes more easily accessible to experts from other fields. The following
section will therefore try to demonstrate how narratologists might define the
domain of narrative fiction.
4. The Novelist’s Domain: Some Principles of Narrative Design
Cognitive approaches to narrative and narrativity proceed from two related

premises: prototype theory and the ubiquity of storytelling in culture. The
prototype theory as proposed by Fludernik (1996: 19) holds that “spontane-
ous forms of storytelling can be imagined as natural and prototypical since
they provide a generic and typological resource for more subtly and com-
plexly textured artifacts of creative structuration”. Oral storytelling in every-
day conversation, according to this theory, can be considered as the proto-
type of more elaborate forms of fictional and non-fictional storytelling, re-
gardless of the medium in which the story is told or the narrative transmit-
ted. Herman’s (2002) concept of storyworlds equally applies to both fictional
and nonfictional narratives.13
13 Herman’s (2002: 20) term ‘storyworld’ designates “models built up on the basis of cues con-
tained in narrative discourse”.
The second, closely related premise holds that storytelling is a transcul-

tural phenomenon and is omnipresent in everyday life: “Narrative is every-
where a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral
cultures into high literacy and electronic information processing” (Ong 1988:
140). Access to the domain starts in early childhood, according to Peter
Brooks (1984: 3): “Children quickly become virtual Aristotelians, insisting
upon any storyteller’s observation of the ‘rules’, upon proper beginnings,
middles, and particularly ends.” Through frequent exposure to stories they
are made familiar not only with narrative plot “as a dominant mode of order-
ing and explanation” (ibid.: 6) but also with all other recurrent features of
narrative. As a result, the implicit knowledge of narrative frames and generic
conventions expands as listeners become readers and discover new narrative
genres and media. In the course of a reader’s biography an intuitive set of
reading strategies (including suspension of disbelief, empathy, mental model-
ling) is constantly refined—readers are experts in creating mental representa-
tion and storyworlds (cf. Herman 2002).
To these established premises we can add a third, which one might call
an equivalence hypothesis: the generic and typological resources for story
comprehension are similar to those required for story generation. The ge-
neric conventions, dramaturgical schemata and narrative frames that readers
need to be acquainted with in order to be able to make sense of a story also
form the regularities and principles that constitute the narrative domain.
These regularities and principles frame readers’ aesthetic experiences and at
the same time serve as domain-specific constraints for authors (as opposed
to the economic, social, technological and ideological constraints of the liter-
ary field): generic conventions, dramaturgy and narrative frames form the
horizon of storied worlds shared by flesh-and-blood storytellers with their
real-world audiences.
The process by which a writer goes “beyond the intuitive grasp of form
to the deliberate construction of form” (Bell 2000: 22) is now commonly
referred to as ‘narrative design’. The concept as used by novelist and creative
writing teacher Madison Smartt Bell (2000) emphasizes the fact that intuition
alone does not suffice to create a longer work of fiction, such as a novel:
“One’s intuitive idea of a novel’s design must be propped up with some sort
of scaffolding, in order to last out a longer period of composition.” (Ibid.:
26) Despite its extensive use of metaphors, the latently prescriptive, goal-
oriented approach to storytelling—“For the writer, some sense of the final
formal design of the work really ought to precede the first stages of compo-
sition” (ibid.: 25)—and the rather schematic opposition of linear vs. modular
design, Bell’s concept offers itself as an interface between the creative pro-
cess and the finalized narrative structure.
102 Roy Sommer
As well as being descriptive and process-oriented, the narratological con-

cept of narrative design proposed here looks at narrative from the author’s
creative perspective. It thus serves as an umbrella term for three related as-
pects of the domain-specific constraints mentioned above, i.e. generic, dram-
aturgical and narrative conventions: for narrative design as a decisive stage in
the creative process involves generic decisions (such as the selection of a
genre and the decision to conform to a well-established formula, or the de-
liberate deviation from generic conventions), as well as dramaturgical plan-
ning (linear or modular design, in Bell’s terminology).
The third component of narrative design, termed “storyworld design” by
Herman (2002: 86),14 is a much more complex concept which subsumes a
variety of mental models or cognitive strategies shared intuitively by writers
and readers. Whereas generic and dramaturgical constraints are specific fea-
tures of the domain of fictional narrative, storyworld design, according to the
prototype hypothesis, applies to fictional and non-fictional storytelling alike.
It is therefore a domain-specific aspect of narrative rather than of fiction, a
distinction which might be important for domain-specific creativity research.
Storyworld design involves several core principles explored in cognitive ap-
proaches to narrative in recent years, such as cognitive maps of fictional
spaces, personality theories and theories of emotion, and frames and scripts.
Although this list cannot claim to be exhaustive, there is no doubt that these
concepts describe core aspects of storyworlds.
Narrative fiction provides its readers with textual cues which allow for
temporal and spatial orientation within the storyworld. Based on these cues,
readers create mental models of spatial relations in the fictional world which
Marie-Laure Ryan (2003: 215) calls ‘cognitive maps’. From a narrative design
perspective the crucial question is how this interaction between texts and
readers is achieved: “Through what strategies do texts facilitate the concep-
tualization of these relations [i.e. spatial relations between objects]?” (ibid.
216) Cognitive maps are based on deictics, on descriptions and spatial
frames, and on scripts and schemata. Deictics are “linguistic expressions
whose prototypical function is to contribute to acts of definite reference”
(Hanks 2005: 99); they play a central role in narrative texts “in anchoring
description to perspective and also co-articulating multiple perspectives”
(ibid.). Descriptions provide readers with cues with respect to the temporal
and spatial setting of the narrative. The function of deictics and descriptions
14 Herman’s seminal study of principles of storyworld design in narrative comprehension introduces a

distinction between narrative microdesign on the one hand, and narrative macrodesign on the
other (cf. Herman 2002: 6). The terminological and conceptual parallels suggest that Herman’s
findings might be systematically related to the study of narrative design in narrative composition en-
visaged here. Such a systematic approach, which might connect these closely related theoretical
frameworks, unfortunately by far exceeds the scope of the present chapter, which can only offer
preliminary hypotheses and exploratory observations.
in narrative is not to create complete representations of objects but to pro-

vide sufficient data for readers to engage in cognitive processing of textual
information. As cognitive approaches to narrative have amply demonstrated,
this cognitive mapping relies heavily on frames, scripts and schemata (Flud-
ernik 1996: 17f.).
Ryan’s essay draws attention to the amount of textual data required to
construct a cognitive map. Her experimental approach to the comparative
analysis of cognitive maps demonstrates that there are significant differences
between individual readers with respect to the mapping of the fictional
world. Whereas literary scholars may use close reading techniques in order to
arrive at a precise understanding of the temporal and spatial relation within a
novel, the stance of “pure surveyor” (ibid.: 218), for example, is the excep-
tion rather than the rule. In general, readers “do not construct narrative
space for its own sake, but as a background for the understanding of plot,
character motivation, and the moral issues articulated in the text” (Ryan
2003: 216). Of course, generic conventions and dramaturgical constraints
influence the amount and detail of temporal and spatial information pro-
vided by the author, who also decides to what extent this information is
semantically loaded.
The second key component of storyworld design is personality theories
and theories of emotion, which guide the production as well as the reception
of literary characters. Characters, or storyworld participants, are vital ingredi-
ents of fictional narratives, although there are experimental examples (such
as the middle chapter in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse) where the
contribution of characters to events within the storyworld is reduced to a
minimum. Cognitive theories regard literary characters as mental models of
persons constructed by readers on the basis of their existing knowledge
structures. Readers normally construct their mental images of literary charac-
ters in analogy to flesh-and-blood persons. In this process of anthropomor-
phisation (i.e. the process by which human motivations, behavioural patterns
or character traits are attributed to nonhuman organisms or objects) they
make use of personality theories in categorisation and attribution processes
(cf. Schneider 2001: 612). The dynamics of mental-model construction in the
reception of characters have been studied in detail by Ralf Schneider (2000,
2001) who has also proposed a sophisticated model of the cognitive pro-
cesses involved (Schneider 2001: 618, 627).
Again, as writers share culture-specific implicit personality theories with
their readers, it is safe to assume that their attitudes towards certain types, as
well as their evaluation of psychological dispositions, are roughly equiva-
lent.15 If this wasn’t the case, empathy would be hard, if not impossible, to
15 Empirical research in experimental and social psychology may provide literary scholars with
(synchronic) prototypes for emotion concepts (cf. Hogan 2003). Whether these can really be
104 Roy Sommer
achieve.16 As with cognitive maps, a limited number of character traits suf-

fices to enable the reader to create a complex mental image of a person. It is
a matter of narrative design what techniques of characterisation are em-
ployed, which character traits are used to portray a specific type, or how the
impression of psychological complexity is achieved. As Schneider (2001: 625)
points out, authors can also distribute character-related information over
longer stretches of text, “so that there is never quite enough information
available for fitting the character into a category”. This effect can be
achieved through various techniques, for instance “by introducing characters
in action without previous narratorial commentary, by engaging them in
dialogue on their first appearance, by having them described in contrasting
terms by different other characters or by presenting the complex workings of
a character’s consciousness” (ibid.).
Action structures, i.e. scripts based on stereotyped sequences of events
and actions, constitute a third factor in storyworld design. Herman (2002: 83)
defines action structures as “principles of organization based on inferences
about participants’ (emergent) beliefs about the world”. Such action struc-
tures help readers to “connect nonadjacent occurrences and to construe
them as elements of an ongoing, coherent narrative” (ibid.). Again, it is up to
the author to design his or her narrative in such a way that readers may acti-
vate their knowledge structures in order to complement textual cues with
contextual frames. Efficient storytelling anticipates the participation of read-
ers in the process of sense-making, and creates spaces for readers to engage
in a process of constructing and reconfiguring the storyworld.
5. Conclusion
There are a number of issues that this chapter hasn’t even begun to address,
especially the processual character of creativity. Cognitive psychologists have
developed a variety of models of the creative process, ranging from the two-
stage model of creative thinking (generative vs. exploratory phase) proposed
by Finke, Smith and Ward to models distinguishing several phases of the
creative process such as Hadamard’s classical four-stage model (cf. Baer and
Kaufman 2006: 19). Csikszentmihalyi’s (1997: 79 ff.) model of creative pro-
cesses has five components or phases, namely ‘preparation’ (“becoming im-
mersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting
correlated with “universal narrative structures, heroic and romantic tragic-comedy” (11), how-
ever, which Hogan regards as “contextually dependent universal prototypes for happiness”
(ibid.), is open to debate.
16 Cf. Schneider (2001: 614): “In portraying a character, authors will, if they want to achieve a
certain disposition towards that character, try not to deviate too much from the standards of
evaluation they expect their readers to apply.”
and arouse curiosity”), ‘incubation’ (“during which ideas churn around below
the threshold of consciousness”), ‘moments of insight’ (which occur several
times throughout the creative process), ‘evaluation’ (based on the internal-
ized criteria of the domain and opinions of the field), and, finally, ‘elabora-
tion’. A proper model of fictional storytelling, then, would have to move
beyond the relationship of domain-specific features in order to account sys-
tematically for the processes such as creative ‘flow’ involved in story genera-
tion (cf. Piiro 2005).
A second omission which can only be justified by a lack of space is the
linguistic aspect of writing as a cognitive activity. After all, the dynamics of
storytelling include not only issues of creativity such as motivation or flow
(cf. Piiro 2005) but also the mechanisms and procedures involved in creating
a written narrative as opposed to a verbally transmitted story or dictation.
The rich tradition of cognitive writing research since the 1980s provides not
only a link between psychological studies of creativity as process and the
narratological analysis of narrative design, but also significant insights into
the cognitive functions of writing, the role of revision, and the relationships
between the processes and procedures of writing on the one hand and its
results on the other (cf. Baurmann/Weingarten 1995).
Despite these omissions, the present chapter has shown why the exten-
sion of cognitive and psychological principles from narrative comprehension
to narrative composition not only closes a systematic gap in existing models
of extratextual literary communication but gives scholars from the field of
literary studies the opportunity to bring their specific experience and exper-
tise to the cross-disciplinary project of creativity research. Literature is of
paradigmatic importance for understanding domain-specific processes and
constraints, as writing and storytelling are easier to observe than other types
of creative behaviour.17
In addition to the cross-disciplinary potential of storytelling, the research
project outlined here may also make a contribution to the future develop-
ment of cognitive narratology. Exploring the principles of narrative design
and storytelling processes will advance our understanding not only of creativ-
ity, but also of the domain-specific constraints and restrictions that authors
have to learn to navigate successfully in order to create storyworlds. If narra-
tology includes processes of production as well as of reception within its
object of study, and collaborates with other disciplines interested in cogni-
tion and creativity “on the far side of the narrator” (Genette 1991: 148)18,
17 Cf. Csikszentmihalyi (1997: 237) who points out that “of all the cultural domains literature may
nowadays be the most accessible”.
18 For the context of this rather cryptic remark, cf. Genette (1991: 148): “In narrative, or rather
behind or before it, there is someone who tells, and who is the narrator. On the narrator’s far
side there is someone who writes, who is responsible for everything on the near side. That
someone—big news—is the author”.
106 Roy Sommer
there is a good chance that we’ll be able to describe more systematically the
creative processes in which narrative worlds are made.
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MONIKA FLUDERNIK
(Freiburg)
The Cage Metaphor:

Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and
Opening it to the Analysis of Imagery
1. Introduction
In this paper two attempts to extend the range of narrative study will be il-
lustrated with the example of a single metaphor, the cage metaphor. The
choice of this specific metaphor does not relate to the narratological aims of
this paper but reflects work in progress on prison metaphors, which has
supplied a large amount of useful data. Quite unpretentiously, the purpose of
this essay is to show how corpus analysis might be fruitfully used in the criti-
cism of narrative texts and, secondly, to argue that narratology should focus
more extensively on the function of metaphor in narrative.
I will start with the second aspect first. Metaphor in narrative is a curi-
ously under-researched topic. In the wake of Roman Jakobson’s classic essay
“Two Aspects of Language” (1956) and David Lodge’s The Modes of Modern
Writing (1977), metaphor has predominantly been regarded as a poetic ele-
ment even when it showed up in fiction, which—so the argument went—it
rendered more ‘lyrical’. To the extent that metaphor was analysed in narra-
tive studies at all, the main critical effort was expended on ascertaining
whether a particular metaphoric expression belonged to the narrator’s or a
character’s language. The question of attribution itself demonstrates that
metaphor was seen as a feature of style and, therefore, voice rather than as a
structural element of narrative.
This situation has not improved since the cognitive revolution in meta-
phor studies. Lakoff, Johnson and Turner have demonstrated in great detail
that our everyday language is steeped in metaphor, that practically all abstract
ideas and relations need to be expressed by recourse to metaphor, and that
ordinary language, much like any kind of literature, consequently teems with
imagery. Although one can go on from there to analyse how specific meta-
phors current in everyday language are deployed in a literary context—a
question that Mark Turner has followed up in his work (Turner 1987; 1991;
110 Monika Fludernik
1996)—, cognitive metaphor theory has not resulted in a greater understand-

ing of metaphor in narratives. Indeed, since the Lakoffian paradigm has be-
come dominant in academia, metaphor studies in literary research have taken
a downward plunge, at least in English literary criticism. A search in the
MLA bibliography for the years 1995 to 2006 under the term metaphor
yielded over 1000 entries; but three quarters of these were linguistic essays,
and among the literary entries only two (!) concerned metaphor in literature.
The rest all discussed specific metaphors in a single work or author.1
It is therefore high time to analyse more extensively the function of
metaphor or imagery in prose texts, and to do so also from a narrative per-
spective. The only recent work on narrative metaphor I am aware of is Ben-
jamin Biebuyck’s analysis of metaphor in the German modernist novel (Bie-
buyck 1998). Biebuyck manages to demonstrate convincingly how meta-
phors structure the narrative discourse in Musil and Broich. In the present
paper, by focussing on the cage metaphor, I will also try to tease out possible
narratologically relevant functions of metaphor in narrative texts.
My second point in this paper is to alert humanities scholars to at least
one possible use of databases. Although corpus linguists have created and
searched numerous databases of various kinds, literary scholars have so far
had few uses for the widely available Chadwyck-Healey and other corpora,
except to employ them as a kind of diachronic concordance allowing one,
say, to find all poems in which snails figure by searching for the word snail(s).
A second use that is becoming very widespread is the resort to databases as a
means of accessing old texts that are available only in the British Library and
then must not be xeroxed. Databases such as Eighteenth-Century-Literature are
treasure troves, since they contain many non-canonical texts and allow one
to print out and read them. This immeasurably improves one’s source mate-
rial to include many out-of-the-way texts, particularly if a library with pre-
nineteenth-century holdings in English literature is not conveniently close. A
third very important use of databases such as Literature Online consists in the
opportunity to find large numbers of lexical items and phrases in less well
known texts, and to supplement the OED as a source of checking difficult
passages in older texts. Thus, I am currently completing an essay on Wycher-
ley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), a play whose title phrase (plain-dealing) and
eponymous hero are something of a mystery in the play. By looking at the
over eighty passages that Literature Online’s Prose Drama and Verse Drama da-
tabases contain, it became very clear that the meanings of plain-dealing can
now be determined much more successfully than the OED’s definition and
example sentences allowed, even taking into account the additional material
from the CD-ROM version.
1 In German and Romance studies metaphor has apparently held more interest for critics. See:
Biebuyck (1994; 1998; 2005) and Coenen (2002).
Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies 111
Finally, in the present essay, nothing more complex than the search for a
single word or phrase is again involved. As I already showed in a recent essay
(2007), the search for the source terms in metaphors can be significantly
aided by databases. In Fludernik (2007) I was mostly concerned with the
word prison as a source domain in metaphors such as MARRIAGE IS PRISON.
In what follows, I will be looking at the word cage, which is one of the main
prison-related metaphorical source terms. By using a database (here English
and American Literature by Directmedia), I have been able to gather a large
number of sentences in English fiction and poetry which contain the lexeme
cage. After eliminating literal items from the list (such as cages in the zoo)2,
the remaining metaphorical entries were analysed. The following section
demonstrates what one can do with the results of such a search.
2. Cage Metaphors: Of Birds and Women
The metaphors document a wide range of uses including versions of several

familiar prison tropes. For instance, the BODY IS A PRISON trope with the
soul figured as an imprisoned bird in the cage of the body occurs in a pas-
sage from Spenser’s Faerie Queene in Book III, Canto xi, st. 12:
Which when she [Britomart] heard, and saw the ghastly fit,
Threatening into his [Scudamour’s] life to make a breach,
Both with great ruth and terrour she was smit,
Fearing least from her cage the wearie soule would flit. (Spenser 1978: 539)3
Scudamour is in despair because he has been unable to rescue his beloved
Amoret from the clutches of Busirane. Rochester, in talking to Jane Eyre,
also uses this image to suggest that Jane has an enquiring and perceptive
mind hidden beneath her bland exterior:
The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muf-
fling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man
[...] or master [...] to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but in
time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be con-
ventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and
variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of
bird through the close-set bars of the cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is
there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. (Jane Eyre, xiv; Brontë 1971: 169-70)
Jane’s body, and her good behaviour inculcated at Lowood, are the cage
within which Rochester detects the creative, curious and sensible mind (or
soul) which is the real Jane, buried by enforced training and self-imposed
2 One example of such literal use from Ambrose Bierce’s In the Midst of Life: “the rich, thrilling
melody of a mockingbird in a cage by the cottage door” (EAL 103). Numbers given refer to
those cited in the EAL database.
3 All emphases in bold italics are mine.
restraint. It is his hope that this mind can be set free, the bird liberated from
its cage and allowed to “soar”, to develop its full potential. In Keats’s
“Fancy” the body/mind dichotomy in the cage image is replaced by the
brain vs. fancy (or intellect vs. feeling or imagination) opposition:
Then let winged Fancy wander
[...]
Open wide the mind’s cagedoor,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar. (Keats 1996: 143; ll. 5-8)
One common metaphor is the term jailbird for prisoner. Although the data-
base does not include many references to prisoners as birds4, there is a
noteworthy passage from Caleb Williams, Godwin’s prison classic. The pas-
sage occurs in the context of Caleb’s realization that even though he is
physically at liberty, Falkland and his minions can trace him everywhere, so
that the whole of England has become a prison to him:
To what purpose serve the restless aspirations of my soul, but to make me, like the
frightened bird, beat myself in vain against the inclosure of my cage? (Caleb
Williams III, viii; Godwin 1991: 256)
The most famous of such bird images for prisoners occurs in Lear’s remark
to Cordelia, “Come let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’
th’ cage” (Shakespeare 1978, V, iii, 8-9), a remark that evokes the happy
prison trope as part of Lear’s overly unrealistic view of their situation. (He
does not foresee Cordelia’s murder, though his idea that as prisoners they
could “wear out, / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That
ebb and flow by the moon” (ll. 17-19) could be seen as a politically shrewd
estimate in view of Sir Walter Raleigh’s long, though not indefinite, survival.)
Many cage metaphors refer simply to rooms or houses that are perceived
as confining: “When the dwarf [Quilp] got into the street, he mounted again
upon the window sill, and looked into the office for a moment with a grin-
ning face, as a man might peep into a cage” (The Old Curiosity Shop xxxiii;
Dickens 2000a: 257). In thus framing Dick Swiveller and Sarah Brass, Mr
Quilp the dwarf (a person accustomed to be treated as a curiosity), applies
the same strategy of curious surveillance to his antagonist, the helpless Dick.
The metaphor is, moreover, appropriate because Dick will come to perceive
the lawyer’s office as a place of imprisonment.
Sometimes the cage metaphor refers to a location but focuses on the
birdlike nature of the inhabitants, rather than on the association of confine-
ment, as in Ananias’s diatribe against sexual licence in Ben Jonson’s The Al-
chemist. Ananias has encountered Kastril’s sister and thinks her a whore: “The
4 But note, for instance, Mynshul’s depiction of the prisoner as “a poore weather-beaten Bird”
(1618: 35) and his sententious remark: “Prisoners to Iaylors, use that wretched trade, / of
common fidlers; [...] they must chant merry songs / Like Birds in Cages, and are glad to sing /
Sweet tunes to those, who them to thraldome bring” (41).
place / It is become a cage of unclean birds” (V, iii, 46-7); here the bird
metaphor, applied to impure women, extends metonymically to figure the
house as a cage.
When little Paul Dombey, on the other hand, yearningly looks at the free
birds passing by his window, the room in which he is confined through his
illness also metaphorically turns into a prison in the shape of a cage:
Oh! Could he but have seen [...] the slight spare boy above, watching the waves and
clouds at twilight, with his earnest eyes, and breasting the window of his solitary
cage when birds flew by, as if he would have emulated them, and soared away!
(Dombey and Son, xii; 1985: 236)
Most basically, the cage metaphor refers to a prison location per se (PRISON
IS CAGE) rather than, conversely, using the cage as the target domain (CAGE
IS PRISON). In Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Arthur Clennam in his room in the
Marshalsea appears like a “dull imprisoned bird” in his cage and even takes
up the metaphor himself:
‘Try a little something green, sir,’ said Young John; and again handed the basket.
It was so like handing green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned bird, and
John had so evidently brought the little basket as a handful of fresh relief from the
stale hot paving-stones and bricks of the jail, that Clennam said, with a smile, ‘It was
very kind of you to think of putting this between the wires; but I cannot even get
this down, today.’ (Little Dorrit, II, xxvii; 1978: 793)
Besides the PRISON IS CAGE equation, the feeling of imprisonment is often
figured as encagement, as in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, where Charles
Darnay’s delivery to a tribunal under guard is likened to transportation in a
cage:
Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across the road
behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred be-
tween him and England. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he
had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he
could not have felt his freedom more completely gone. (A Tale of Two Cities, III, i;
2000b: 255)
This consciousness of captivity closely resembles the LIFE IS A PRISON/
CAGE metaphor, another very general prison metaphor specifically focussing
on the cage as metonymic signifier of the source domain, prison:
To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage
Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan [...] (“To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin”;
Shelley 1971: 522)
The WORLD IS A PRISON trope likewise shows up in the garb of cage im-
agery, as in Jonson’s poem “A Farewell for a Gentlewoman, Virtuous and
Noble”, where the saeva indignatio of satire targets the lures of the world
which threaten to entrap the unwary with their glitter. The prison of the
world is figured in a combination of source lexemes—all metonyms of cap-

tivity: fetters (“gyves”, “chain”, “noose”) and the cage:
Yet art thou [False world] falser than thy wares.
And knowing this, should I yet stay,
Like such as blow away their lives
And never will redeem a day
Enamoured of their golden gyves?
Or, having ’scaped, shall I return
And thrust my neck into the noose [...]
What bird or beast is known so dull
That, fled his cage, or broke his chain,
And tasting air and freedom, wull [sic!]
Render his head in there again? (ll. 20-32; Jonson 1975: 95)
A second very interesting instance of the WORLD IS A PRISON trope occurs
in a passage by Henry James on the French writer Balzac:
It comes to us as we go back to him [Balzac] that his spirit had fairly made of itself
a cage in which he was to turn round and round, always unwinding his reel, much
in the manner of a criminal condemned to hard labour for life. The cage is sim-
ply the complicated but dreadfully definite French world that built itself so solidly
in and roofed itself so impenetrably over him. (James 1963: 200)
This passage combines the animal in the cage metaphor (of the rodent
trapped in the cage or working a wheel) with that of the hard labour prison;
as such it merges the Work is Prison trope with the CAGE IS PRISON meta-
phor. The extract is moreover interesting because it introduces the British
concept of penal servitude into a context of American prison architecture,
the cage-like prison cells. (British cells did not have bars, and most penal
labour outside the crank was performed in halls or outdoors.)
Besides these very general metaphors employing the cage as a source
term, more specific equations can be found, again in alignment with com-
mon prison metaphors. For instance, the CONVENT IS PRISON metaphor
current in the Gothic novel can be used with the cage as source lexeme
(CONVENT AS CAGE), as in “[...] the Princess Fleur de Marie [...] was sadly
ogling out of the bars of her convent cage, in which, poor imprisoned bird,
she was moulting away” (Pendennis, II, xiv; Thackeray 1994: 135).
In addition to physical prison scenarios, one also finds a number of in-
stances of cage imagery in reference to more clearly psychological, social or
political constraints. Thus, in Meredith’s The Egoist, the narrator remarks
ironically on Vernon and Clara’s necessary sexual restraint after they have
fallen in love. The figure used is that of staying in the cage of decorum and
respectable virginity while love is beckoning through the open door of the
cage:
And if it was hard for him, for both, but harder for the man, to restrain their par-
ticular word from a flight to heaven when the cage stood open and nature beck-
oned, he [Vernon] was practised in self-mastery, and she [Clara] loved him the
more. (The Egoist, xlviii; Meredith 1979: 588)
More commonly, it is love itself that is figured as the prison, the cage:
The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre loue, is vaine,
That fondly feare to loose your liberty,
When losing one, two liberties ye gayne,
And make him bond that bondage earst dyd fly.
Sweet be the band, the which true loue doth tye,
Without constraynt or dread of any ill:
The gentle birde feeles no captiuity
Within her cage, but singes and feeds her fill. (Amoretti LXV; Spenser 1989: 639)
Most common of all is the MARRIAGE IS PRISON/CAGE metaphor:
Rosamond concluded that he [Lydgate] had learned the value of her opinion; on the
other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents now that he gained a
good income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride Street provided one all
flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of paradise that she resembled. (Middlemarch,
“Finale”; Eliot 1985: 893)
Here Rosamond, the egocentric manipulator, shows that her esteem for
Lydgate depends on her being treated as a bird of paradise, to be lavishly
showered with luxury goods, rather than as a common bird shut up in a mis-
erable little house in Bride Street (“where the rooms are like cages”—lxiv,
710).
“Like a Bird i’th’Cage”: The Golden Cage Trope
Within her gilded cage confined

I saw a dazzling Belle,
A Parrot of that famous kind
Whose name is NONPAREIL” (“The Parrot and the Wren”; Wordsworth 1936:
130)
In the remainder of this section I want to focus on the two most prevalent
images connected with the cage metaphor, the BIRD IN THE CAGE and the
BEAST IN THE CAGE. Both metaphors have a number of different readings.
Thus, the bird in the cage, as we have already seen, may foreground weak-
ness5, despondency (failing to sing), despair (beating one’s breast against cage
bars) or monotonous activity (the simile that Henry James uses, equating the
cage with hard labour, the treadmill, with birds or mice going round in a
contraption inside the cage). Most common of all, however, is the image of
the golden cage, the association of caging with happy prisons that are safe
harbours and refuges from a dangerous world of freedom outside, a tempta-
5 Compare the simile from Melville’s “Billy Budd”, according to which “any demur would have
been as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage” (EAL, XIII 7).
tion to idleness and the love of comfort. This image is frequently applied to
love, and especially marriage, to address the situation of the wife kept by her
husband in luxury but imprisoned either physically at home or in intellectual
confinement. The wife as bird is reduced to an ornament or plaything. The
woman then resembles a caged canary adorning a lady’s boudoir (though this
prison may be perceived by its inmate as paradise, as in the case of Rosa-
mond Vincy in Middlemarch).
Perhaps one of the most extensive treatments of the golden cage of lux-
ury that kills is D. H. Lawrence’s short story, “The Captain’s Doll” (1921).
Lawrence’s novella describes a love triangle in post-World-War-I Germany
involving the Scottish Captain Alexander Hepburn, his wife, whom he has
left at home and Countess Johanna zu Rassentlow, called Hannele, who is a
refugee and survives by making exquisite dolls. Hannele and the captain have
fallen in love, but he is curiously unable to articulate his feelings or come to a
decision. Hannele has made a doll in the shape of the captain, which his wife
sees when she shows up in the village. She suspects Hannele’s companion to
be her husband’s mistress and, in her jealousy, tries to have the two women
refugees chased from the town by the British military authorities. Then she
suddenly falls to her death from a window. We never learn whether the cap-
tain pushed her, or whether she realized he loved the other woman and
jumped. After a period of mourning and distraction, the captain recognizes
that he needs Hannele after all. He finds her and persuades her to marry him
on his own terms (without any form of clinging love).
After the wife’s death, Hannele and the captain have a conversation in
which he depicts his wife Evangeline as a bird dying in a golden cage:
“[...] When I was a boy I caught a bird, a black-cap, and I put it in a cage. And I
loved that bird. I don’t know why, but I loved it. I simply loved that bird. [...] And it
would peck its seed as if it didn’t quite know what else to do; and look round about,
and begin to sing. But in quite a few days it turned its head aside and died. Yes, it
died.—I never had the feeling again, that I got from that black-cap when I was a
boy—not until I saw her. And then I felt it all again. I felt it all again. And it was the
same feeling. I knew, quite soon I knew, that she would die. She would pick her
seed and look round in the cage just the same. But she would die in the end.—Only
it would last much longer.—But she would die in the cage, like the black-cap.”
“But she loved the cage. She loved her clothes and her jewels. She must have loved
her house and her furniture and all that with a perfect frenzy.”
“She did. She did. But like a child with playthings. [...] And it got worse. And her
way of talking got worse. As if it bubbled off her lips.—But her eyes never lost their
brightness, they never lost that fairy look. Only I used to see fear in them. Fear of
everything—even all the things she surrounded herself with. Just like my black-cap
used to look out of his cage—so bright and sharp, and yet as if he didn’t know that
it was just the cage that was between him and the outside. He thought it was inside
himself, the barrier. He thought it was part of his own nature to be shut in. And she
thought it was part of her own nature.—And so they both died.” (Lawrence 1994:
112-113)
This passage equates the “fairy” (112) look of Alexander’s wife with the im-
prisoned bird of the captain’s boyhood. This is, however, no ordinary
MARRIAGE IS PRISON metaphor, either for the captain or his wife. The cap-
tain, tragically, believes that he has killed both bird and wife with his love.
Yet the nature of the captain’s love for his wife (and bird) hints at a strong
sadistic element, as if he positively enjoyed watching them succumb to their
cage and die.
However, one can give his story a quite different reading. The blackcap
died in captivity through lack of freedom; but Evangeline died because the
captain never really loved her, since he was incapable of strong emotional
commitment anyway. In fact, he felt imprisoned by his marriage and resisted
his wife’s attempts to get him to remain at home, where, one supposes, he
felt suffocated. When Hannele thinks over what Evangeline has told her
about the captain’s promise on his wedding day, vowing to always make her
happy, she muses: “Not that he was afraid of the little lady. He was just
committed to her, as he might have been committed to gaol, or committed
to paradise” (105). The inherent ambivalence of the marital state as bliss
(paradise) or jail (hell) is articulated here in a syllepsis: committed to can be
both an intransitive verb (I am committed to my work/duty, to the Movement, etc.)
and a passive (to be committed to prison). Whereas the sentence starts out by
foregrounding the positive intransitive meaning, it then recasts that structure
to produce the negative, passive meaning of the verb. It ends with the para-
doxical “committed to paradise”, in which paradise no longer looks like
paradise at all, in either sense of the word commit. (Is he committed to think-
ing of marriage as a paradise, although it is not? Or, is he arrested and com-
mitted to paradise as if to a lockup?)
Given the captain’s reluctance to show his feelings (thematized at great
length between Hannele and himself at the end of the story), one may as-
sume that he killed Evangeline through his refusal to be more than a legal
husband. By treating her as an inconsequential being that one needs to hu-
mour, rather than as an equal, he in fact treated her like the bird for which he
had developed such strong feelings. This comes out clearly in his preposter-
ous answer to Hannele’s question whether he will have sex with his wife
during her visit:
“Do you want to go to her at the hotel?” asked Hannele.
“Well, I don’t, particularly. But I don’t mind, really. We’re very good friends.
Why, we’ve been friends for eighteen years—we’ve been married seventeen. Oh,
she’s a nice little woman.—I don’t want to hurt her feelings.—I wish her no harm,
you know.—On the contrary, I wish her all the good in the world.”
He had no idea of the blank amazement in which Hannele listened to these
stray remarks.
“But –” she stammered. “But doesn’t she expect you to make love to her?”
“Oh yes, she expects that. You bet she does: woman-like.”
“And you—?”—the question had a dangerous ring.
“Why, I don’t mind, really, you know, if it’s only for a short time. I’m used to
her. I’ve always been fond of her, you know—and so if it gives her any pleasure—
why, I like her to get what pleasure out of life she can.” (93)
The captain regards his marriage as a union of pure (but highly unequal)
friendship and is therefore quite puzzled by Hannele’s insistence on love.
In hindsight, Hannele’s notion that Evangeline’s clothes and furniture
are her cage (wealth as a prison) begins to appear naive. It is not that
Evangeline is imprisoned in a luxurious golden cage by somebody who loves
her to excess, but that she is caught in a loveless marriage for which she
compensates by furnishing her cage with trinkets and gadgets. Being unloved
by the captain was tolerable as long as she was wooed by other men and he
did not care for other women. When she discovers that there is a relation-
ship (though not of the sexual shape that she imagines), she overreacts by
wanting to ruin the two women’s lives, and probably incurs her husband’s
wrath. Yet, by treating her like a doll, a useless plaything, the captain has
been responsible for this problem in the first place.
The title of the tale is, therefore, ambiguous—it ostensibly refers to the
doll that Hannele makes as an image of the captain (the doll representing the
captain), but it also relates to Evangeline as the captain’s doll-like wife, the
doll he owns. Does the liaison with Hannele work because she treats him
like a doll by producing one that looks like him? The captain himself strongly
resents having his likeness taken and considers himself to have been dis-
posed of against his will by her love:
“All this about love,” he said, “is very confusing and very complicated.”
“Very! In your case. Love to me is simple enough,” she said.
“Is it? Is it? And was it simple love which made you make that doll of me?”
“Why shouldn’t I make a doll of you? Does it do you any harm? And weren’t
you a doll, good heavens! You were nothing but a doll. So what hurt does it do you?”
“Yes, it does. It does me the greatest possible damage,” he replied. (147)
This way of looking at things implies that the captain is in the position of
Evangeline now, a doll in the cage. On the other hand, since Hepburn insists
so much on being honoured and obeyed but not adored, Hannele is perhaps
the wrong choice of partner. Hannele, as an independent woman, is unlikely
to succumb to dollhood on the lines of Evangeline, and thus escapes from
the cage of femininity which attaches to marriage.
That the cage may perhaps not be marriage (as Hannele and the captain
think) but femininity could be argued on the basis of a passage just prior to
the blackcap story, in which the cage is equated with a tomb, another yet
more dire prison metaphor:
“[...] She was a gentle soul [...], but she was like a fairy who is condemned to
live in houses and sit on furniture and all that, don’t you know. It was never her na-
ture. [...] All her life she performed the tricks of life, clever little monkey she was at
it too. Beat me into fits. But her own poor little soul, a sort of fairy soul, those queer
Irish creatures, was cooped up inside her all her life, tombed in. There it was,
tombed in, while she went through all the tricks of life, that you have to go through
if you are born to-day.” (110-11)
“[...] As it was, poor thing, she was always arranging herself and fluttering and
chattering inside a cage. And she never knew she was in the cage, any more than
we know we are inside our own skins.” (111)
Not only does Hepburn compare his wife to a monkey taken from the jungle
(Ireland) to a zoo, literalizing the cage metaphor; he moreover sees her as a
wild frightened being unable to survive in civilization. His basic metaphor
here is animal-like freedom—she was a wild natural caught by society. The
vision that we as readers get of Evangeline differs from this portrait (was it
perhaps the captain who felt “tombed in” when he was with her?): she is less
a monkey than a dangerous fox-like creature and one who tries to defend her
“cage” from intruders. Perhaps what is keeping her hemmed in is the deco-
rum of femininity to which she clings, since this does not allow her to ex-
press her love openly. Perhaps, then, the cage is really a metaphor for wither-
ing love, love destroyed by the captain’s lack of response, or a meditation on
how love goes sour when unrequited except in terms of cold, polite friend-
ship.
Does Hannele at the end of the story accept the same role, now that the
doll she has made is gone; and is this why she needs to destroy the painting
made of the doll as well? Does the doll signify cathexis, and does the cathec-
tic investment on Hannele’s part need to be overcome? Lawrence’s tale is
extremely subtle, using the image of the bird in the cage to probe the psy-
chology of the captain, his wife and Hannele. By making a doll of the cap-
tain, Hannele seems to counteract victimization through him, yet she eventu-
ally relinquishes her symbolic hold. Perhaps the captain should be seen as
metaphorically imprisoned in his inability to love, a condition he compen-
sates by turning involuntary jailer to the women who love him.
Beasts in Cages
After discussing Lawrence’s rather complex treatment of the golden cage

trope, I would now like to turn to the second recurring image, that of the
beast in the cage. This is not in fact a metaphor, but occurs for the most part
in the form of a simile (like a tiger / lion / bear etc. in the cage). The animal in
the source domain does not, as one might presume, invariably suggest feroc-
ity as the ground of the comparison.
EAL has a large number of such similes, with varying connotations.

“Like a tiger in a cage” in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) suggests that the
colonel who is thus described behaves in a distraught, insane manner (“‘The
watch! the watch!’ raved the colonel, pacing to and fro like a tiger in a
cage. ‘Give me that man’s watch.’”—EAL, VII, 333). The simile focusses
on the energetic movement of the colonel, which may be ‘fierce’ in a meta-
phoric sense but is not literally ferocious (dangerous). Despair and restless-
ness also mark the description of Mr. Carson in Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton
(1848). On the night before the trial of his son’s supposed murderer
[...] he felt as if there was no peace on earth for him [...]; no peace either bodily, or
mental, for he moved up and down his bedroom with the restless incessant tramp
of a wild beast in a cage, and if he compelled his aching limbs to cease for an in-
stant, the twitchings which ensued almost amounted to convulsions, and he re-
commenced his walk as the lesser evil, and the more bearable fatigue. (xxxii; Gaskell
1985: 381)
Restlessness and excitement of this sort are common analogues of the meta-
phoric animal’s movement. In Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), Mr Verloc
watches Stevie “gesticulating and murmuring in the kitchen. Stevie prowled
round the table like an excited animal in a cage” (The Secret Agent, iii; Con-
rad 1990: 83), while Verloc himself is described as “turning about the bed-
room on noiseless pads like a bear in a cage” (viii, 173)6. Whereas Stevie’s
disability is responsible for his apparent purposelessness, giving him the dis-
oriented and anxious aspect of a lost creature, Verloc, the secret agent,
moves around stealthily but also like a person of great power and energy
caught in a room too small for him. In both cases, therefore, the beast in the
cage simile describes not the imprisonment as such but the comportment of the
man who moves about in ways evocative of an animal behind bars. Verloc,
in particular, is being described as stealthy, fierce and socially inept, unable to
become more than a provider for his wife and her son, Stevie. He has the
feel of a bull in a china shop (the German Elephant im Porzellanladen is the
better image, since elephants are not aggressive), a plodding, awkward man,
who fails to take the feelings of other people into account.
Sometimes the cage simile betokens despondency or neglect, as in Con-
rad’s elegiac depiction of a run-down ship in the docks as “a free ship [that]
would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage” (The Mirror and
the Sea, EAL XII; 111). Hopelessness and hyperactivity are also the intended
targets of the simile in Caleb Williams (Caleb, “like a frightened bird beat[ing
himself] in vain against the inclosure of [his] cage”—III, viii; Godwin 1991:
256). Restlessness and irritation prevail in the fit of jealousy experienced by
Clara in Gissing’s The Nether World: “With burning temples, with feverish
6 Again at xi, 216: “He [Verloc] turned around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large
animal in a cage.”
lips, she moved about her little room like an animal in a cage, finding the
length of the day intolerable” (EAL, 293). In all of these texts the men and
women characterized by the similes are beside themselves with fear, anxiety
or despair; they have lost control over their bodies and minds; they act as if
they were no longer rational creatures.
By contrast, in a passage from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan
Doyle’s narrator depicts a tempest of “equinoctial gales” and of “exceptional
violence”. Even in London “we were forced to raise our minds for an instant
from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great elemen-
tal forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like
untamed beasts in a cage” (EAL, 245). It is noteworthy that the simile
here inverts the enclosure image, putting the howling storms into a cage and
thereby mastering them rather than seeing humankind taking refuge from
growling beasts at large inside the barred gates of their civilization.
More generally, of course, the animal shut up in the cage can be either a
fairly harmless or weak creature or a dangerous beast of prey. The reaction
to captivity is usually imagined differently in the two groups—small or weak
animals are frightened or pine away, large and ferocious ones chafe at their
captivity but in the end may also give up hope. In Conrad’s An Outcast of the
Islands, thoughts are compared to birds in a cage (Lingard watching the
woman breathe: “And nearly a minute passed. One of those minutes when
the voice is silenced, while the thoughts flutter in the head, like captive
birds inside a cage, in rushes desperate, exhausting and vain”—II: 258)7,
and in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Caleb is welcomed by the thieves into their
community and contrasts their proud bearing with “the imprisoned felons
[he] had lately seen [and who] were shut up like wild beasts in a cage, de-
prived of activity and palsied with indolence” (III, ii; 1991: 218). The strong
captive chafes at the bars and suffers more than the frightened little bird:
“The captive thrush may brook the cage, / The prison’d eagle dies for
rage”—Scott, “Lady of the Lake”; EAL II: 533). By contrast, in Cooper’s
The Deerslayer (1841), the fight between Indians and trappers is rendered in
the image of “noises” that “resembled those that would be produced by a
struggle between tigers in a cage” (EAL II: 815). Here the ferocity of the
Indians is invoked in the simile. The ferocity of lions in a cage can even be
used as an image for fire, as in Longfellow’s “Tales of a Wayside Inn”: “sea-
soned wood, / To feed the much-devouring fire, / That like a lion in a
cage / Lashed its long tail and roared with rage” (EAL, 269).
The above remarks have demonstrated, I hope, that databases can be a
useful complement to traditional literary analysis. They help to trace all the
7 Another rather humorous example comes from Felix Holt where Mr Transome, afraid of his
wife’s criticisms, “paused in his work and shrank like a timid animal looked at in a cage where
flight is impossible” (i; 1988: 15).
occurrences of a particular word in one text, providing a complete listing of

cross-references within that story. As a result, one can produce better inter-
pretations of such texts, since one is less likely to overlook important pas-
sages. More significantly, the range and distribution of lexemes in their vari-
ous connotations (or meanings) becomes accessible, making it possible to
analyse (by author, period, genre, etc.) the imagery in a larger group of writ-
ings. I have been mostly concerned so far with the associations of the word
cage in English literature, and one of the exciting results of the analysis has
been the diversity of local meanings given to an encaged bird or animal, as
well as the diversity of literary uses to which the metaphor is put. Having
acquired a great deal of material on which to base narrative analysis, let me
now focus on narrative questions in relation to imagery in fiction.
3. Metaphor in Narratology—Preliminary Arguments
So what, from a narratological perspective, is the purpose of metaphors (or

imagery) in narrative texts, and how can metaphoricity be integrated within
the narratological paradigm?
To the extent that imagery is considered a factor of voice this question is
easy to answer and, indeed, has been answered already. In this approach
metaphors are simply an expressive factor alignable with narratorial dis-
course (narration) or with a character’s speech or thought. If the matter rested
there, there would be no question to answer. However, metaphors are fre-
quently ruling signifiers of a thematic kind in stories, as is the case in Law-
rence’s “The Captain’s Doll” or “In the Cage” by Henry James. In the Law-
rence example, the cage metaphor significantly defines the institution of
marriage for both men and women. It cannot merely be aligned with the
narrator’s discourse, since it operates on both the narratorial and figural (the
captain, his wife) levels, and must, therefore, be construed as a structural
feature attributable to the ‘implied author’, i. e. to that (constructed) source
of textual meaning which the reader intuits to belong to the ‘author’ in one
of his/her textual incarnations.
“In the Cage” shows this even more clearly. The metaphor relates to a
literal caging of the post office clerk, but it acquires multiple symbolic over-
tones which are foregrounded in the title of the story. The position of the
clerk in the cage assumes key significance as a matter of focalization—seeing
the world from the vantage point of marginalized spinsterhood—and as a
comment on the objects of her observation, who are also discovered to be
‘in a cage’ of decorum, societal norms and social restraints. This implicit
linking of focalization and subject matter is difficult to situate on the narra-
torial level exclusively. It is not commented on, and the narratorial voice
appears blissfully unaware of the implications of the operative metaphor.

Both the metaphor and its implications must, therefore, again be attributed
to the ‘implied author’ level of the text.
Situating metaphoricity on that level immediately supports the thesis that
metaphors or imagery should or can—in those texts that employ them so
openly—be compared with narrative strategies like focalization, or with the
chronological rearrangement that are usually said to operate in the transfor-
mation of a story into narrative discourse. However, unlike focalization,
metaphors also serve as stylistic elements; it is only global metaphors that
acquire a structural function comparable to focalization and become part of
the process of narrative transmission and reading. As a consequence, meta-
phors upset the neat model in which every category has its place on a distinct
level of narratological typology (metaphor as either voice or as structural
feature). Against this it may be argued that global metaphors lie in the eye of
the beholder (reader, critic) rather than in empirical textual data, since their
overall significance—unlike that of global focalization8—seems to be a mat-
ter of interpretation. The objection can be answered by pointing out that
focalization and voice in their turn often rely for their ostensible ‘presence’
on the interpretation of textual markers that in themselves do not always
clinch the case for a particular reading (compare Fludernik 2001). However,
these interpretative decisions relate to the local level of the text—there is
rarely any doubt about global focalization. It is usually agreed between critics
that a particular novel is wholly or largely narrated from the perspective of
one or several characters, and is thus a case of figural narrative situation or
reflector mode narration. Where there are conflicts in critics’ views, this gen-
erally concerns local passages or individual sentences and paragraphs, and
occurs mostly in texts situated on what Stanzel has called the authorial-
figural continuum, or in texts that utilize less clearly defined modes of telling
(such as those outlined in Fludernik 2001).
Thus, on the one hand, metaphor at the local level shares with focaliza-
tion the ambiguity common to all expressive markers; where it adds a new
level of ambiguity (or perhaps, rather, ambivalence) is at the overall global
level of interpretation, where constructions of ‘authorial’ meaning are an-
chored (and often defined) as actions or decisions performed by the ‘implied
author’, ‘himself’ a figure of critical extrapolation from textual clues.
A third and entirely different facet of metaphor should also be noted at
this point. As the New Zealand critic Mike Hanne (1999) has observed, nar-
rative and metaphor share important features of sense-making. It is in terms
of metaphor and/or narrative that our thinking operates, that we explain the
world to ourselves. To that extent, the presence of metaphor in narrative
8 I use this term to refer to the categorization of an entire text as, for instance, reflector mode
narrative or authorial narrative.
texts arguably exploits their explanatory or semantic potential to the full by

enriching it with an additional semiotic framework. However, on a more
local level linked with narrative discourse, metaphor often combines with
narrative to generate mini-stories of “disnarrated” material (Prince 1982;
1988). By means of an extended simile these introduce alternative, purely
virtual fictional worlds that parallel, counterpoint or complement the main
narrative. An example of the phenomenon is the following:
And in the grove, at tyme and place yset,
This Arcite and this Palamon ben met.
Tho chaungen gan the colour in hir face,
Right as the hunters in the regne of Trace,
That stondeth at the gappe with a spere,
Whan hunted is the leon or the bere,
And hereth hym come russhyng in the greves,
And breketh bothe bowes and the leves,
And thynketh, ‘Heere cometh my mortal enemy!
Withoute faille, he moot be deed, or I:
For outher I moot sleen hym at the gappe,
Or he moot sleen me, if that me myshappe’,
So ferden they in chaungyng of hir hewe,
As fer as everich of hem oother knewe.
(“The Knight’s Tale”, Chaucer 1988, A 1635-48; my emphasis)
The simile which Chaucer here employs in a virtual scenario has all the mak-
ings of a story. Palamon and Arcite face one another in expectation of death
at each other’s hand and each of them sees his cousin as a mortal enemy, like
a threatening animal that is about to devour or maul him. Duelling for love is
here compared to the chivalrous activity of hunting; to win in love, as in
battle, one must conquer one’s foe. However, another implication might be
that the insanity of passion turns men into wild beasts, leading to their exces-
sive hatred and desire to annihilate one another. The story that the simile
outlines, however, is one of noble knightly behaviour; the hunter coura-
geously facing the boar or bear coming at him and making ready to meet the
danger squarely. In this story of a hunting expedition, knightly exploits and
undaunted courage the insanity of love is rendered harmless. The situation
anticipates the later tournament in which Palamon and Arcite will battle to
win Emelye. Unlike the competitive scenario of their love for Emelye, how-
ever, the virtual narrative that each of the two cousins tells himself concen-
trates on manly prowess and unblenching courage, to the exclusion of any
competitive framework. It therefore also implies that Emelye is merely the
catalyst for a contention between the two men, whose homosocial bonding
has suffered a change from love to hatred, from shared suffering to antago-
nistic competition. So deadly is their enmity in love that only the annihilation
of the other will solve the problem—it will be either the survival of the boar
or of the hunter. A simile like this teases the reader by invoking another
story, one that projects a hunting expedition in which Palamon incautiously

gets into conflict with a powerful lion or bear and has to preserve his life. In
actual fact, it is Theseus who has gone hunting, and instead of a bear he en-
counters two animals baiting one another, Palamon and Arcite. He has the
power of life and death over the knights, a power that they cannot fight.
Unlike the bear scenario, however, the confrontation of Theseus with the
two duellists opposes law and mercy, a human rather than animalistic con-
frontation (death or conquest). Hunting and war are superseded by civiliza-
tion—justice and mercy.
Not only do such mini-narratives invoke contrastive scenarios; they addi-
tionally demonstrate that, by virtue of the blend that joins source and target
domains, metaphor inherently allows for narrative extrapolation. Thus, in a
metaphor such as My surgeon is a butcher (Kövecses 2002; Grady et al. 1999) or
a simile such as My love is like a red, red rose (Burns), the blend initially aligns
features of the target domain with appropriate aspects of the source domain
and marginalizes those features that are irrelevant. The surgeon is imaged as
a butcher with a cleaver threatening to turn the patient into a corpse, i. e. the
piece of meat that the butcher might handle. But the butcher will not have
taken money from the cow, nor will he operate on a live animal. Similarly,
the lady in the Burns phrase is perceived by the lover as sweet in aspect, per-
fume or character. Logically she will blossom into even greater beauty as a
consequence of the love affair, but she is certainly not seen as requiring regu-
lar watering, or as pricking the lover with her thorns.
Besides creating such equivalences, however, metaphors make it possible
to imagine alternative or subordinate stories that evolve in pursuit of the
alignments suggested by the transfer from source to target domain. Thus the
surgeon butcher subliminally raises all sorts of scenarios of an incompetent,
cold-hearted or violent doctor that tease the interpreter’s mind with narrative
elaborations. It should be noted, nevertheless, that in its actual context the
metaphor usually comes in an already elaborated form, and therefore cuts off
further, less pertinent, narrative excursions: in a narrative context the meta-
phor is already constrained in its semiotic impact. Narratologically speaking,
this third feature of metaphor—its narrativizability—might suggest that that
one could place such virtual storylines on an embedded story level, even
though they are generated by the discourse of the narrator.
A preliminary and cautious conclusion to these considerations would
suggest that narrative metaphors occur on all levels of narrative—the deep-
structural story level, the surface-structural discourse level, the level of the
narration (in Genette’s model); and the ‘meaning of the text as a whole’ level
(N3 in Nünning 1989). It is consequently difficult to integrate metaphor
within the standard model. Indeed one can do so only by distinguishing dif-
ferent types of metaphor and treating them in different manners—a practice
that is theoretically unattractive. Nevertheless, rather than continuing to ne-

glect metaphor within narratology (the customary procedure), this article has
tried to show at least where the problem lies, even though we may have to
wait for a neat, systematic solution.
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WOLFGANG HALLET
(Gießen)
The Multimodal Novel.

The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration
1 The Rise of the Multimodal Novel
Multimodality is not a concept that has been used in the field of narratology,
nor is it an established generic term in literary criticism. Therefore, at the
outset of this article, some clarification is advisable of the phenomenon to
which the generic term in the title responds. It denotes a type of novel that
seems to have emerged visibly over the last twenty years and that is substan-
tially different from the traditional novel which relies totally on the written
word in printed form. While still relying to a considerable extent on the tra-
ditional language of the novel, multimodal novels incorporate a whole range
of non-verbal symbolic representations and non-narrative semiotic modes.
Consequently, novelistic narration must now be considered to be an integra-
tion of the narrative novelistic mode along with other written modes, as well
as various non-verbal modes such as (the reproduction of) visual images like
photographs or paintings, graphics, diagrams and sketches or (the reproduc-
tion of) handwritten letters and notes (see Fig. 1).
In the theory of multimodality, a mode is a semiotic resource “used in
recognisably stable ways as a means of articulating discourse” (Kress/van
Leeuwen 2001: 25) and of producing cultural meaning, so that colour, a
handwritten letter or a black-and-white photograph as well as a newspaper
article or a ground plan are all regarded as semiotic modes (see Hallet 2008a;
2008b). In contrast, media are defined as merely physical and material re-
sources “used in the production of semiotic products and events, including
both the tools and the materials used (e. g. the musical instrument and the
air; the chisel and the block of wood).” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 22) The-
refore, modes are abstract semiotic concepts (like, e. g., genres) that “can be
realised in more than one production medium.” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001:
22)
The use of non-verbal and non-novelistic elements in a novel cannot be
adequately expressed in terms of authorial framing or complementary edito-
130 Wolfgang Hallet
rial elements, parerga or paratexts, such as full colour photographs or illus-

trations which an author has added or agreed to be included in the edition of
a novel or on the cover. On the other hand, any occasional use of visual
images and other forms of non-verbal representation or non-novelistic mo-
des could, in itself, not be regarded as a new phenomenon, nor would it ju-
stify a new generic term, nor would it affect narratological analysis, let alone
narratological and disciplinary concepts. Rather, it is the systematic and re-
current integration of non-verbal and non-narrative elements in novelistic
narration that makes the difference. This is the reason why this article con-
cerns itself with a corpus of novels that integrate photographs, all sorts of
graphic representations, reproductions of non-narrative texts and genres,
texts in different fonts and typographical styles, reproductions of printed
texts from other sources and documents, non-verbal types of symbolization
and different discursive modes, like transcripts of non-narrative conversati-
on, recorded voices, or telephone-dialogues into the narrative discourse (see
Fig. 2). Examples may range from an insertion of (the reproduction of) per-
sonal letters or newspaper articles to a complete collage of images, reproduc-
tions of documents and other textual elements and styles (e. g. footnotes)
that make it difficult to identify a text as novel in the traditional sense at all.
After all, traditional novels would not include non-narrative modes like foot-
notes, which are clear textual markers of an academic mode, or a series of
family photographs, which one would expect in a family photo album or in
some other documentary book.
8.1. A double-page from Marlene Streeruwitz’s novel Lisas Liebe. Romansammelband

(2005: 28-29)
The Multimodal Novel 131
One of the common features that needs to be emphasized is that in multi-

modal novels these identifiable textual elements are not in most cases them-
selves narratives—unlike in the postmodern novel, in which a number of
small narratives or multiperspectival narrations by different narrators may
constitute the whole of the novel. Apart from visual elements, the modes in
a multimodal novel might be lists of some sort, maps in various forms, road
signs, envelopes, diagrams and statistics, and even discipline-specific symbo-
lic languages like mathematical formulae or algorithms. Also, the reader of a
multimodal novel may encounter whole passages—identifiable independent
texts—which are delivered in a different language (content and meaning
communicated in the mode of a ‘foreign language’), so that plurilingualism
may also be one of the features of the multimodal novel.
8.2. A double-page from Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident

of the Dog in the Night Time. (2003: 110-111)
Since it might be argued that elements like these have occurred in one or the
other novel before, it must be added that it is also quantity, the sheer num-
ber, the recurrent combination and the systematic use of all these elements
and different languages, codes, and semiotic modes that constitute a novel’s
multimodality. Moreover, although these modes will be identified as origi-
nally non-novelistic, they do not in multimodal novels normally have a dis-
ruptive or disturbing effect on the reading process. Rather, readers will per-
ceive them as an integral part of the novel and will thus incorporate them in
their cognitive construction of the narrated world and narrative meaning.
132 Wolfgang Hallet
Even if this may be a demanding task, readers will realize that they are sup-
posed to perform it. It follows, then, that this article is not about extra-
textual illustrations, graphic novels, photo-stories, photo-books or the like,
but about the integration of non-verbal and non-narrative texts, representa-
tions and modes in the otherwise conventional (verbal) narration of a novel.
Narratologically speaking, all of these elements are part of the narrative tex-
tual world at different diegetic levels: they are directly articulated with the
characters that inhabit them, their actions and their cultural environments.
A look at a selection of what might be regarded as prototypical of the
multimodal novel, will further illustrate the type of novel that is examined
here.1 In part 2 I will therefore take a phenomenological approach, using
examples from various novels in an attempt to identify and delimit the phe-
nomenon and to provide evidence that ‘the multimodal novel’ makes sense
as a generic label. Part 3 will then introduce the concept of multimodality,
which originated in visual studies, semiotics, discourse theory and other,
quite different areas of cultural studies. In part 4 some novels will be ana-
lyzed more systematically, and in greater detail, in an attempt to identify dif-
ferent functions of non-verbal representations and non-narrative elements
and their manner of integration into narrative discourse. In part 5 I will try
to delineate some of the implications and repercussions of the concept of
multimodal narration on narratology, arguing that narratological theories that
solely rely on verbal narration are too limited, and that the phenomena rep-
resented by the multimodal novel require a transmodal concept of novelistic
narration. Such a theory would have to explain how different modes and
media are integrated in the narrative discourse of a single novel or other nar-
rative text. It will also explain how narrative meaning, and the reader’s con-
struction of the narrative world, can be regarded as a synthesis of different
forms of verbal narration with non-verbal elements and non-narrative texts.
2 Modes, Media and Symbolic Representations in the Multimodal Novel
The phenomenological section of this article will attempt to give an exem-

plary overview of the large variety of symbolizations and modes that one
encounters in the novels in question, and to systematize them by grouping
them along the categories of medium and mode. As far as medium is con-
cerned, it needs to be pointed out that, in the strict sense, a novel cannot and
normally does not integrate other media into the medium of the paperbound
book. Rather, whenever other media are introduced into the novel, these are
generally representations or printed reproductions of photographs, handwrit-
1 I am indebted to Alexander MacLeod and Birgit Neumann, who referred me to a number of
prototypical multimodal novels which I had not come across when I first drafted this paper.
ten notes, maps and the like. Once more, however, the phenomena in ques-
tion are so multifarious that sometimes it is debatable whether a novel in-
corporates a different medium or merely the representation of such a me-
dium, so that borderline cases may occur. Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics
in Calamity Physics may be an appropriate example here: Throughout the
novel the homodiegetic narrator provides her own hand-drawn illustrations
in order to replace original photographs which she claims no longer to pos-
sess (Pessl 2006: 19). Thus, these visual elements are not actually illustrations
in the traditional sense, but part of the narrative world, produced by the nar-
rator and directly woven into the narrative discourse by the device of draw-
ing upon them continuously in ekphrastic passages. For instance, “Visual aid
1.0” depicts the narrator's mother “when she was twenty-one and dressed
for a Victorian costume party” (Pessl 2006: 19), and simultaneously charac-
terizes her father by providing an impression of “Dad’s favourite photo-
graph of Natasha […] in black and white, taken before she ever met him
[…]” (Pessl 2006: 19). Since these visual elements are ‘aids’ provided by the
narrator for the fictive reader, and are fully integrated into the narrative dis-
course, they possess the same status as the verbal narrative text, and vice
versa. They are representations of a medium (hand-drawing on paper) in the
same sense as the printed page is a representation of the original text, hand-
written or typed by the narrator.
Generally speaking, on the one hand the medium of the printed book
seems to set limits to the modes and media that can be integrated in noveli-
stic narration. For instance, three-dimensional objects beyond a certain size
cannot, for simple physical reasons, be included in a paperbound book. On
the other hand one could imagine all sorts of tangible objects, scents and
materials as inserts in the book and as supplements to the verbal narrative
discourse. The following attempt to identify and group modes and media
that occur most frequently and most saliently in the novels that have been
examined is more or less tentative, since there are in principle no limits to
authorial creativity: Kenneth Harvey’s novel Skin-Hound (There Are No Words)
(2000) was supplemented by an envelope with a flake of the author’s skin.
Verbal Narrative Discourse
Although this might seem self-evident, it is worth noting that in order to be

identified as ‘a novel’, major parts of the multimodal novel will consist of
verbal narrative discourse. Leafing through any of the books in question,
potential readers will immediately guess that they are addressed as readers
and expected to read a book, as opposed to looking at pictures in a picture
book or other decoding procedures, even if they might sometimes be irri-
134 Wolfgang Hallet
tated by the relative proportions of verbal text and, for example, photo-
graphs on a double page.
Photographs
Although by no means exclusive, the vast majority of non-verbal representa-

tions in multimodal novels are photographs of various sorts, or, to be more
precise (as is required in this context), reproductions of photographic paper
prints. These may range from individual or family portraits to photographic
documentation of buildings, landscapes or situations, as well as interiors,
objects and so forth. In order to demonstrate different ways in which these
visual images may be incorporated into a narrative, I will briefly analyze a
photograph in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz—the photograph which is also
used on the book cover. It shows the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz as Jac-
quot, a boy in a snow-white costume dressed as cavalier for a masked ball to
which he accompanied his mother, an actress, in Prague in the 1930s.
8.3. Jacques Austerlitz as Jacquot in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2002). From the book covers
of the German and the English paperback editions.
The appearance of this photograph in the narrative discourse fulfils the re-
quirements that are connected with novelistic multimodality, since it is fully
integrated in the narrative on several diegetic levels: Austerlitz’s quest for his
identity and his family’s history eventually takes him to Prague, where he
finds his roots and the house in which he grew up and lived in an apartment
with his mother, Agáta. When he returns there, an old friend of his mother's,
Vera, presents the photograph to him. As an intradiegetic narrator, she tells
the story of Jacquot’s childhood, of Agáta’s life in Prague as an actress, of
her deportation by the Nazis, and of the Kindertransport that separated Auster-
litz from his parents and deprived him of his identity and memory. Vera
hands the photograph over to Austerlitz whose memory it triggers. It repre-
sents the rather glamorous life of a Jewish family in Prague, and strongly
contrasts with the narrative present in which Austerlitz delivers his story in a
second degree homodiegetic narration. He recollects his visit to Prague and
his encounter with Vera in long conversations with the homodiegetic
anonymous narrator of his life story who now possesses the photograph,
since Austerlitz has passed all his photographs, a large collection, over to the
narrator. Through Austerlitz’s comments, this photographic portrait of Jac-
quot as a page becomes a central symbol in the novel and thus iconicizes
Austerlitz’s whole existence, as well as the quest novel as a whole:
As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place
in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly
than on that evening in the Šporkova when the eyes of the Rose Queen's page
looked through me. (Sebald 2002: 261)
Thus, the narrative function of this photograph can be considered prototypi-
cal of the appearance of other medial and modal representations in the mul-
timodal novel. Such artefacts form an integral part of the narrative discourse
and are directly connected with the perceptions, experiences, practices and
lives of the literary characters or narrator(s) that inhabit the story. These
photographs are existents in the storyworld and, as can be seen, they even
have a history of their own within the narrative world.
Graphics
It is an interesting observation that in multimodal novels a lot of description

in which the storyworld normally unfolds, and on which the reader has to be
able to rely in order to model the textual world mentally, is at times replaced
by graphic representations provided by the narrator. The phrase that runs
through Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
(2003) and that indicates this shift from verbal to nonverbal, visual represen-
tation is: “It looked like this”. For instance, instead of describing a cow in
detail, the narrator resorts to a drawing he includes in the novel: “I could do
a drawing of them at home and say that a particular cow had patterns on it
like this:” (Haddon 2003: 176).
In this, as in all other cases, graphic elements are not merely introduced
in the place of verbal description; they represent the protagonist’s and narra-
tor’s individual, specific way of looking at and conceiving of the world.
Plans, maps and sketches of patterns or rooms represent the narrator’s men-
tal pattern (or an abstract conception) of some real object or entity. They are
neither supposed to represent the object itself, i. e. ‘reality’, nor do they sim-
ply substitute for verbal descriptions. Rather, such artefacts focus on certain
136 Wolfgang Hallet
features of real objects, underlying patterns (the cow), arrangements like a

classroom in Sebald’s The Emigrants (1996: 33) or deep structures of systems
that are not directly accessible to human perceptions but constitute visual or
graphic representations of the narrator’s mental models or cognitive concep-
tualizations. Simultaneously, schematic drawings like ground plans, maps or
the paper plane plan in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) are
also representations of cultural design practices and genres that make it pos-
sible to anticipate, to conceive and to understand how things are made, pro-
duced and built. In that sense, they are visualizations of the human mind’s
capacity to construct the world according to human needs and wishes.
Documents
The characters and narrators in a narrative are concerned with exploring and
structuring the world around them, in an attempt to understand it, to find
orientation, to remember or to make themselves at home in this world. The-
refore, quite often and almost as a standard, literary characters in multimodal
novels are occupied (if not obsessed) with documentation, mostly through
photographs or film (e. g. in Danielewski’s House of Leaves); and they are also
collectors of all sorts of documents like newspaper articles and clippings,
advertisements, death notices, letters written by themselves or others, hand-
written poems and notices, entrance tickets, agenda, diary entries and so
forth. As in the case of an advertisement or of the death notice in Streeru-
witz’s novel Lisas Liebe that suggests a suicidal background, it is not always
clear, or explained in the narration, how the document and the story are re-
lated. Other documents or facsimiles may be explicitly and extensively re-
ferred to in the narrative text. A complete history of the document may be
provided, and a novel may fully unfold and represent the story of the rela-
tion between the document and the narrator or one of its characters. Some-
times—particularly in Sebald’s case, but also in the novels by Foer, Danie-
lewski and Haddon—these are epistemological, encyclopaedic and quite
systematic approaches, resembling the work of engineers, historians, as-
tronomers or architects. In other cases, as in Streeruwitz’s and partly in
Haddon’s novel, collections of documents are conceptualizations that struc-
ture everyday perceptions and knowledge, like the photographs of one street
sign after another through which Lisa in Streeruwitz’s ‘collection of love
novels’ explores and makes her way through New York, contrasting this
experience with her rural background in the German Alps. In any case, all
such documents are indicative of practices of collecting and archiving, with
actants and narrators as collectors and historians. The multimodal novel thus
represents the process of building up a personal and cultural archive of some
sort that is then made accessible in the course of the narration and is part of
the construct of memory within the story or novel concerned. In that sense,
the multimodal novel also represents and makes accessible the multimodality
of cultural archives, knowledge and memory.
Works of Art and Physical Objects
Sometimes, a literary character’s or a narrator’s activities of collecting, ob-

serving and analyzing also comprise works of art, like a Turner water-colour
in Austerlitz that comes to Austerlitz’s mind when he observes a funeral, a
drawing in a children’s bible, collages in House of Leaves or a multifunctional
“teas-maid” in Sebald’s The Emigrants which, “with its nocturnal glow, its
muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence”, keeps the narrator “hold-
ing on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might
well have become completely submerged.” (Sebald 1996: 154f.) Once more,
the verbal narrative text reveals that physical objects and visual art objects,
which can of course only be incorporated in a narrative via photographs or
reproduction, are existents that contribute to the construction of the story-
world and are related to the story’s actants in a particular way, in terms of
being representative of their way of life or belonging to their identity, history,
or memory.
8.4. The ‘Monty Hall-problem’ in Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident

of the Dog in the Night-time (2003: 80f.)
138 Wolfgang Hallet
Formal Languages
It is an interesting detail that in several of these novels formal languages and

scientific references or quotes are used. Thus, a completely different mode
of describing and conceiving the world becomes a conspicuous part of an
otherwise narrative text (Fig. 4).
The argumentative mode, which can easily be recognized as “the scienti-
fic way of thinking” (Ryan 2004b: 3) and which for Bruner (1986) and others
is opposed to (and forms a dichotomy with) the narrative mode, is fully inte-
grated into a narrative. Sebald’s references to philosophers, engineers or
scientists, although not represented in a formal scientific language but para-
phrased in encyclopaedic or everyday language, can also be regarded as a
scientific mode, a scientific way of thinking and world-making. This integra-
tion of a mode that used to be regarded as opposed to narration raises que-
stions of how scientific ways of conceptualizing and representing the world
are narrativized in a particular novel and how they contribute to the whole of
a narrative.
Typography
Typography is one of the most striking features of multimodal novels. In all

of them, typography serves to identify independent textual units outside the
main narrative text, which are often delivered by other narrators or authors.
These may be electronic mails as in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), or hand-
written letters, or even whole pieces of fiction like the typescript of (almost)
a whole novel in Stephen King’s Misery (1988). In this novel, a writer is cap-
tured by his ‘No 1 fan’, kept hostage and forced to continue a novel series
that he has already ended by eliminating the protagonist. The deteriorating
material and personal conditions of novel-writing (a novel within the novel)
are visualized not only by using a typical typewriter font, but also by express-
ing the increasing dysfunction of the typewriter in an ever increasing number
of missing letters, so that there are complete novel chapters (novel within the
novel) with no ‘e’s and ‘n’s in them. Typographically distinct texts like these
are produced by identifiable (normally fictional) authors, who in most cases
feature as literary characters in the story. Typographical styles range from
handwritten poems (Lisa’s “Mountain Poem”) and the facsimile of deleted
typed text to the mimetic representation of movement in the House of Leaves,
or—in Extremely Close & Incredibly Loud—to a gradual change of font-types
and font-sizes (or simply the use of different font-types), to mimic academic
writing, or to the representation of complete hypertextual arrangements
(Danielewski 2000; Haddon 2003). Typography visualizes textual ‘difference’
and identifiable textual elements, voices, ways, styles and modes of writing,
but it also represents the material side and the technologies of writing, from
the fountain pen, the typewriter and book print to the digits of electronic
and multimedial hypertext.
All these different symbolizations, semiotic modes, generic forms and
medial representations cannot possibly be regarded as merely additional ele-
ments to an otherwise verbal narrative text. A stereotypical formula like “It
looked like this” in Haddon’s novel indicates that graphic elements, non-
verbal representations of the narrator’s perceptions, and non-narrative mo-
des must be read as integral parts of the narrative discourse. The traditional
verbal narrative then serves to contextualize these other modes and media
and to assign them their meanings, places and functions within the narrative
world.
3 Multimodal Narration and Transmodal Signification
The concept of multimodality that has been introduced and used to describe
the various semiotic modes in the novels in question derives from different
disciplines and fields of study, mainly discourse theory, semiotics, visual cul-
ture studies and art design. It is an integrative approach that seeks to re-
spond to the growing importance of visual images in cultural processes of
signification, as well as to the rise of multimedial electronic environments
that challenge the age-old dominance of verbal communication. In multime-
dial environments, as in all other signifying processes that integrate verbal
and non-verbal symbolization, ‘meaning’ can no longer be explained as re-
sulting solely from natural human language. The contribution of pictorial
elements and of other codes and languages needs to be considered, too.
Therefore, any theory of cultural semiosis must explain and describe how
meaning is made across (and simultaneously through) a variety of different
semiotic symbol systems, media and generic modes, and how a combination
of modes and media can result in integrated meaning.
Such an approach strongly contrasts with the monomodal concepts of
the past, in which “language was (seen as) the central and only full means for
representation and communication” (Kress/Van Leeuwen 2001: 45). Of
course there were disciplines that occupied themselves with other modes of
representation, like music, photography, or painting. But “in each instance
representation was treated as monomodal: discrete, bound, autonomous,
with its own practices, traditions, professions, habits” (Kress/van Leeuwen
2001: 45). In contrast to such monomodal concepts of semiosis (e. g. the
concept of the ‘novel’ as ‘a verbal narrative text in printed and paper-bound
form’), a multimodal theory of signification defines modes as “semiotic re-
sources which allow the simultaneous realisation of discourses and types of
140 Wolfgang Hallet
(inter)action” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 21) while maintaining, at the same

time, that these are always tied to a specific medium of realization. Such se-
miotic resources might be basic modes like colour or musical tone, but also
more complex resources like textual or medial genres, or cultural artefacts
like furniture, or even whole rooms; or they might be social practices that
cultural agents can draw upon in social interaction and communication or,
indeed, in all processes in which meaning-making is involved (see Kress/van
Leeuwen 2001: 24ff.). ‘Narrative’, too, is a mode
because it allows discourses to be formulated in particular ways (ways which ‘per-
sonify’ and ‘dramatize’ discourses, among other things), because it constitutes a par-
ticular kind of interaction, and because it can be realised in a range of different me-
dia. (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 21f.).
In all of these cases, multimodality is a communicative practice that incorpo-
rates various modes and media in discursive acts of meaning-making or in
the cultural negotiation of meaning, so that almost no act of communication
(let alone discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense) is, or ever has been,
monomodal. This applies all the more in the age of globalized televison net-
works, worldwide electronic communication, electronic multimedial com-
munication and digital photography and videography:
Any discourse may be realised in different ways. The ‘ethnic conflict’ discourse of
war, for instance, may be realised as (part of) a dinner-table conversation, a televi-
sion documentary, a newspaper feature, an airport thriller, and so on. In other
words, discourse is relatively independent of genre, of mode, and (somewhat less) of
design. Yet discourses can only be realised in semiotic modes which have developed
the means for realising them. (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 5)
In that sense, multimodality in a novel represents the general insight that all
cultural processes of signification and meaning-making comprise different
modes and media (see Rose 2001: 136). Nowadays, it is the multimedial elec-
tronic hypertext that is able to best and most fully integrate different modes
and media in a single act of semiosis. This is why the hypertext can be re-
garded as a prototype of multimodality and of transmodal meaning both in
culture and literature. It does not come as a surprise, then, that some pages
in multimodal novels resemble hypertexts rather than traditional verbal nov-
els.
In this way, the multimodal novel turns out to mirror and to contribute
to a wider shift in cultural signifying practices. It does so not only by incor-
porating multimodal semiosis in narrative discourse, but also by constructing
agents that employ these practices themselves. Narrative meaning can, there-
fore, no longer be regarded as a result of language-in-writing but of the
combination and integration of different modes and media that contribute to
and participate in the process of narration as a whole. The textual world that
is created, and the narrative world that the reader constructs, are fed from a
variety of semiotic resources which, on the reader’s side, are perceived

through different senses. It seems highly plausible that such transmodal rea-
der-cognition should lead to meaningful narrative constructions, since this is
the way in which individuals make meaning in everyday-life discourses, too.
The assumption that readers are able to incorporate different modes and
media in the cognitive construction of a single narrative that is not delivered
as linear verbal discourse may even be a strong argument in favour of Ryan’s
cognitive definition, in which
narrative is a mental image built by the interpreter as a response to the text. But it
does not take a representation proposed as narrative to trigger the cognitive tem-
plate constitutive of narrativity; we may form narrative scripts as a response to life
itself (Ryan 2005: 6)
– or, as one might add here, to multimodal or hypertextual arrangements
(see Schneider 2005). The multimodal novel makes it possible not only to
connect various intratextual with extratextual semiotic discursive practices of
writing, visualizing and conceiving the world. Multimodal novels are mani-
festations of the fact that “in the era of multimodality semiotic modes other
than language are treated as fully capable of serving for representation and
for communication.” (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 46).
4 Functions of Multimodality in the Novel
Apart from macro-cultural aspects of the mimetic representation of cultural

practices, a narratological approach is most interested in the narrative func-
tions of non-narrative and non-verbal elements in and through the multimo-
dal novel. These must, of course, be regarded as individual and specific, dif-
fering from novel to novel, for statements about the function of textual ele-
ments in novels require very specific, detailed analysis. The following re-
marks about the narrative function and potential of different modes and
medial representations are, therefore, preliminary and should not be taken to
anticipate the substantial, detailed and individual analysis of any of the novels
mentioned.
4.1 Plot Construction and Novelistic Narration through Visual Images
As has been shown in the preceding parts of this article, pictures, photo-
graphs and all sorts of visual images are, in multimodal novels, an integral
part of the story, indissolubly interwoven into the narrative discourse and
storyworld. They may even, like the family portrait in Auster’s The Invention of
Solitude (Auster 1982: 4), or in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family
(2000), provide the narrative core of the whole story, which refers to and
142 Wolfgang Hallet
relates the history of the photograph. Auster for instance reconstructs the
history of the photograph, how it was torn apart to eradicate a person from
the photo, how lies were told to the family for generations about the person
that is absent from the photo, how the narrator got hold of the photograph
and how, through his own investigations, he was eventually able to solve the
mystery behind it (see Fig. 5).
8.5. The family portrait in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982: 4-5)
In Sebald’s Austerlitz and in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close the pro-
tagonist’s habit of photographic documentation is a central element of the
story; and Danielewski’s House of Leaves can be read as the verbal reconstruc-
tion of a cinematic document, the story of decoding and deciphering Navid-
son’s film about the mysterious ‘house’ that changes its shape and interior
whenever somebody approaches and enters it. Thus, in all of these examples,
the plot of the novel revolves around visual images which, in contrast to
monomodal narratives, are made directly accessible to the reader in the act
of reading. Novelistic narration leads here to a synchronization of reading
and looking. Moreover, meta-medial and meta-modal reflexive passages on
the possibility of manipulation and visual deception, as well as the (un-
)reliability of visual images, are almost inevitable in these exemplars of the
multimodal novel.
Since it is generally agreed that stories can also be rendered in visual
form (see Wolf 2002; Ryan 2004b; 2004c; 2005), it follows that visual images,
as well as being central to a novelistic plot, can also play a pivotal role in plot
construction itself. Whereas in all of Sebald’s narratives photographs, al-
though only loosely connected with each other, may be regarded as a thread
around which the verbal story is told, they form a plot of their own in
Streeruwitz’s love story Lisas Liebe. Romansammelband (Lisa’s Love. A Serial
Novel). Lisa hands over a love-letter to Dr. Adrian, a man whom she sees
every morning on her way to school as a school-teacher, but whom she does
not know. From that moment on, day after day she keeps waiting in vain for
the postman to bring Dr. Adrian’s answer. This non-event of the postman
and letter that never arrive is the narrative present of the novel; but the sim-
ple sub-plot of waiting for a letter for weeks and months is never verbalized
in terms of narrative discourse; instead, it is represented in the photographs
taken by the narrator, showing the mountainous landscape, the surrounding
meadows and the neighbour’s house (see Fig. 6). There are headings and
captions to the photographs by Lisa as a homodiegetic narrator, noting down
pedantically the date of the photograph, and there are one-sentence state-
ments about the postman, like “July 26. The postman riding past my house
on his bike”, or “The postman rides across the meadow earlier than usual”.
These photographs may even represent explicit non-events, stating that
“there is no mail on Saturday” (p. 93) or simply “July 31. Sunday” (p. 94).
At the plot-level, these photographs constitute a two-month-long daily
chronicle of endless waiting (from July 4 to August 31): a sub-plot which is
never addressed in the verbal text. Instead, the latter is a heterodiegetic narr-
ration that tells the event-based stories of the two preceding months, with
various more or less purposeful activities and encounters, mostly with mar-
ried or older men. With regard to the initial love-letter, these activities can be
seen as surrogate activities and relationships in which there is no future for
Lisa.
8.6. A typical double-page from Streeruwitz’s Lisas Liebe (2005: 26-27)

144 Wolfgang Hallet
Two things are worth noting: First, even in Streeruwitz’s case visual images
are always contextualized through verbal text which establishes their diegetic
function, i. e. their relation to the narrator or literary characters and the narr-
ration: the verbal part of the novel, in other words, defines their place in the
textual world and embeds them in the narrative chronology. Secondly, there
is no photograph without a photographer: it is obvious that photographing
the postman is one of the narrator’s daily routines. This impressive series of
some sixty repetitive, partly almost identical photographs, along with some
newspaper clippings, therefore represents long stretches of (in-)activity and
of a solitary life in isolation. It contrasts strongly with the heterodiegetic nar-
ration of Lisa’s active professional, cultural and sexual life rendered in the
verbal narrative, that eventually results in the standstill of a lonely female life
in the mountains represented in the postman-photographs. Photographic,
filmic or (as in Haddon’s novel) graphic documentation in all of these narra-
tives is thus indicative of the protagonist’s occupation, activities and way of
life, which thus become themselves part of the plot. The act of taking, mak-
ing or collecting visual images, then, can itself be plot-driving and, regardless
of the content of these pictures, contribute to the story of its producer’s life.
4.2 Construction of Literary Characters
As has been shown, it is one of the major concerns of the narrative dis-
course to trace and tell the story and history of pictures and their making.
Thus, all of the visual artefacts cited above are directly connected with the
life of literary characters and/or narrators. They testify to these characters as
culturally productive agents who look at the world in certain ways and com-
municate their views and feelings via visual images. Doing so, they contrib-
ute to their identity, represent or symbolize important events or experiences
in their lives, and trigger or represent their memories. It is one of the pecu-
liar effects of the multimodal novel that the reader can study and look at
artefacts produced or collected by an agent in the fictional world: photo-
graphs, drawings, letters, envelopes, newspaper-clippings. In this way charac-
ters from the fictional world move closer to the reader’s real world, since a
photograph is indexical of the reality of the person or object depicted, as
well as of the photographer who took the picture.
4.3 Representation of Cognition
Visual artefacts, facsimiles and graphic representations and reproductions of

textual products (photographs, drawings, graphs, flowcharts, letters, captions
in the photo-album, stories written by a literary character etc.) can, for vari-
ous reasons, allow the reader insight into the homodiegetic narrator’s or any
literary character’s ways of ‘world-making’, into their ways of looking at the

world and conceiving or structuring it. Austerlitz in Sebald’s novel, for in-
stance, is obsessed with architecture. To him, architecture is a central cultural
activity, since buildings and their design represent the world that humans
create in order to organize their civic and social lives. Studying buildings and
their underlying design enables him to read entire social histories and social
systems—to the extent, however, that he is permanently unable to write the
cultural history of architecture he intended. In Sebald’s narratives, photo-
graphic documentation of the man-made world, including gardens, cemeter-
ies, a concentration camp, interior rooms and whole panoramas of cities, not
only contextualizes the story, it represents a literary character’s attempts to
understand and structure his world.
Visual elements can also represent cognitive micro-processes and modes
of thinking. Thus, in Haddon’s novel, Christopher, the homodiegetic narra-
tor, considers his future options by creating possible (textual) worlds, draw-
ing a flow-chart so that the reader can study the protagonist’s and narrator’s
process of decision-making as a mental algorithm. Throughout Haddon’s
novel, many of the protagonist’s cognitive activities—perceptions, decision
processes and memories—are visualized, the narrator evidently possessing a
visual mind and memory that he considers superior to its digital-conceptual
counterpart.
4.4 Contextualization
Photographs, documents and physical objects are regarded as indices of a

real, empirical world. As such, they contribute considerably to the construc-
tion of the textual world, setting the story in a certain geographically and
topographically identifiable space (New York, the Alps, London etc.) at a
given historical time. In this way the reader is enabled to activate the appro-
priate cognitive schemata: to ‘see’ (or rather glimpse) the narrative world and
connect it to her or his own world temporally and spatially. Again it must be
noted that it is the number and range of artefacts in the multimodal novel
that creates a new type of contextualization. They represent a whole culture,
along with many of its practices, that can be studied in appropriate material
form, including their history; in the examples cited this ranges from garden-
ing to architecture and burying the dead. Multimodal novels thus convey a
textual world’s signifying cultural practices, its ways of making sense of the
world. They enact the material dimension of the depicted world beyond ver-
bal manifestations, tapping generic riches unavailable to the novelistic narra-
tion that determines the textual world. In this process what used to be the
extratextual context has now to a great extent become integral to the narra-
tive text itself. Culture is represented directly and extensively; above all, it is
146 Wolfgang Hallet
no longer re-mediated linguistically. As to the performative dimension of

literature, multimodal novels create the cultural archives that they claim to
represent.
4.5 Indexical Functions
Visual and graphic representations express the medial and material dimen-
sion of the narrative world: multimodal elements in a novel introduce the
materiality and technology of ‘sign’, ‘language’ and ‘text’, i. e. paper, colour,
ink, print, handwriting, font-types and so forth. Thus a multimodal novel will
often contain a number of texts and passages which are not in ‘regular’ print.
A particular graphic style or font-type will represent the writing technology
and conditions of composition: a handwritten draft, an unedited typescript
or an obviously defective version.
This emphasis on the materiality and mediality of signification brings to
the reader’s mind an awareness of the processual character of discursive
practices with their conditions, obstacles, and dangers, and the impact of the
material side of cultural signification on meaning. Almost all of the novels
cited deal with the retrieval, discovery, restoration or reconstruction of lost
or damaged artefacts and documents. In many cases, the materiality and
condition of these artefacts is thematized and the process of restoration is
narrated or forms a narrative of its own. A person, for instance, is identified
through her handwriting (Haddon), a film is reconstructed through the ana-
lysis of a study of the film (Danielewski), where letters and notes have bur-
ned to ashes. In search of his mother, Austerlitz in Sebald’s novel produces
an enlarged slow-motion copy of a short film from the Terezin concentrati-
on camp, hoping to identify his mother in the film, only to find that the lar-
ger the image is the more blurred it becomes. In Foer’s novel young Oskar
experiences the same phenomenon when searching the Internet for 9/11
videos that might show his father.
Thus, in the age of digitalization and immaterial electronic signs, the
multimodal novel reinstalls the physicality and materiality of semiotic practi-
ces. It is an interesting side-effect that through this multimodality the use of
verbal language as the main medium of novelistic narration is no longer ‘na-
tural’; on the contrary, in the light of other modes and media the printed
verbal mode is de-naturalized and relativized. On the one hand, it appears to
be limited in its signifying potential, but on the other hand its specific value,
its capacity to conceptualize, to contextualize as well as to de-contextualize
and to integrate a number of other modes is highlighted.
4.6 Framing and Perspective
Although this is by no means a new phenomenon (Victorian novel, episto-

lary novel), the postmodern novel in particular often consists of different
textual elements and identifiable parts, often related by different narrators or
voices and represented in the form of a narrative collage. These independent
narratives within the novel are frequently reproduced in a different font.
This not only indicates the specific position of a narrative within a distinct
frame narrative, but it also serves to identify different narrative voices. Vari-
ous narrative voices may be identified through their respective graphic style
or font-type, or a homodiegetic narrator may present a literary or textual
product of his or her own that belongs to the different (distant) time-level of
the frame narrative and can thus be regarded as a (fictional) document or
trace from the narrative world. These different modes and styles of writing
and representation can be regarded as a form of materialized multiperspec-
tivity, with each style or mode representing a different perspective and a
different history of production and distribution (see Wirth 2002).
4.7 The Limits of Verbal Narration
Eventually, as can be expected, in almost all of the novels the visual images
also bear witness to the shortcomings of verbal language and narration.
Again, Sebald’s Austerlitz is the most extreme example, for he never realizes
his intention to write up his studies of architectural and cultural history:
The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence—the
exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me
nothing but an entirely arbitrary or deluded enterprise. I could see no connections
any more, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the
words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs
into a blue-grey trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by
some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of
horror and shame. (Sebald 2002: 175f.)
There are phenomena and aspects of the world, then, that can hardly be
conceived of as, or translated into, verbal information. The incorporation of
visual or graphic information in a narrative text is, in a sense, an admission
of the limitations of verbal narration in a visualized world: it is a form of
narrative surrender, which is sometimes made almost explicit. That is why in
Haddon’s novel one comes across “This is what it looked like” as a standard
formula whenever the homodiegetic narrator is lost for words or finds it
inappropriate to verbalize a specifically visual perception. Pessl in Special
Topics in Calamity Physics (2005) even uses empty spaces between words to
represent the limits of verbal description when she attempts to characterize
Hannah, one of the central characters in the novel, and her “Art of Listen-
148 Wolfgang Hallet
ing”: “To describe this singular quality of hers […] is impossible, because
what she did had nothing to do with words.” (Pessl 2005: 121)
4.8 The Multimodal Construction of Textual and Possible Worlds
It has become clear that in a multimodal novel a wide range of different

modes and media participate in the construction of the storyworld. It is nei-
ther the written verbal mode nor any of the other modes on its own that
constitutes the story or builds the storyworld. Nor is this simply a matter of
‘dialogue’ between a verbal text and visual images (see Horstkotte 2002;
2005). Rather, it is the complex interplay between different semiotic modes,
generic forms, and ways of conceiving and making sense of the world that
eventually constitutes novelistic narration. And although it may be true, as
Ryan (2004b: 11) argues, that “verbal language is the native tongue of narra-
tive, its proper semiotic support”, it is also possible to narrate and to make
meaning of the world in non-linguistic forms.
A case in point of how, within the context of a verbal narrative, the po-
werful story of a possible world is constructed and delivered in merely visual
form is Foer’s novel (see Hoth 2006). Oskar, the homodiegetic narrator and
protagonist, who has lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the WTC, develops
a vision in a very literal sense. He dreams himself into that other reality in
which people do not fall from towers but instead, in the mode of a reverse
presentation of a film, fly upwards from the ground, all the way up to their
offices, sit down at their desks and start working. In the book, this vision is
represented in a flipbook-like series of stills from an Internet video at the
very end of the novel. Thus, Foer’s 9/11 novel not only narrates a possible
world in pictorial form, it also does so by reviving one of the oldest techni-
ques of moving pictures, the flip-book. At the same time, this flip-book story
is a manifestation of the deception of the senses that all motion pictures use.
Thus, by introducing a visual technology into the verbal art of storytelling,
the authenticity of the picture is questioned, whilst simultaneously the story-
telling potential of pictures is proven in contrast to the (weaker) narrative
power of the word. Above all, the young narrator’s attempt to make sense of
what happened to his father and him on that September day in 2001 is
bound to fail as long as he relies on the linguistic mode. His quest for mea-
ning can be arrested only after he has found the appropriate visual image.
Thus, an individual’s search for meaning and its construction are represented
as multimodal, and the multimodal novel can be regarded as itself a cultural
template of the multimodality of semiosis and meaning making.
5 Transmodal Narratology
What has been said about the multimodal novel can be summarized very
briefly: The multimodal novel
incorporates and represents a wide range of verbal and non-verbal signi-
fying practices as well as narrative and non-narrative modes and ways of
world-making;
equips its characters and narrators with a wide range of signifying and
cultural abilities so that they appear as fully capable human beings shar-
ing the cultural practices of their textual world;
thus uses, represents and communicates cultural practices of looking and
seeing, writing, printing and design technologies;
integrates and thematizes the materiality of different codes and symbol
systems;
makes it possible for the reader to look at and study artefacts from the
fictional world and thus share the cultural code and experiences of the
textual world and its agents;
creates a multimodal cultural archive by claiming to present and repre-
sent documents and sources from that archive;
relativizes the conceptual and discursive power of verbal language and
emphasizes that meaning-making, and making sense of the world, is
transmodal and the result of multimodal as well as multimedial proc-
esses.
It should have become clear that the questions raised and discussed here are
not, as in transmedial narratological approaches (see Schüwer 2002, Wolf
2002, Herman 2004, Ryan 2004a, Meister 2005), primarily concerned with a
single narrative that travels across different media. Rather the particularity of
multimodal narrative lies in the fact that the whole of the narrative is a result
of the semiotic interplay of different modes and media: they are fully inte-
grated in the narrative discourse, part of the storyworld and an integral part
of the reader’s construction of the narrative. It seems obvious, then, that the
features of the multimodal novel delineated and illustrated above may have
considerable implications for some central paradigms of narrative theory.
Yet it would be premature to draw definitive conclusions at this point. So I
am not proposing a new terminology, since a terminological system needs to
be carefully developed in accordance with disciplinary traditions, both within
narratology and in ‘imported’ disciplines. Rather, I would like to point to
some conceptual shifts that may be implied in the findings indicated above
about the multimodal novel:
From writing to designing: It is obvious in the examples shown above
that novels of the multimodal type require more than just writing a verbal
text. Instead, the text can be regarded as a complex arrangement that com-
150 Wolfgang Hallet
bines various semiotic resources, and even layouts, on a page or double-

page. The multimodal novel is the result of multimodal and multimedial
design (see Kress/van Leeuwen 2001: 5).
From narrator to narrator-presenter: Since the same applies to the narra-
tor who, apart from delivering a story, searches, retrieves and ‘collects’
documents and sources and eventually presents them to the reader, the
process of narrating includes ‘showing’ and ‘presentation’. As in everyday
cultural practices, where life stories or a family history may be narrated while
looking at and showing photographs in an album or on slides, narration in
the multimodal novel includes presentation. The act of presenting, the selec-
tion of texts and visual images, their accessibility and reliability may become
part of the narrative discourse as well as of meta-narration.
From monomodal (verbal) text to multimodal, multimedial texts: Suffi-
cient evidence has been provided above that the narrative text can no longer
be conceived of as solely verbal. Instead, it takes on the shape and functions
of a multimedial text. In that respect, some pages in multimodal novels may
resemble a hypertext. In its most advanced form, as in Danielewski’s House of
Leaves, the multimodal novel can even be conceptualized as a non-electronic
hypertext.
From reading to transmodal construction of narrative meaning: As has
been shown, in the case of the multimodal novel the reader is engaged in
constructing a holistic mental model of the textual world in which she/he
incorporates data from different semiotic sources and modes. Connecting
these different sources and resources intertextually and intermedially is an
indispensable part of the reading process. ‘Reading’ this type of novel now
integrates various literacies and the ability to decipher not only verbal lan-
guage but also other codes and languages, from visual grammars to scientific
formulae.
From reader to ‘user’: The aforementioned shifts imply that the reader
has to engage in intertextual and intermedial ways of meaning-making with
the eventual goal of creating transmodal narrative meaning. To a certain ex-
tent, the reader’s activities start to resemble those of the user of an electronic
hypertext (although in most cases the multimodal novel is a linear narrative,
whereas the electronic hypertext is a non-linear ensemble of texts and signs).
The traditional reader, on the other hand, makes meaning solely from the
words on a page.
What has been stated about the multimodal novel cannot leave narratol-
ogy unaffected. It seems inevitable that the phenomena and implications
described in this article will affect various narratological conceptualizations,
since narratology must inevitably concern itself with conceptualizing and
theorizing the semiotic interplay of different medial representations and se-
miotic modes within a single narrative and defining their mode-specific con-
tributions to the narrative whole. Narratology must be able to describe and

conceptualize narrative meaning as the transmodal outcome of multimodal
textual arrangements and of the reader’s transmodal construction of narra-
tive. A fully transmodal narratology would, therefore, have to study and un-
derstand transmodal cognitive process and the construction of cognitive
narrative schemata based on multimodal data input.
In the light of the multimodal novel it becomes apparent that interdisci-
plinary collaboration is not an arbitrary act, for the specific contribution that
particular modes and media make to the whole of the narrative can only be
studied appropriately if concepts from various specialized disciplines are
consulted and imported. ‘Conceptual import’ from semiotics, visual culture
studies or other fields of cultural studies is the corresponding, reciprocal
move to what Wolf (2005) calls the ‘export’ of narratological concepts to
other disciplines. The multimodal novel as a literary and cultural phenome-
non cannot be grasped through traditional narratological and literary studies
alone. The multimodality of narratives confronts narratology with phenom-
ena that have not so far been the objects of its research. Therefore narratol-
ogy must resort to and integrate the expertise that has been developed in
other disciplines in order to describe and decode non-novelistic, non-
narrative and non-verbal modes and media and their interplay with verbal
narration.
Accordingly, the analysis of interdiscursive exchange between literature
and cultural discourses in the sense of Link (1988) will have to shift away
from the investigation of merely verbal correspondences to multimodal and
multimedial transfer-processes between the literary and the cultural ‘text’. As
a result, ‘context’, ‘culture’ and ‘knowledge’ may no longer be conceived of
as being represented in verbal form only. ‘Search words’ such as Baßler
(2005) proposes for scanning the cultural archive are suitable for the contex-
tualization of verbal documents and texts, but they are not able to identify
contextualizing images or graphic modes or to use them as contextualizing
texts.
Finally, it may be necessary to revisit historical exemplars of novels that
show features of the multimodal novel, like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1951 [1759-67]), for non-verbal or non-narrative elements in novels have
often been simply overlooked and left unconsidered in literary criticism. A
comparison may produce astounding phenomenological parallels that require
a closer analysis of non-verbal and non-novelistic elements in older novels
and demand revaluation in the light of the study of multimodal novels as a
literary and cultural phenomenon of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
152 Wolfgang Hallet
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PETER VERSTRATEN
(Leiden)
Between Attraction and Story:

Rethinking Narrativity in Cinema
When the action-packed blockbuster Godzilla (Robert Emmerich, 1998) was

released, the tag line was “Size does matter”. The tag line referred to the size
of the title monster wreaking havoc in New York. Wittily, skeptics replied
that ‘plot does matter, too’. Although it was still possible to make head or tail
of the film, it lacked a solid bone structure. It has often been said that the big
Hollywood productions sacrifice consistent plotlines in favor of more spec-
tacle. A decent story is also said to be missing in films like Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider (Simon West, 2001) and in European Hollywood imitations like The
Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997). When asked why the digital effects over-
shadowed the shaky plot of Besson’s film, leading man Bruce Willis an-
swered that nobody cares for stories anymore nowadays (cited in Lunenfeld
2004: 151).
Willis’s remark that the interest in film stories in the big blockbusters has
dwindled is right insofar as it refers to classic ways of narrating. These pre-
sume that causal relations are consistent, which is a criterion that has tradi-
tionally been considered to be the parameter of plot. We follow a hero in
time and space from A to B to C. It is possible for a narration to jump from
A to C, but only on condition that development B is addressed in (for in-
stance) a flashback. If a film starts with development E, A-B-C-D will even-
tually also be shown. It must always be clear who the hero is, what his/her
background is, what his aims are and why he does what he does. In a classic
film, the hero has to overcome obstacles while trying to achieve his aim, for
instance because other characters have interests that are opposed to his. The
hero will normally succeed, but this is not an iron ‘rule’.
According to new media theoretician Peter Lunenfeld, the much-debated
crisis of (classic) film narrative has more to do with the sheer quantity of
stories in the contemporary information age than with indifference: nowa-
days, simple references suffice (Lunenfeld 2004: 151). We can easily jump
from A to C while omitting B because the visually literate viewer has already
trodden that particular path many times. A tightly structured plot is unneces-
sary in a blockbuster like Godzilla. For the modern-day popcorn movie, the
Rethinking Narrativity in Cinema 155
structure of a box of bricks is enough: the typical standard elements of a

story no longer require elaborate psychological motivations. Characters can
be reduced to stable functions: H fights G to save M. These films, consisting
of ‘stacked bricks’, do not represent or require a full development. Their way
of narration is based on references to overly familiar plot devices. They pre-
sent a sequence of events that are not explicitly causally related, but the
viewer who is familiar with story patterns from other films can usually fill in
the gaps.
Apart from these ‘stack of bricks’ films, the last fifteen years have seen
the rise of films with a so-called contiguous approach. Films like Short Cuts
(Robert Altman, 1993), Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998), Amores
Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) and Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004)
offer a mosaic of widely diverging characters. What connects the characters
is often little more than that they (temporarily) reside in the same place,
which enables them to cross paths for a short time. These ensemble films are
based on a narrative structure that also differs from classical narration in that
coincidences now take precedence over causal relations: something might
happen ‘out of the blue’ and events do not require a thorough introduction.
In Short Cuts and Magnolia, the narrative climax is formed by natural events
like an earthquake or a shower of frogs. These jumbled narratives are sur-
prising and unusual when compared to classic film tradition. Nevertheless,
they do adhere to a logic we have come to connect with the cyberspace hy-
pertext, jumping from one link to the next (Zizek 2001: 204-205). I would
argue that the altered nature of narration in cinema is an urgent reason to
rethink filmic narrativity.
A second reason why a reconsideration of film narratology is relevant at
this moment has to do with the developments in the field of new media
studies, which have their impact on academic film culture—and vice versa.
In their search for the language and grammar of new media, Janet H. Mur-
ray, Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder (among others) have posed narrato-
logical questions. How do digital media, with their database logic and inte-
ractive ambitions, relate to (film) narrative? What are the differences and
similarities between the rules of computer games and (film) narratives? What
does the future hold for the (film) narrative in cyberspace and how does
cyberspace in its turn influence cinema? In view of the fact that the new
media have inherited so much from cinema, the return of the narratological
discussion to film studies is like a boomerang. This makes a reexamination
of the ‘theory of narrating and narrations’ essential. And the question that
will be my starting point is whether cinema is essentially narrative.
156 Peter Verstraten
1. The Narrative Potential of Film: Time, Space, Causality
Following Mieke Bal’s example in her Narratology (1997), I will use ‘the repre-
sentation of a (perceptible) temporal development’ as the basic definition of
a story. A transition from one situation to another takes place, and that
change is brought about by a (non-)act effected by someone or something. If
the rain dance of a certain character in a film is followed by a spontaneous
downpour, for instance, one may suspect that the dance has caused the
cloudburst. If the sun breaks through the clouds after the dance, however,
this can also be taken as a change caused by the same act. The radiant
weather can then be interpreted as a reaction to the failure of the dance. For
those who do not believe in the possible magic effect of the rain dance, the
changing weather conditions have nothing to do with the dancer’s act at all.
If it happens to start raining, the ‘event’ needs to be attributed to something
else—the rain may simply be the result of the advancing storm clouds. Gen-
erally, not conducting a certain act can also be classified as a development.
When someone stands by as another person is drowning, his failure to act
has consequences for the further development of the fabula. Even if the
drowning person is saved after all, a breach of trust, at least, might have oc-
curred.
The scope of the term ‘temporal development’ can be a matter of de-
bate. Bal claims that temporality can be ‘read’ in, for instance, paintings. In
Rembrandt’s work, the viewing direction and/or facial expression of the
characters often suggests a story. We see for example how Susanna is being
watched by the elders while she seems to turn to the viewer for ‘protection’.
The painting shows a ‘frozen’ moment in time while simultaneously reveal-
ing interaction both between the characters and between them and the vie-
wer (Bal 1991: 166-167). Even non-figurative paintings can be narrative. The
wild brush strokes of abstract-expressionist action painters like Willem de
Kooning and Jackson Pollock ‘narrate’ the creative process: their fierce
painting techniques seem to imply movement (Bal 1999: 177). This move-
ment points to a certain temporal order that can be reconstructed by ‘read-
ing’ the painting.
Essentially, film is the setting in motion of a series of photographic im-
ages that pass forward (or, occasionally, backward) along the temporal axis.
Filmic frames are linked moments in time. Because of the emphatic presence
of temporality it would not be too big a leap to claim, along with André
Gaudreault and Christian Metz, that cinema has been equipped with narra-
tive antennae (Gaudreault 1997: 71). Concurring with these two critics, Sey-
mour Chatman claims that a novel can give an exhaustive description of the
surroundings, or of the looks, of a certain character. Fabula time is then ar-
rested for a pause in the story. Chatman, however, claims that film scenes
cannot pause and consequently are unable to describe (1980: 129). In his
opinion, film cannot withstand the constant narrative pressure: the projec-
tion of moving images on the temporal axis forcefully drags the story on.
Does this narrative pressure mean that film, as Gaudreault claims, is a ma-
chine doomed to tell stories (1997: 171)? It is a question that allows no other
answer than a complex ‘yes and no’.
Whoever wants to approach the matter from a strictly historical perspec-
tive may be forced to claim, like Sean Cubitt, that the earliest forms of cin-
ema were not narrative. Cubitt argues that temporality is not yet properly
directed in the first one-shot films. Originally, cinema was a simple stream of
photo frames.1 Like the waves at sea, this primary state of cinema is inde-
pendent of beginnings or endings. In the case of the Lumière brothers, it
was not the things that were shown that gave rise to fascination but rather
the fact that something unprecedented could be shown in the first place. The
most miraculous effect of cinema was based on pure movement (Cubitt
2004: 15): this was a cinema of immediate presence, of the here and now,
without past or future. It was straightforwardly sensational and yielded an
experience that was not bound to narrative expectations. Having studied the
oldest experiences of the medium, Cubitt cautions that narrativity is not in-
herent to cinema. At the moment of its conception, cinema was neither cre-
ated nor experienced as a narrative medium.
According to Cubitt, it is only when the cinematic cut was introduced
that temporality was given a direction. By means of cutting, the length of
shots was shortened and the viewer started to focus on what exactly was
moving in the image. The cut marked the transition from the experience to
the perception of the filmed object. Cubitt claims that this transition is com-
parable to looking at paintings by Camille Pissarro from a distance. When
one looks at his canvasses from (less than) an arm’s length, it would seem
that the painter has only applied colorful smudges and dots. A recognizable
image can only be discerned if the viewer increases the distance between
himself and the painting (Cubitt 2004: 28).
Cubitt argues that the viewer only becomes sensitive to the composition
and framing of film shots in the moment when they become aware of what
they are looking at. This sensitivity generates questions like: ‘What does the
person at the front have to do with the person in the background? Why have
they chosen this setting? The person at the front is looking to her left: what
could she be looking at outside this frame? Where will the camera be in the
next shot?’ These questions evince two important principles. Firstly, if the
cut encourages the viewer to transform waves of photo frames into ‘objects
1 Instead of the filmic term ‘photo frames’ Cubitt prefers the term ‘pixels’ from the vocabulary of
digitization. See Stewart for a critique of this “terminological backflip” of Cubitt’s history
(2007: 12).
in the world’, the length of the shot is given intrinsic limits and the moving
image becomes spatially located. This transition is marked by a change of
attitude: instead of ‘wow, we are actually seeing a projection of a walking
man’, the viewer might now think ‘in the image, a man with a cowboy hat is
walking through a wide landscape. Is he going somewhere? How long do we
keep following him?’
Secondly, the filmic space creates causal relations, and these are inher-
ently temporal: first this happened, then that happened. A causal link, how-
ever, can often be drawn only in retrospect. If we see a shot of a man in a
room followed by a shot of a gun in a drawer, questions such as these may
arise: ‘Does this revolver belong to that man? Why does he have a revolver?
Does he feel threatened? If so, by whom?’ If the man actually uses the re-
volver later on, the earlier shot of the drawer gains relevance: the weapon
was not put there for no reason. The showing of the gun turns out to be
functional.
I stated that Cubitt gives a strictly historical analysis: cinema was not nar-
rative from the moment of its conception, because true narrativity arises only
in the process of editing. Against this vision, however, we could bring in the
argument of retrospectivity. With the knowledge of cinema we now have, we
could also classify the earliest films as narrative. (And since both visions are
valid, this explains the complex ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether
cinema is essentially narrative.)
According to Gaudreault, the short film La Sortie des Usines Lumière
(Louis and Auguste Lumière, 1895) can also be called narrative. In this film,
shot with a static camera, the workers do little more than leave a factory. The
earliest film of the two brothers shows at least part of a true temporal devel-
opment—the gates open and the workers walk through. Therefore, the film
can be called a “micro-narrative”. Gaudreault applies the term “monstration”
to these early one-shot films (1997: 73). They are not yet ‘narrating’ in the
proper sense of the word, but by showing they both create a sequence of pho-
tographic images and capture movement. This form of showing suffices for
Gaudreault as a basic criterion for a (micro-)narrative. He considers monstra-
tion to be the first level of narrativity. Whereas Cubitt holds that narrativity
only comes into the picture with the advent of editing, Gaudreault believes
editing to be a second level of narrativity. The narration is no longer exclu-
sively determined by what is being projected, but mainly by the transitions
from one shot to the next. According to Gaudreault, these transitions be-
tween images shape narration in cinema (1997: 73). Three important func-
tions of editing can, therefore, be addressed. Firstly, it allows time to be ma-
nipulated, for instance by omitting a certain time span. Secondly, space can
be framed (time and again). Thirdly, causal relations can take shape because
of the way in which images are juxtaposed.
Time, space and causality are the main principles of narrative cinema. In
this type of cinema, multiple storylines can be adroitly combined according
to a pattern of cause and consequence; the direct look into the camera has
become taboo. If we transpose this to the ‘classic’ variant of cinema, we get a
formula like: ‘we know, or will soon know, why the characters are where
they are when they are.’ The triad of time, space and causality is therefore a
basic ingredient of narrative cinema. Nevertheless, filmmakers have thank-
fully used the many opportunities at their disposal to violate these classic
conventions. The psychological motivation for someone’s action may remain
unexplored, leaving the possibly enigmatic reasons for a certain deed unre-
solved. In several (European) art films, moreover, it is virtually impossible to
fit the pieces of time and space together. The clear reconstruction of when
what took place is barred. Despite the fact that these films are a challenge to
narrative rules and make it impossible to ascertain a coherent fabula, they are
nonetheless narrative.
L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) reveals some characte-
ristic narrative inclinations of ‘alternative’ films. The title explicitly refers to
the classic parameters of time and space: we know when (last year) and whe-
re (the health resort Marienbad) the film is set. In the film, a nameless man
in an immense baroque hotel is telling a woman about his encounters with
her. They are said to have met many times near the balustrade of a garden
full of statues in Fredriksbad, or perhaps in Marienbad or Karlsbad. The
woman does not have a single memory of their meetings, which generates
the impression that the ‘events’ have sprung from the lover’s imagination.
Moreover, the status of the characters is unclear. We see how the woman is
shot by a man who presumably is her husband; did this event take place last
year, or is it imaginary once again? The fact that the characters in the hotel
move about like ‘statues’ and the many references to the condition of being
dead suggest that the guests are possibly roaming the hotel as ghosts. In the
end, the lover claims that the woman has withdrawn with him alone, but
within the context of the film this claim is unconvincing. With its many un-
certainties, it is impossible to categorize L'Année Dernière à Marienbad finally:
is it an abstract thriller, a love story or a philosophical puzzle?
Resnais’s film violates the traditional use of basic narrative ingredients,
but that in itself is unremarkable. However, it makes one wonder whether
these basic ingredients might even be absent altogether. Is entirely non-
narrative cinema possible? An unequivocal answer cannot be given. How-
ever, just as the claim that every film is narrative is not completely correct—
if one adopts Cubitt’s historicizing perspective—so also the assertion that a
genuinely non-narrative film can exist is hard to defend. Since the debate
concerning narrative and non-narrative cinema has not yet fully crystallized
in film theory, the issue demands further exploration.
2. Freeze Frame and temps mort
Narrativity is said to be innate to cinema for the simple reason that films
unfold in, and embody, passing time. An obvious exception to this rule is the
freeze frame, which temporarily stops the image and turns it into a ‘photo-
graph’. A frozen frame, however, does not necessarily cease to be narrative.
One of the most famous freeze frames in film history is the final shot of Les
Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959). The young Antoine Doinel has
escaped from a juvenile institution and is running toward the ocean. The film
ends with a ‘photographic’ portrait of his face in close-up as he turns to the
camera. Strictly speaking, the (filmic) movement is arrested. Nevertheless,
the underlying suggestion is narrative. The freeze frame invites the viewer to
complete the story. According to Chatman the frozen shot does not imply a
standstill or a pause, but instead signifies a repetitive pattern (1980: 130):
Antoine is trapped in the frame, just as he will remain trapped in an exis-
tence made up of failures. And the freeze frame is, in fact, the starting point
of several sequels about Antoine’s life that confirm the pattern of struggle
already visible in Les Quatre Cents Coups.2 Chatman compares the narrative
function of a ‘dead moment’ like the freeze frame to a taxi meter: even if we
are in a traffic jam, the meter still runs (1980: 130). The story continues even
when the image stops, if need be with an appeal to the viewers to interpret
the freeze frame for themselves.
Cinema has another technique that implies a standstill in its terminology:
the so-called temps mort. This term indicates a scene in which no discernible
event takes place. In the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, such ‘dead time’
manifests itself when the camera lingers at a place the characters have already
left. Oddly enough, the absence of the characters within the shot is made all
the more palpable by the passing of time: how long will it take for the cam-
era to pick them up again? The non-appearance of a character where you
would normally expect one to appear is also a form of development, much
as a non-act is a form of action. The last five minutes of Antonioni’s Éclisse
(1962) only contain shots of the surroundings in which the main characters
had earlier agreed to meet. They both fail to show up. The final scene be-
comes an exercise in patience: will they show up or not? When the film ends,
this question is still not answered. Will they perhaps meet after the film has
ended, and if so, what will they say to each other? Even though nothing rele-
vant to the plot happens in the final scene, the narrative issues remain; they
are simply relegated to a point beyond the scope of the film. The narrative
agent puts the story on the viewer’s plate beyond the usual ‘fine’.
2 In Baisers Volés (François Truffaut, 1968), we see how Antoine is fired from the military, how
he ruins his job as night porter in a hotel and, finally, how he attempts to get by working as a
detective.
3. Tension, Attraction and Story
With the freeze frame and temps mort, I have discussed the dividing line be-
tween narrative and non-narrative on the level of shot and scene respec-
tively. In both cases, the balance shifts to narrative. The next step is con-
cerned with the way in which (spectacular) scenes relate to the (main) plot.
This step refers back to a debate between historians of early film about the
term ‘attractions’. This term signifies a type of cinema that was dominant up
to 1906, before the development of the cinema of narrative integration. Ac-
cording to Tom Gunning’s famous statement, the “cinema of attractions”
involves an “exhibitionistic confrontation” with the viewer: ‘look at me per-
forming my tricks’ (see Gunning 1994: 41). Browsing through old collec-
tions, Gunning came to the conclusion that early films were predominantly a
display case for a series of ‘circus acts’. In the vein of vaudeville theatre, early
cinema revolved around unrelated acts that lacked dramatic unity.
Don Crafton has polemically reduced the difference between attraction
and story to a difference between ‘pie’ and ‘chase’. A chase has a cause,
shows a linear development, and is rarely confined to a single space. The
throwing of pies in slapstick comedies, on the other hand, appears to be a
spectacle staged only for the camera. According to Crafton, such comical
act(ion)s or gags meet the qualification of a typical ‘attraction’: it needs to be
a unique, self-sustaining event. If the pie-throwing has any cause at all, this
disappears in the sheer fun of pies incessantly flying through the air. The
relation to the main plot is usually irrelevant, which also applies to gags like
the funny faces of comedians or the squinting looks of comic actor Ben
Turpin. Crafton believes there is a fundamentally unbridgeable gap between
the gag and the (main) story (1995: 111).
According to Tom Gunning, however, the gag is always taken up again
by the overarching story of the film. Apart from the fact that the gag already
offers a microscopic story in itself, its only purpose in the first place is to
serve as an ornament for the main plot. Pie scenes may seem an end in
themselves and appear to drift away from the film’s actual storyline; never-
theless, Gunning claims they always have a discernible narrative motivation
(1995: 121). A similar tension between story and intermezzo can be found in
genres as diverse as the musical, the pornographic film and the Hollywood
attraction-cinema. The narrative patterns have been sacrificed for the true
‘attraction’ of these genres: song and dance, sex scenes or flashy action se-
quences. The plot mainly functions as an excuse for, or an introduction to,
these scenes. Eventually, however, these intermezzos are integrated into the
plot, no matter how rudimentary it may be.
4. ‘Zero Degree’ of Narrativity?
The point so far is that specific techniques, (dead) scenes and intermezzos
become embedded within a ‘larger’ story. This seems to corroborate
Gaudreault’s and Chatman’s view that narrativity is inherent to film. This
conclusion remains disputed, however. It is predominantly in the category of
experimental film—which in turn comprises abstract as well as associative
cinema—that narrative integration is (virtually) absent. Thus the ‘abstract’
film Ballet Mécanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, 1924) presents not
a story but an argument expressed in the rhythmic dancing of objects (hats,
bottles), and the mechanical movements of people. Reflecting Henri Berg-
son’s theory that we laugh each time a person gives the impression of being
an automaton, the film opens and closes with an abstract animation of the
comedian Charlie Chaplin, whose apparently agile body remains straight as a
board while moving, and who is consequently notorious for his almost me-
chanical stiffness. In addition, Ballet Mécanique predominantly shows rhyth-
mical similarities between objects, shapes and title cards. There is an incredi-
ble amount of movement in the eleven minute film, ranging from objects to
human figures, but all this movement seems to lack direction. We repeatedly
see a shot of a cleaning lady climbing a stairway, for instance, but this shot
cannot be related to a fabula or to a temporal sequence of cause and effect.
The connection with the other shots is graphic and rhythmic: the way in
which human bodies move is reminiscent of object or machine parts.
The abstract form of Murphy’s and Léger’s ‘visual symphony’ is appro-
priate to an ‘argument’ almost entirely constructed of (metaphorical) similari-
ties. In order to reduce human beings to machinery, their psyches need to be
as ‘empty’ as possible. Because of the complete removal of psychological
aspects, temporality, causality and space become irrelevant and narrativity (as
a ‘characteristic’ of the film) is shut out. Similarities grow to be so dominant
that the ‘story’ is suppressed. A film becomes non-narrative by filtering out
or suppressing temporality, causality and space, but what it then turns out to
be is nothing more than a formal exercise.
One reservation concerning the idea that Ballet Mécanique is a non-
narrative film needs to be made, however. Psychoanalysis has taught us that
the repressed can resurface in a different guise. Even if a film consists only
of accumulated similarities, and temporal development appears entirely lack-
ing, the viewer may not be able to resist the inclination to read narrativity
into the text, reordering the endless flow of movement into a (minimal) nar-
rative. The possibility is not unlike Bal’s idea that the seemingly non-narra-
tive work of action painters can be interpreted narratively if one reads the
canvas as expressing movement.3
5. Content—Form
For David Bordwell, narratological analysis revolves around the interaction

between narrative tactics and stylistic features. This interaction is analogous
to the more familiar distinction between content and form. Content refers to
the bare representation of the plot, which is reduced to the question ‘what is
it about?’ Narrative tactics concern the shaping of the content; the order in
which events are told, for instance, falls under that heading. Form denotes
the furnishing of the content and involves the question ‘how and by what
means is the content conveyed?’ This entails a choice from the entire arsenal
of filmic techniques: what camera positions does the director choose, what
colors, what type of shot transitions, does the sound correspond to the im-
ages, and so on. Style is a further specification of formal possibilities. Ac-
cording to Bordwell, style refers to the systematic use of film techniques. He
uses the word ‘style’ when a director or filmic genre can be recognized by the
techniques that are employed. The interaction between content and form, or,
in Bordwell’s terms, between style and narrative construction, determines
how time, space and narrative logic will be manipulated.
The distinction between form and content is not as strict as it may ap-
pear, because form is not a neutral conductor. Form is not like a wire that
conducts electricity with a burning light bulb as its final ‘content’. Formal
features inevitably affect content as well. One could envisage an experiment
in which a man is filmed visiting a museum and looking around. If cheerful
music accompanied the images, the pleasure of the visit would be empha-
sized. If we heard ominous music, however, we might get the idea that the
man was being pursued. Thus a simple formal adjustment can greatly influ-
ence the content of a film.
Because of the impossibility of completely neutral form, content is al-
ways distorted. I understand this distortion as ‘excess’, a concept I derive
from an essay by Kristin Thompson. If a film exhibits “style for its own
sake”, ‘filmic excess’ ensues (1986: 132). If the style draws too much atten-
tion to itself, the story is in danger of dissolving. Excess begins where moti-
vation is lacking, or, in other words, where a stylistic feature does not propel
the story or serve a narrative function. In Thompson’s view, excess is both
3 A comparable argument can be made where other experimental films from the twenties—
Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, 1926), for instance—and short-lived movements like cinéma
pur are concerned.
“counternarrative” and “counterunity” (1986: 132); it prevents the story

from creating closure.
In this view, Ballet Mécanique is an excessive film. Because of the em-
phatic rhythmic parallels and contradictions, temporal developments become
secondary. Bordwell claims that the concept of excess cannot be reconciled
with narratology. Excess falls outside the scope of narrative analysis (1985:
53). He blames it on an exuberant style that is not functional to the story. In
his view, Ballet Mécanique is so abstract that the viewer is not invited to read a
narrative into it at all.
Every film creates a certain measure of excess, but the exact level of ex-
cess is determined by the balance between form and content. In the classic
film or the ‘average’ genre film, excess manifests itself where specific stylistic
means (temporarily) short-circuit the story: ostentatious low angle or high
angle shots, overly fast shot alterations, extreme close-ups, sudden subjective
shots and the use of bright or dim lighting may all be excessive. Techniques
like these can draw attention to themselves in such a way as to distract you
from the story and make you almost forget you were watching a film noir or
a Western. In the black-and-white Western Forty Guns (Sam Fuller, 1957) the
camera films the hero virtually from beneath his feet, looking up. The shot
becomes an abstract composition. Above the hero’s hat, we see a vertical
black line. In the next shot, the narrative efficiency of the ‘abstract’ shot is
demonstrated: the line is a rifle which belongs to a man who is holding the
hero at gunpoint from the upper storey window.
It does not seem too big a leap to hypothesize that a (classic) film with
sound narrative logic can relatively easily absorb excessive elements. Con-
versely, stylistic excess can be less easily incorporated into a film that lacks a
tight narrative structure. This hypothesis seems to result in an apparently
logical rule of thumb: the less plot or content a film has, the more its style
and form will move to the foreground. The stronger form and content di-
verge, the more excessive the film becomes. This claim can easily be tested
against European art cinema. In L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960),
a group of friends travels to a deserted island. Suddenly, Anna disappears
and Sandro and Claudia start a search. Gradually, the actual cause of the
search is ‘forgotten’: Anna’s disappearance is never solved. In the words of
Pascal Bonitzer: ‘what happens is that Anna’s disappearance itself disappears’
(1989: 215). For a film called ‘the adventure’, there are remarkably few excit-
ing events. As the film progresses and the plotline of the missing woman
fades away, Antonioni’s meticulous style, with its stringently composed
black-and-white shots and dead moments, focuses attention on itself to such
an extent that L'Avventura now only seems to state its own unorthodox style.
The considerations mentioned above lead to the following conclusion.
As a rule, no film is unproblematically narrative for the full one hundred
percent of its length. Storylines are always distorted by formal techniques.

The tighter the narrative structure, however, the better this distortion can be
absorbed and concealed. That is why the chance of a disturbed balance be-
tween form and content seems greater in avant-garde films and European art
cinema than in classic Hollywood films. Nevertheless, this seeming logic
requires further specification. Even in films that are unexceptionably narra-
tive, the form can nonetheless be so ostentatious that ‘excess’ cannot in the
end be contained.
6. Functional Compensation for Excess
The difficulty of ‘excess’ is that it is not a well-defined characteristic and con-

tinues to be a matter of interpretation. A first logical step in the tracing of
excess is of course to gain awareness of unorthodox stylistic elements—
sharp-edged transitions or an extremely low number of cuts, shaky or very
steady camera operations, illogical transitions in time or space, a bizarre
choice of actors or actresses, quaint music or sounds, etcetera. A second step
is checking whether the story legitimates unorthodox stylistic means. In
other words: is the style functional and does it propel the plot? The notion
of excess is predicated upon the interaction between form and content. Hor-
ror films sometimes take liberties with causal relations. If the monster does
not operate according to (human) logic, the common sequence of cause and
effect need not be adhered to. Since they find themselves threatened by an
irrational monster, the characters hardly realize what they are dealing with,
and causal relations can be dispensed with. In addition, horror films also
make relatively little use of the shot/reverse shot structure. These stylistic
characteristics are motivated by the fact that horror is based on the fear of
unknown threats: the reverse shot is withheld in order to ensure that the
monster will long remain mysterious.
If a character has a distorted notion of time, like the protagonist in Don’t
Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), or is spatially disoriented, like the alien crea-
ture in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg, 1976), illogical transitions
in time or space are, in a sense, logical. They represent the experience of the
main character. A distinct category is also formed by genres that offer ‘at-
tractions’ rather than a story. A good example is the musical, in which songs
occasion intermezzos with lavish mise-en-scène consisting of, for instance,
grandiose decors, bright colors and theatrical gestures made by the actors.
These excessive stylistic elements are consistent with the representation of
extravagant spectacle that is presented as separate from the actual plot. A
spectacle may point to the dreamy mood of characters that ‘lose themselves’
in song and dance or can take place on a specially prepared stage. In these
cases, the music and dance scenes mark a separate world. Their deviating and
patently artificial nature is heightened by the superfluous styling. Because the
excessive style in musicals serves to represent the utopian ‘world’, there is a
motivation for the stylistic overkill with respect to the content, and excess
can be contained.
The list of examples mentioned above, which can be expanded at will, il-
lustrates the fact that excess can in principle be found in all types of film. In
these examples, however, excess is only incipient, because stylistic elements
are at the same time neutralized by the content or plot. Excess as defined by
Kristin Thompson only fully manifests itself when the style remains self-
directed and is emphatically not compensated for by the content. Such is the
case when metaphoric connections obscure insight into temporal develop-
ments, which happens in the abstract Ballet Mécanique. This also occurs when
the plot all but disappears, as I claimed was the case with L'Avventura. The
narrative rhythm of this film is extremely sluggish and crucial events are
overlooked. What remains is a film with exceptionally steady shots in which
characters are reduced to elements in desolate surroundings. We see them as
‘extras’ against the backdrop of modern architecture. The meticulous com-
positions implicitly tell the ‘story’ of the alienation of modern man.
Because of their neglect of plot, these films function at the margins of
the narrative tradition. Since there is so little content, there is an excess of
style that cannot be compensated: the first condition of excess. The ‘van-
ished’ search and the slow rhythm lend L'Avventura almost the same level of
stillness as a painting. The question remains, however, whether excess can
also manifest itself in films that are not just stylistic exercises, but have a
clearly narrative character.
7. Ostentatious Film Styles: The Case of Melodrama
The European immigrant Douglas Sirk is known as the master of fifties Hol-
lywood melodrama. Sirk’s plots are relatively tight, psychologically compre-
hensible and have a bitter, sentimental subtext. In All that Heaven Allows
(1955), a widow from a well-to-do background has an affair with her young
gardener, this to the horror of her two children and gossipy neighbors. In
Imitation of Life (1959), a daughter is frustrated with the frequent absences of
her career-minded mother, while a friend of hers is aiming for a career in
showbiz and has to disavow her own black mother in order to achieve it.
It does not take much effort to analyze the classic, potentially tear-
jerking story lines of these melodramas, because there is much logically
structured ‘content’ to be analyzed. Melodramas are usually situated in a rela-
tively restrictive social milieu. The story takes place in a wealthy middle-class
setting in which it is inappropriate to settle conflicts by means of direct,

forceful action (Elsaesser 1995: 364-366). The outlet that is often chosen in
melodramas—and this was Sirk’s strong point—is to embellish the plot with
syrupy stylistic features. The colors are bright and exuberant to draw atten-
tion to the role of outward display within provincial milieus with rock-solid
social codes. The music is sentimental and underlines the emotions that are
sometimes held back by these codes, but at other times are expressed in the
most theatrical of ways. The characters operate within kitschy decors and are
carefully framed behind windows, the latticework of stairways, bedposts or
among mirrors in order to emphasize the lack of human contact.
In a Sirk melodrama, the emphatically present stylistic procedures result
in an ultra-kitsch approach. The storylines themselves already strike a maud-
lin tone, but the stylistic features create an even more hyper-sentimental ef-
fect. The filmic style manifests itself so ostentatiously that it draws attention
to itself and outshines the story—which is the defining characteristic of ex-
cess. Form outweighs classical plot construction. The story, in other words,
is told first and foremost by means of the excessive filmic form.
Generally speaking, there are two ways to approach Sirk’s melodramas.
On the one hand, the viewer can choose to see them as ‘simply’ sentimental
because of their classical narrative structure. On the other hand, he or she
can adopt an ironic stance and label them overly sentimental because their
form is so imbued with pathos, their stylistic features so strain after effect
that their dramatic context can no longer be taken seriously. Instead of iden-
tification with the events and characters, irony creates a buffer between the
viewer and the emotions displayed on screen. The viewer will watch Sirk’s
cinema with some (critical) distance and will not be carried away by the tear-
jerking content.
I argued initially that excess results from a dysfunctional imbalance be-
tween style and form on the one hand and content and plot on the other.
This claim concurs with the spirit of Bordwell’s Narration in Fiction Film and
Thompson’s essay on filmic excess. Nevertheless, Sirk’s melodramas prompt
a certain revaluation. In Sirk’s case, it could be said that the stylistic features
of his films are in fact overly functional. The colors, shot compositions,
framing and music magnify the story’s sentimentality so strongly that a para-
doxical inversion takes place. Excess is created here by emphatically under-
lining the formal features.
8. Description and Excess
Earlier I mentioned Chatman’s (1980: 126) claim that the pressure from the
narrative component in cinema is great. There is usually no time to dwell on
plenteous visual details. When a character travels across a landscape, an es-

tablishing shot may give an immediate impression of the space. In a split
second we see whether there are trees, cars, lamp-posts, traffic signs and so
on. In the case of an establishing shot, we do not register all the details, since
the number of details is indeterminate. If we suppose that this is a shot from
a classical movie, we are not expected to be interested in the landscape itself,
but we will wonder about the action that is probably coming up. Taking this
narrative pressure in cinema into account, I have examined to what extent
films can contain non-narrative elements. To that end, I have introduced the
concept of ‘filmic excess’: formal features can be so dominant that narrative
content may become irrelevant. This particular lesson, I would suggest,
might be fruitfully extended to other media.
Let us imagine the scene in a literary text where a character travels across
a landscape. It is possible to assume that the description of the landscape is
embedded in the flow of the fabula. The character takes time to observe the
surroundings. Hence, the description occurs through his or her focalization.
However, we might equally assume that the description becomes so elabora-
te and precise that the whole fragment seems dissociated from the charac-
ter’s perception and turns into an extensive exposition of the landscape. We
might even get the idea that the character moves across that space so that the
narrator can dwell on the beauty of the landscape. The timeline of the story
is then only the occasion to indulge descriptive purposes—or in other
words, narrative content is made subservient to formal ends. In this regard,
the concept of ‘excess’ that I have examined in relation to cinema, may be
usefully applied to the medium of literature as well. The notion of ‘excess’, I
conclude, warrants further investigation, for ‘excess’ is not only crucial in
film narratology, but may also shed light on the thin line between narration
and description in literature.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading ‘Rembrandt’. Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Rev. ed. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Bonitzer, Pascal. 1989. “The Disappearance (On Antonioni)”. In: Seymour Chatman and
Guido Fink (eds.). L’Avventura. Michelangelo Antonioni, Director. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, p. 215-218.
Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen.
Chatman, Seymour. 1980. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”. In:
Critical Inquiry 7, p. 121-140
Crafton, Don. 1995. “Pie and Chase. Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy”. In:
Karnick/Jenkins 1995, p. 106-119.
Cubitt, Sean. 2004. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1995 [1973]. “Tales of Sound and Fury. Observations on the Family
Melodrama”. In: Barry Keith Grant (ed.). Film Genre. Reader II. Austin: University
of Texas Press, p. 350-380.
Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.). 1997 [1990]. Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI.
Gaudreault, André. 1997 [1984]. “Film, Narrative, Narration. The Cinema of the Lumière
Brothers”. In: Elsaesser 1997, p. 68-75.
Gunning, Tom 1994 [1991]. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. The Early
Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gunning, Tom 1995. “Response to ‘Pie and Chase’”. In: Karnick/Jenkins 1995, p. 120-122.
Harries, Dan (ed.). 2004 [2002]. The New Media Book. London: BFI.
Karnick, Kristine Brunovska and Henry Jenkins (eds.). 1995. Classical Hollywood Comedy. New
York: Routledge.
Kinder, Marsha. 2004. “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games”. In: Harries
2004, p. 119-132.
Lunenfeld, Peter. 2004. “The Myths of Interactive Cinema”. In: Harries 2004, p. 145-154.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Stewart, Garrett. 2007. Framed Time. Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Thompson, Kristin. 1986 [1977]. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess”. In: Philip Rosen (ed.).
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Reader. New York: Columbia University Press,
p. 130-142.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2001 [1992]. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York:
Routledge.
SILKE HORSTKOTTE
(Leipzig)
Seeing or Speaking:
Visual Narratology and Focalization, Literature to Film
1. Film, Narrative, Focalization
Ever since Seymour Chatman proposed to analyze film with the help of nar-
ratological concepts (Chatman 1978),1 narratology has become a widespread
method of film analysis (see, e. g., Andringa et al. 2001; Bordwell 1985;
Branigan 1984; Chatman 1990; Lothe 2000; Nadel 2005). Chatman’s main
contribution to the field of film narratology remains his concept of the
“cinematic narrator,” which he defined as a non-human agent, “the compos-
ite of a large and complex variety of communicating devices” (Chatman
1990: 134). These include auditory (sound, voice, music) as well as visual
channels, for instance lighting, mise-en-scène, camera distance, angle and
movement, and editing (rhythm, cut etc). Chatman thereby contradicted
David Bordwell’s earlier contention that film has narration but no narrator,
and that notions of film narration are the construction of a spectator, not a
narrator (Bordwell 1985).
Referring to the opposition between fabula (story) and syuzhet (dis-
course) in Russian Formalism, Bordwell had defined film narration as “the
process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling
the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (Bordwell 1985: 53). Bordwell allowed
for the possibility of an intradiegetic, voice-over (VO) narrator, whether
homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, but excluded the possibility of an extra-
diegetic film narrator.2 However, it has been repeatedly pointed out that
Bordwell’s conception of film narration as a message with a perceiver but
without any sender (Bordwell 1985: 62) is a logical impossibility: as Chatman
1 Following earlier suggestions from film theory to describe film as a ‘cinematic narrative’; see
e. g. Metz (1974).
2 A comparable argument is raised by Celestino Deleyto, who also seeks to restrict cinematic
narration to explicit on-screen narration through voice-over or intertitles (Deleyto 1991: 164).
Visual Narratology and Focalization 171
argues, surely “something gets ‘sent’”, and this sending presupposes a sender
of some kind (Chatman 1990: 127).3
It seems sensible to assume that film possesses narrative qualities, and
that these narrative qualities must have an originating agency on the side of
film, hence, a film narrator. Leaving aside Chatman’s claim (contentious, in
my view) that cinematic as well as literary narrators are put in place by im-
plied authors (Chatman 1990: 132-133), I would tend to agree that film nar-
rative presupposes the existence of a narrator and that this cinematic narra-
tor is the transmitting agent of narrative, not its creator (Chatman 1990:
132). I would, however, furthermore posit that the presence of this cinematic
narrator has to be inferred by the spectator to a much greater degree than is
the case in literary narrative, and that film narration thus emerges out of an
interaction between a film and its viewers.
While a significant amount of research has been done on cinematic nar-
rators, less attention has been paid to the possibility of a cinematic focalizer.4
This is surprising because focalization, through its basis in the notion of
perspective, is closely associated with matters of vision. It would therefore
seem a much more promising starting point for film narratology than narra-
tion, a concept originating with linguistic codes. In fact, focalization has been
proposed as a concept bridging textuality and visuality (Bal 1997; 1999), and
has been tentatively used as a tool for analyzing visual artifacts (Bal 1999;
Yacobi 2002) as well as ones that combine the visual and the verbal
(Horstkotte 2005). However, since Gérard Genette first proposed the con-
cept (Genette 1980), focalization has remained one of the most problematic,
and hotly discussed, areas of narrative theory. Although Genette initially
favored the term for its abstractness and for avoiding the optical connota-
tions inherent in the French “vision” and “champ” (see Genette 1972: 206),
roughly corresponding to English “point of view,” he later highlighted the
intrinsically visual dimension of focalization by distinguishing between “who
speaks” (narration) and “who sees” (focalization) (Genette 1980: 186). In his
still later Narrative Discourse Revisited, however, Genette again downplayed the
term’s optical associations by suggesting that the question “who sees?”
should be reformulated as “who perceives?” to include other sense percep-
tions (Genette 1988: 64). While some narratologists, particularly Mieke Bal,
continue to stress the visual aspects of focalization, which make the concept
“the obvious place to begin easing in some elements of a ‘visual narratol-
ogy’” (Bal 1997: 161), others have argued that focalization’s connection to
seeing is merely metonymical or metaphorical (Jahn 1996: 243).
3 A similar point had already been made by Albert Laffey (1964): the succession of images in a
film must, considered logically, have an originating agent beyond the screen (see esp. pp. 81f).
4 See, however, Deleyto (1991).
172 Silke Horstkotte
The term ‘focalization,’ then, may have shifted problems of narrative

analysis rather than solved them, and similar problems beset Franz K. Stan-
zel’s concept of figural narrative (Stanzel 1984), which theorizes the consis-
tent use of a reflector character as a distinctive narrative situation separate
from first-person and “authorial” narrative. Stanzel’s holistic conception of
narrative situations mixes notions of seeing, experiencing and passing judg-
ment with the narrative act itself, from which Genette’s term of focalization
was meant to be clearly distinguished. Apart from the duly noted inconsis-
tencies of Stanzel’s system (Cohn 1981), this may point to unresolved prob-
lems concerning the distinction between narrator and focalizer, problems
which also determine the ongoing discussion as to whether focalization is
always linked to an anthropomorphized focalizing character (Bal 1997) or
not (Genette 1980, 1988).5
To sum up, the different terms focalization, perspective, figural narrative
and so forth, which continue to circulate in narrative theory, clearly indicate
that there are widely divergent ideas of what constitutes what I broadly term
focalization in this article. Despite their provenance from the optical domain,
the concepts of focalization and point of view cover aspects of cognition
and emotion as well as of perception; and they are insufficiently differenti-
ated from narration. Not surprisingly, a survey of recent contributions to the
field (Bal 1997; Herman 2002; Jahn 1996; Miller 2005; Nünning 2001; Phelan
2001; Rimmon-Kenan 2002; van Peer/Chatman 2001) reveals disagree-
ments, blurred boundaries, and even fundamental uncertainties about what
the term does—and does not—encompass. Similar inconsistencies were also
noted by Monika Fludernik, who concluded that “[the] extensive debate on
focalization has really demonstrated that the category is an interpretative one
and not exclusively a textual category.” (Fludernik 1996: 345)
This article will consider the potential, as well as the shortcomings, in-
herent in a ‘traveling concept’ of focalization through a study of two cases of
intermedial translation, namely by comparing the literary and film versions of
Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta (Jakob von Gunten, 1909; film: Brothers
Quay, 1995) and Franz Kafka’s The Castle (Das Schloß, 1926; film: Michael
Haneke, 1997), two novels which make intense and systematic use of fixed
internal focalization. I believe that a parallel reading (or viewing) of the films
can be productive for two reasons. Firstly, the original literary narratives
differ in one important point: Institute Benjamenta is a first-person narrative in
diary style; The Castle is told by a heterodiegetic narrator and consistently uses
the protagonist, K., as a focal character or fixed internal focalizer. This en-
ables me to contrast a heterodiegetic narration, which is comparatively easy
to distinguish from internal focalization, with a homodiegetic narration, in
5 The debate is summed up by Jahn (1996: 245).

which the distinction between narrator and focalizer is much less clear-cut. It
will then, secondly, be interesting to see how the two film adaptations trans-
late this distinction (or lack of distinction) into a filmic narrative and film
focalization.
2. Kafka’s The Castle:

Ironic Distance between Narration and Focalization
Franz Kafka’s third and last novel The Castle, written in 1922 and published
posthumously by Kafka’s close friend Max Brod in 1926, exemplifies that
combination of heterodiegetic narration with fixed internal focalization
which Franz Stanzel termed the “figural narrative situation” (Stanzel 1984).
As early as 1952, the Kafka scholar Friedrich Beißner referred to this form
of focalization as an “einsinniges Erzählen,” or narration from a single fixed
perspective (reprinted in Beißner 1983). Apart from the fact that Beißner’s
term unnecessarily confuses the positions of the impersonal narrator and the
character-focalizer K., it bears noting that K.’s focalization is not as consis-
tent as Beißner assumed but contains a number of breaks and oddities, espe-
cially at the beginning of the novel (see Müller 2008: 523; Sheppard 1977:
406).
It is significant for the later development of the narrative that Kafka
wrote two unfinished drafts of the novel’s beginning, employing different
narratorial positions, before finally coming up with a narrative situation
which enabled him to continue beyond the novel’s initial scenes (see Jahr-aus
2006: 397-402). The first of these fragmentary beginnings, the so-called
“Fürstenzimmer” fragment, uses a heterodiegetic narrator who tells of the
arrival of an unnamed “guest” at a country inn. This fragment already con-
tains the thematic kernel of the later novel plot, because the guest talks about
a “fight” in which he needs to engage (Jahraus 2006: 398). In the novel, K.
frequently imagines his relation to the castle in terms of a fight. The “Für-
stenzimmer” fragment, however, breaks off before this theme can be further
explored. Kafka’s second false start already contains the first two sentences
of The Castle, but employs a homodiegetic narrator, inasmuch as the pro-
tagonist K. here serves as a first-person narrator. This narrative situation
continues until the narrator-protagonist engages in amorous relations with
Frieda in the third chapter. At that point, the narrative abruptly reverts from
a first-person to a third-person perspective, as in the earlier fragment. Kafka
then writes a third beginning for his novel, this time employing a covert,
heterodiegetic narrator. That third start finally develops into the fragmentary
novel published in 1926 by Max Brod.
I would suggest that a crucial factor in Kafka’s decision to use an imper-

sonal, covert or heterodiegetic narrator was the possibility of linking this type
of narration with a specific form of fixed internal focalization that is endemic
in modernist writing and is characterized by the frequent use of free indirect
discourse (FID), reported speech, and reported thought.6 Franz Stanzel’s
concept of “figural narrative” suggests, in fact, that these two aspects—
narration through a covert, impersonal, heterodiegetic narrator and fixed
internal focalization tied to the consciousness of the central character—are
mutually interdependent and together constitute a standard narrative situa-
tion. However, I will show that although the narration in The Castle presup-
poses a fixed internal focalization, this does not mean that the positions of
narrator and focalizer are always congruent with each other. On the contrary,
the protagonist-focalizer’s perception and interpretation of events is fre-
quently at odds with the same events’ presentation in the narrative; indeed,
the ironic distance between narrator and focalizer is a driving motor of the
narrative.
K.’s focalization is closely linked to visual activity, especially in the early
chapters of The Castle, where the protagonist’s gaze remains directed at the
silhouette of the castle, whereas the later chapters focus on his attempts to
gain insight into the inner workings of the castle bureaucracy. The very first
sentences of the novel draw attention to the protagonist-focalizer’s gaze:
“There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it […]. K.
stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the
village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.” (Kafka 1998: 1)7 Curi-
ously, the sentence suggests that although K. looks, time of day and weather
conditions prevent him from actually perceiving anything. The assertion that
there is, in fact, a castle on the mountain therefore has to be the narrator’s,
not K.’s, meaning that the initial statement is not internally focalized.8 In
fact, K. is later surprised to hear that a castle perches above the village at all.
We are, then, from the beginning of the novel confronted with conflicting
statements about what is and what is not, what can and cannot be seen, set-
ting up an ironic distance between narrator and focalizer.
6 Dorrit Cohn similarly speculates that the implausible near-effacement of the narrating self in
Kafka’s second attempt motivated the shift towards third-person narration (Cohn 1978: 169-
171). Gérard Genette, on the other hand, remains unconvinced that “a rewriting of […] The
Castle into the first person would be such a catastrophe” (Genette 1988: 112).
7 “Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehn, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn […]. Lange stand K.
auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere
empor.” (Kafka 1994: 9)
8 Klaus-Detlef Müller (2007) offers a different interpretation: he argues that although the first
sentence could be “authorial”, the consistent narration “from K.’s perspective” suggests that K.
misses something (the castle) which he had expected (Müller 2007: 105). This is a circular, and
therefore unconvincing, argument: if the very first sentence suggests zero focalization, then in-
ternal focalization cannot be consistent.
The disparity between what the narrator asserts could be seen and what
the focalizer actually perceives raises the question what, if anything, the nar-
rator can be said to see. The perceptual capacities of narrators are a hotly
contested narratological problem, with Seymour Chatman denying that the
narrator can see anything and asserting that he “is a reporter, not an ‘ob-
server’ of the story world in the sense of literally witnessing it” and that nar-
rating, therefore, “is not an act of perception but of presentation or repre-
sentation” (Chatman 1990: 142). At least as far as the beginning of The Castle
is concerned, however, the distinction between reporting something that is at
least potentially visible and actually seeing it does not appear highly useful.
Whether we call the narrator’s activity perception or presentation, he (I will
stick with the male pronoun for convention’s sake) suggests to the reader a
visual impression of the castle that can then be compared with the visual
impression (or lack thereof) that we receive through the focal character, K.
Rather than drawing an absolute distinction between the focalizer’s vis-
ual perception and the narrator’s reporting of visual phenomena, I would like
to refer to Manfred Jahn’s proposal to distinguish between different “win-
dows of focalization” in the house of fiction (1996), which allows for distinc-
tive forms of visual perception specific to both the narrator and the focalizer
and therefore enables me to talk about the narrator’s visual perception.
Jahn’s main point is that although narrators can, in principle, “see,” their
perception has a different ontological status from (while being at least partly
reliant on) that of the character-focalizer(s):
What the narrators actually see is determined by a number of factors: the shape of
the window […], the view afforded by it […], the ‘instrument’ used […], but above
all, the viewer’s ‘consciousness’ and its construction of reality. It is for this reason
that narrators see things differently even when they are ostensibly watching the
‘same show’ […]. Before this backdrop enters a special story-internal character […]
who sees the story events not, like the narrator, from a window ‘perched aloft’, but
from within the human scene itself. Wholly unaware of both his/her own intra-
diegetic status and the part s/he plays in the extradiegetic universe comprising nar-
rator and narratee, the reflector’s consciousness nonetheless mirrors the world for
these higher-level agents and thus metaphorically functions as a window him- or
herself. (Jahn 1996: 252)
In the opening passage of The Castle, however, we find the narrator reporting
on a potential visual perception that is not—indeed, that cannot be—
mirrored for him by the reflector. The first sentences of The Castle are there-
fore at odds with the ensuing fixed internal focalization. While the narrator’s
assurance of the castle’s actual existence—which K. cannot see in the dark-
ness—as well as the objective geographical detail of the bridge “that leads
[…] to the village” (Kafka 1998: 1) seem to suggest a zero focalization (the
narrator knows more than the characters), the following paragraphs make
increasing use of internal focalization, culminating in the use of FID two
pages later when we witness K. observing the village inn: “So there was even
a telephone in this village inn? They were certainly well equipped.” (3)9 As
the novel progresses, K.’s thoughts and perceptions—sometimes rendered in
the form of indirect thought re-presentation, sometimes through the use of
FID—circle increasingly around the unknown castle and its employees,
which K. supposes to be engaging in a fight with himself. After an initial
telephone conversation confirms K.’s claim that he has been appointed as a
surveyor to the castle, he considers his position in the following terms:
K. listened intently. So the Castle had appointed him land surveyor. On the one
hand, this was unfavorable, for it showed that the Castle had all necessary informa-
tion about him, had assessed the opposing forces, and was taking up the struggle
with a smile. On the other hand, it was favorable […]. (5)10
As K.’s position is confirmed by the castle, the initial zero focalization is
replaced with an almost consistently fixed internal focalization, which is only
interrupted by the direct speech of other characters and by Olga’s longer
intradiegetic narration about her sister Amalia. It is as if in order to be able
to function as a focalizer, K. has to receive proof of his status and person-
hood from the castle.
Apart from the first paragraph, no uncontroversial narratorial reference
to the castle exists in the novel; the castle is always seen from K.’s perspec-
tive, or else is subject to interpretation by K. or through the direct speech of
other characters. That the second description of the castle is already based
on K.’s perception—that it is internally focalized—is made obvious by the
verb “seemed” (“schien”), as well as by the use of deictics (“here”/“hier”)
relative to K.’s viewing position, thus establishing K. as the “deictic center”
of focalization (see Jahn 1996: 256).
Now he saw the Castle above, sharply outlined in the clear air and made even
sharper by the snow, which traced each shape and lay everywhere in a thin layer.
Besides, there seemed to be a great deal less snow up on the hill than here in the vil-
lage […]. Here the snow rose to the cottage windows only to weigh down on the
low roofs, whereas on the hill everything soared up, free and light, or at least
seemed to from here. (Kafka 1998: 7)11
9 “Wie, auch ein Telephon war in diesem Dorfwirtshaus? Man war vorzüglich eingerichtet.”
(Kafka 1994: 11)
10 “K. horchte auf. Das Schloß hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt. Das war einerseits
ungünstig für ihn, denn es zeigte, daß man im Schloß alles Nötige über ihn wußte, die Kräfte-
verhältnisse abgewogen hatte und den Kampf lächelnd aufnahm. Es war aber andererseits auch
günstig […].” (Kafka 1994: 13)
11 “Nun sah er oben das Schloß deutlich umrissen in der klaren Luft und noch verdeutlicht durch
den alle Formen nachbildenden, in dünner Schicht überall liegenden Schnee. Übrigens schien
oben auf dem Berg viel weniger Schnee zu sein als hier im Dorf […]. Hier reichte der Schnee
bis zu den Fenstern der Hütten und lastete gleich wieder auf dem niedrigen Dach, aber oben
auf dem Berg ragte alles frei und leicht empor, wenigstens schien es so von hier aus.” (Kafka
1994: 16)
Given the consistency of focalization, however, it is not surprising that it

develops in scope as the novel progresses; for while the initial chapters re-
volve around the visual perception of the castle, K. later becomes increas-
ingly preoccupied not with what is actually seen, but with speculation about
the unknown inner workings of the castle and its presumed perception of
himself. However, K.’s interpretations do not always adequately represent
the fictional world, a fact that can be gleaned from the readings he gives to a
number of letters he receives from the castle.12 Since the narrator quotes
these missives in their entirety, the reader can easily compare the letters
themselves with K.’s interpretation of them. For example, the first letter
which K. receives from the hands of the messenger Barnabas confirms that
he has been accepted into castle service, although it does not specify what
that service is. It then assigns K. to the “village chairman” (23; “Dorfvorste-
her”, 33) as his immediate superior, and asks him to convey messages to the
castle exclusively through Barnabas. K. interprets this rather vague message
as offering him a choice between two options: being a subordinate “village
worker” (24; “Dorfarbeiter”, 34) who is connected to the castle in appear-
ance only, or else being a village worker in appearance only, but in reality
entirely determined by the messages delivered by Barnabas. K. then decides
in favor of the second possibility, even though the letter had named no such
alternative (see Alt 2005: 598). In view of this and of other highly fanciful
interpretations of the castle’s messages and actions, the reader is led to
strongly doubt K.’s impression that while he is watching the castle, the castle
is actively watching back, thereby confirming his standing on equal terms.
K.’s character focalization in the latter parts of the novel, then, does not
constitute a perception of what is, but a model-building of what might be or
can be inferred from what is, corresponding to Manfred Jahn’s concept of
“imaginary perception” (Jahn 1996: 263). This has two possible conse-
quences. On the one hand, K. emerges as a highly unreliable focalizer and
quite a shady character to boot—we cannot even be sure that he is, indeed, a
surveyor at all. Since the decision to reproduce the castle letters verbatim is
the narrator’s, the contrast between the quoted letters and K.’s interpretation
suggests that the narrator aims to show us how unreliable K.’s focalization is.
On the other hand, as Peter-André Alt has pointed out, K.’s focalization also
has the opposite effect: the castle is constituted less as a real place with
clearly delineated contours than as a distanced focusing point for K.’s gaze,
whose main effect is to unsettle the statements that the narrator makes about
reality (Alt 2005: 592). Although the narrative situation is based on a combi-
nation of the narratorial and focalizing positions, an ironic distance is thus
created between the two. Bearing in mind the different ontological status of
12 Michael Müller (2008: 524) raises a similar argument.

the heterodiegetic narrator, however, it would appear that the ultimate irony
is the narrator’s, at the expense of the focalizer’s credibility.
3. Cinematic and VO Narration in Michael Haneke’s Das Schloss
How can the combination of narration and focalization in Kafka’s novel be

translated into the medium of film? Before addressing that question, we first
need to identify what forms, if any, focalization can generally take in a fea-
ture film. Summarizing Edward Branigan’s theory of subjectivity in film
(1984), Andringa et al. (2001) suggest four techniques through which focal-
ization may operate in film: (1) through so-called point of view (POV) shots,
which show the focal character perceiving or thinking something; (2)
through lighting and music; (3) through image sequences interrupting the
film action to represent a character’s thoughts; (4) or by means of a voice
over (VO). Voice over, however, has also been identified as an aspect of film
narration—indeed, Andringa et al. identify the VO in the film they analyze as
an overt level 2 narrator, as opposed to the covert cinematic level 1 narrator
(see Andringa et al. 2001: 136, table 8.1).13 Seymour Chatman similarly dis-
tinguishes between a “showing” narrator—the cinematic narrator—and a
second-order “telling” (VO) narrator who “may be one component of the total
showing, one of the cinematic narrator’s devices” (Chatman 1990: 134). At
the same time, however, Chatman also names VO as a possible element of
focalization (“filter,” in Chatman’s terminology), which may be effected on
screen “through eyeline match, shot-countershot, the 180-degree rule, voice-
off or voice-over [or] plot logic” (157). If the same techniques can be con-
structed as either narration or focalization, it seems that the two are even
more difficult to tell apart in film than in literature and that any differentia-
tion between them is almost entirely a result of the viewer’s interpretation.14
Nevertheless, I will try to offer some insight into the differences between
film narration and focalization through a reading of well-known Austrian
film director Michael Haneke’s adaptation of The Castle.
The film script faithfully reproduces Kafka’s chapter division, although
the scenes themselves are often shortened so as to concentrate on the (per-
ceived) essence of a chapter. Scenes are frequently separated by cut to black,
giving the film a fragmentary and jerky appearance and subverting the sort of
identificatory and illusionistic viewing attitude promoted by mainstream Hol-
lywood cinema. A further disillusionment is effected by the film’s setting.
While Kafka’s novel was set in a claustrophobic universe bearing little or no
13 On VO narration, see also Kozloff (1988).

14 Deleyto draws the more radical conclusion that “focalisation and narration … exist at the same
level, and simultaneously in film” (1991: 165).
relation to any specific time and place, the film set suggests a setting close to
the present, and in an Alpine region. Props, interior furnishings and charac-
ters’ clothes seem to derive from the 1970s, but their used and dated look
suggests a later time, probably the 1990s when the film was made. On the
side of sound, we find repeated allusions to Alpine folk music, both canned
(from a radio at the inn) and live (peasants playing dance music in the inn).
And while most of the actors speak little to no dialect, a number of minor
characters such as Pepi (played by Birgit Linauer), Momus (Paulus Manker)
and the village chairman (Nikolaus Paryla) exhibit traces of Austrian intona-
tion, and Hans Brunswick (Conradin Blum) of Swiss dialect. However, these
hints remain vague and are of a generically Alpine rather than a specifically
regional nature. In the film, as in the novel, no precise location can be as-
signed to the village and castle, and this also serves to reflects K’s uncertain
social status and underdetermined identity (Alt 2005: 594).
Rather than suggesting a precise time and location, the film’s setting cre-
ates allusions to a specific theater aesthetic that is associated with the well-
known Swiss director Christoph Marthaler and with stage designer Anna
Viebrock, with whom Marthaler frequently cooperates (for example in Die
Stunde Null oder die Kunst des Servierens, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg,
1995; Kasimir und Karoline, also Deutsches Schauspielhaus, 1996). Characteris-
tic for this aesthetic is the use of dated interiors, of Alpine folk music, and of
grotesque acting. These elements unite to create an effect of spectatorial
distance and disillusionment in the tradition of Brechtian epic drama.
Haneke, too, introduces many grotesque and slapstick effects especially
through the comical and childish nature of the two “assistants” (“Gehilfen”).
The actors’ clothing, with the men’s long johns and Frieda’s wrinkled stock-
ings, is used to great comical effect in the film’s frequent dressing and un-
dressing scenes, which also serve to show off the actors’ pale and distinctly
unfit-looking physiques. Another source of humor can be found in the fre-
quent close-ups focusing on the actors’ highly expressive mimicry. This con-
cerns especially the assistants (played by Frank Giering and Felix Eitner),
Frieda (Susanne Lothar) or Barnabas (André Eisermann), whereas lead actor
Ulrich Mühe, who had already worked with Haneke in two earlier films
(Benny’s Video and Funny Games), plays K. with a markedly deadpan facial
expression that adds to the character’s enigmatic nature. Finally, the frequent
repetition of scenes showing K. walking, stumbling or running through the
snow-covered village emphasizes the cyclical nature of Kafka’s tale while
also adding to the slapstick effect of the film.
Together, all of these aspects—mise en scène, setting, lighting, sound—
constitute the cinematic narration. However, the film also employs a second-
level, overt VO narrator. The VO, spoken by Udo Samel, begins with the
novel’s first sentence and recurs throughout the film, faithfully quoting the
narrative usually one or two sentences at a time. Indirect speech and repre-
sentation of thought in the novel are sometimes translated into dialogue in
the film, but on the whole, the film is very faithful to the novel’s original
text, with Kafka’s language creating an estranging effect when combined
with the semi-contemporary visual setting. VO narration usually bridges
passages with little or no dialogue. Sometimes, however, VO also overlays
spoken dialogue and in one central scene entirely disrupts the cinematic nar-
ration. This concerns K.’s first love scene with Frieda on the floor of the
“Bridge Inn” (“Brückenhof”), which is rendered exclusively in VO narration
with almost no visual support—what is shown is not the couple making
love, but only a still image of Klamm’s illuminated window (one of the castle
bureaucrats residing at the inn).
Like the fragmentary novel, the film ends abruptly. In fact, Michael
Haneke was probably drawn to this fragmentary novel because of his own
“fragmentary aesthetics” (Metelmann 2003: 35). However, the visual compo-
sition closes with a repetition of K. walking through the snow that is at odds
with the VO narration describing a scene in one of the villagers’ houses.
Indeed, film scholar Jörg Metelmann points out that the “obvious and clearly
audible separation of sound and image” is frequently used in Haneke’s “aes-
thetics of deviation” as a “means of criticizing the characters and their ac-
tions” (2003: 154-156, my translation). In this and other aspects Haneke is
closely influenced by Brecht (Metelmann 2003: 156), a heritage which also
accounts for his visual similarities to Marthaler and Viebrock. Haneke’s ex-
plicit refusal to psychologically motivate his characters’ actions, which de-
rives from Brecht’s concept of epic theater (Metelmann 2003: 159), could
also account for his lack of attention to the focalizing FID passages in
Kafka’s novel.
The film’s VO narration mostly concerns those passages of the novel
that are not focalized (zero focalization, the narrator knows more than the
characters). Sometimes, the VO refers to K.’s auditory impressions, but
rarely to his visual perception. The novel’s many instances of FID, especially
the passages interpreting letters that are so central to the relation between
narration and focalization, are left out entirely. The film’s use of VO, then, is
not concerned with focalization, but with narration, and the other possible
techniques for rendering focalization described by Branigan and Andringa et
al.—POV shot, sound and lighting, and the insertion of image sequences
rendering thought—are also left unexploited. Ulrich Mühe’s deadpan acting
does not allow for the mimicking of point of view; the film’s sound and
lighting function as part of a Brechtian aesthetic which creates the furthest
possible distance between the audience and characters; no image sequences
occur. An alternative possible source of focalization is the focus on K. cre-
ated by the systematic use of shot/countershot between K. and his visual
field. This may suggest some limited degree of internal focalization; surpris-
ingly, however, the castle is never shown in the film and its description is not
quoted in the VO narration. Focalization as a means of psychological insight
is thus switched off, and the psychologically or psychoanalytically motivated
conflict between K. and the castle is diminished. The limited use of internal
focalization is restricted to rendering literal point of view, and a small por-
tion of K.’s view at that, with the looming castle cut out completely.
4. Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta:

Feigned Narration and the Reality of Dreams
Where Kafka’s Castle combined an impersonal, covert, heterodiegetic narra-

tor with a fixed internal focalization, Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta,
written thirteen years earlier, is relayed by an overt homodiegetic narrator,
the novel’s eponymous protagonist who is supposed to have written this
novel in diary style. No independent focalization can be detected in the
novel. This raises the thorny problem of whether narrators can (theoretically,
narratologically) be focalizers. Answers to this question that have so far been
suggested range from Patrick O’Neill’s claim that “the narrator is always a focal-
izer, having no choice whether to focalize or not […] only how to do so”
(O’Neill 1994: 90), through James Phelan’s more moderate assertion that
“narrators can be focalizers” (Phelan 2001), to Seymour Chatman’s and Ge-
rald Prince’s vehement denial: “the narrator—even an intradiegetic and homo-
diegetic one […]—is never a focalizer” because “s/he is never part of the diege-
sis she presents […] s/he is an element of discourse and not story […] whereas
focalization is an element of the latter” (Prince 2001: 46; see Chatman 1990:
144-145).
However, while the distinction between narration and focalization is
sound in theory, my analysis will show that it is not always easy to uphold in
an analysis. Narrator and focalizer are messily intertwined especially in intra-
diegetic-homodiegetic narrative (as indeed Prince’s own assertion above sug-
gests). For instance, Prince’s absolute distinction between story and dis-
course fails to take into account the specifics of retrospective narrative, in
which the same character can function as a character in the story (in the
past), and as the narrator, i. e. producer of discourse, in the present. This
means that a narrator (in the present) may rely on his own focalization (in
the past) (see Phelan 2001: 53). In fact, Seymour Chatman points out that
“[the] homodiegetic or first-person narrator did see the events and objects at
an earlier moment in the story, but his recountal is after the fact and thus a
matter of memory, not of perception” (1990: 144-145). In retrospective
homodiegetic narrative, therefore, narrator and focalizer, while functionally
distinct, coincide in the same person. The same may, however, also be true
of non-retrospective homodiegetic narrative, for example in introspective
diary writing, where the writer may rely on his or her own focalization at a
time close to, or sometimes coinciding with, the time of writing. Phelan con-
cludes that a human narrator “cannot report a coherent sequence of events
without also revealing his or her perception of those events” (2001: 57); I
shall take this assertion as a starting point for my discussion of focalization
and narration in Institute Benjamenta. A second point to bear in mind when we
turn to Walser’s novel in diary format is James Phelan’s reminder that treat-
ing narrators as potential focalizers enables us to think about an important
aspect of narration, namely “the self-consciousness of the narrator” (ibid.:
52). Clearly, the presentation of self-consciousness is central to diary writing,
and I will therefore attempt to clarify the different aspects of narration and
of focalization involved in it.
The extremely rudimentary plot of Institute Benjamenta can be summarized
in few words. The novel is set in Benjamenta’s Boys’ School, a school for
aspiring domestics in which nothing is taught, where the teachers sleep as if
petrified all day and the students waste whole days smoking in bed. Almost
the only activity at the school is the pupils’ constant spying on each other
and on their teachers; occasionally the protagonist takes strolls through the
unnamed modern metropolis where the novel is set (presumably Berlin), a
city that overwhelms the spectator with its manifold impressions. A position
as a servant, for which the school is supposed to prepare Jakob and which
Mr Benjamenta repeatedly promises him, never materializes. When Miss
Benjamenta, the school principal’s sister, dies, all the pupils are suddenly
given positions; only Jakob remains behind as a traveling companion for Mr
Benjamenta.
Like K. in The Castle, Jakob is a non-entity, possessed by a need to com-
pletely efface himself. As Rochelle Tobias explains, Walser’s protagonists are
generally “incapable of forming attachments or returning the affection di-
rected at them since they have no defining traits save that they mirror the
characters they meet” (Tobias 2006: 293). The enigmatic setting in Benja-
menta’s school thus mirrors the impenetrable character of the protagonist-
narrator. As a result, Jakob’s diary focuses less on Jakob’s own personal de-
velopment than on his relationships with other characters: on his interactions
with the Institute’s reclusive director, which has distinctly homoerotic under-
tones (e. g. Walser 1995: 87f./Walser 1985: 105), his budding love affair with
the director’s sister, Lisa (ibid.: 99f./120), and his relations with Kraus, the
institute’s model student who serves not only as Jakob’s antithesis or an-
tagonist in his love affair with Lisa Benjamenta, but also as a kind of doppel-
ganger (see Grenz 1974: 141-142; Greven 1978: 173; Tobias 2006: 299).
The almost complete lack of plot is compensated by Jakob’s rich inner

life, which produces dreams and fantasies that are increasingly disconnected
from reality. Jakob often likens his surroundings to fairytales or biblical sto-
ries. Some of these comparisons are simple fantasies of wish fulfillment,
such as his extended and repeated reflections on what he would do if he
were rich: “I would like to be rich, to ride in coaches and squander money.”
(Walser 1995: 5)15 Besides their obvious motivation as wish fulfillment, how-
ever, Jakob’s fantasies about being rich (see also Walser 1995: 61-63 /
Walser 1985: 75-77), or about being a war lord in the year 1400 (Walser
1995: 108-110), also serve the function of creating an alternative reality to
the boredom and frustration that characterize student life at the Institute. In
contrast to the wealth fantasies, which are usually narrated in the subjunctive,
the warlord story—although initially designated “imaginings” (90)—is ren-
dered in the indicative, and it is interesting to dwell a little on the function of
focalization in this extended fantasy. Jakob’s impressions of the dealings he
has with his generals are rich in detail and frequently refer to sense percep-
tions, which makes the reader temporarily forget the different ontological
status of these descriptions from those relating to his fellow students. While
the beginning and end of the passage foreground Jakob in his narratorial
role—with comments on the unreal status of his imaginations—the central
part of the sequence, therefore, highlights his role as a focalizer, and one
with a highly imaginative and speculative perception of his surroundings. To
be sure, Jakob is still the agent relating these fantasies and impressions. But if
we treat focalization as an interpretative rather than a textual category, there
are good reasons why we should experience Jakob more as a focalizer and
less as a narrator, and these have to do with his complete lack of agency in
his own fate. Not only does he consistently confuse dream and reality, he
also lacks insight and understanding of his own inner life, thereby becoming
“a mystery to myself” (5).
The most extended of Jakob’s dream sequences, and the one where
dream and reality most intermix, is the night scene in the darkened class-
room (81-85/97-103), in which he experiences being led by Miss Benjamenta
through “the vaults of poverty and deprivation” (83; “Gänge des Not-
Leidens und der furchtbaren Entbehrung”, 100) into the inner chambers of
the Institute, where the Benjamenta siblings reside and which only Kraus has
previously been allowed to penetrate. In contrast to Jakob’s impressions of
the metropolis and to his fantasies about being rich, this sequence is also
rendered in the indicative. However, Jakob stresses at the beginning that the
experience was “incomprehensible” and a “myster[y]” (81) and later sees it
dissolving into a “gluey and most unpleasant river of doubt” (85). After the
15 “Ich möchte gern reich sein, in Droschken fahren und Gelder verschwenden.” (Walser 1985: 7)
girl has disappeared, Jakob concludes that she was “the enchantress who had
conjured up all these visions and states” (ibid.). Afterwards, he expresses
regret over having given in to “wanton pleasures of easefulness” (ibid.;
“lüsterne Bequemlichkeit”, 103), belatedly suggesting that the dreamlike se-
quence may have been motivated by sexual desire for Miss Benjamenta. As
Rochelle Tobias correctly remarks, “[each] room is the translation of an alle-
gorical figure; each represents a particular phrase or mood as a physical envi-
ronment” (Tobias 2006: 302), and this suggests that the rooms materialize
Jakob’s feelings and emotions. Alternatively, however, the inner chambers
could equally be manifesting the Fräulein’s words, as Tobias also suggests
when she says: “Throughout the episode, the phrases that Fräulein Benja-
menta utters appear as diverse settings.” (Tobias 2006: 303) Because of its
dream logic, the passage lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations focus-
ing either on Jakob’s attachment to the Benjamentas or on the use of birth
metaphors (see Tobias 2006: 304).
In this and other passages, Jakob functions as a narrator insofar as he is
the transmitting agent of the narrative, but since what he transmits is almost
exclusively concerned with dreams and fantasies, it would appear difficult if
not impossible to separate the two acts of narrating and focalizing. Indeed,
different aspects of narration and focalization constantly blend into one an-
other, with Jakob expressing doubts about what sort of perception he is de-
scribing: Is he reporting on the state of affairs in the Institute Benjamenta,
for instance, or are these rather memories from the prep school he attended
in his home town? It is, moreover, not at all clear whether Jakob is here re-
porting an earlier perception, or whether the styling of sense impressions as
dreams and fairytales does not occur in the act of composing his diary, in
which case it would belong to the order of narration. We might, then, turn
once again to Manfred Jahn’s suggestion that there are different “windows of
focalization” in the house of fiction and describe Jakob’s role as that of a
narratorial (rather than reflector-mode) focalizer (Jahn 1996: 256-7). Or we
could employ James Phelan’s (2001) terminology and describe Institute Benja-
menta as a combination of two types of narration: narrator’s focalization and
voice, and character’s focalization and narrator’s voice (with ‘character’ refer-
ring to Jakob-as-experiencer, and ‘narrator’ to Jakob the diary-writer).
Phelan’s proposal has the advantage of enabling us to differentiate be-
tween Jakob as a character and Jakob as a diary writer. As Manfred Jahn has
pointed out, Genette’s question “who speaks?” inadequately captures the
narratorial function because it buries the narratologically relevant distinction
between speaker and writer (and thinker, in interior monologue) (Jahn 1996:
246). Jakob, of course, poses as a diary writer; the novel’s subtitle designates
it as a diary, and Jakob’s narration relies heavily on irony and word play,
thereby calling attention to the diary’s composition (Tobias 2006: 299).
However, a number of discrepancies raise suspicions that the book cannot

really be a diary, and have led to the novel’s interpretation as a feigned diary
(Gößling 1992: 170-179; Tobias 2006: 301-302). Among these are the intri-
cate structure with its repetition of leitmotifs and intertextual allusions to
Grimm’s fairytales and to biblical stories, and the fact that the diarist explic-
itly addresses such compositional aspects, for example when he writes
“Once again I must go back to the very beginning, to the first day.” (24; “Ich
muß noch einmal ganz zum Anfang zurückkehren”, 29). Furthermore, the
diarist seems to possess an overview over the unfolding of the story, includ-
ing events occurring later in the book, as when he writes “I shall have much
to say about Kraus.” (20; “Von Kraus werde ich sehr viel reden müssen”,
25).
Finally, these two statements suggest that Jakob is directing his diary
writing at an addressee other than himself—that he imagines, in other words,
a reader for his journal. Indeed, he frequently addresses a reader and specu-
lates how that reader will respond to his writing: “I must now report a matter
which will perhaps raise a few doubts.” (43; “Ich muß jetzt etwas berichten,
was vielleicht einigen Zweifel erregt”, 53), or he even uses direct forms of
address: “I’m gabbling somewhat again, aren’t I?” (87; “Ich schwatze wieder
ein wenig, nicht wahr?”, 105).
In light of these metaleptic deviations from the fiction of diary writing,
Rochelle Tobias has proposed reading the novel as a double fiction “in
which the diary of a student is enclosed within the diary of another person
bearing the same name as him” (Tobias 2006: 301). Tobias posits that this
makes Jakob simultaneously a homo- and a heterodiegetic narrator—a logi-
cal impossibility, because the two are ontologically incompatible positions. If
the diary is feigned, however, then why should we assume that it contains a
reliable narration? It makes much more sense to assume an unreliable
homodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator who fantasizes about attending a school
for domestics and produces a fake diary about these fantasies. In this inter-
pretation, there would be no character called Jakob, only a narrator who
produces a hypothetical narrative including a narratorial focalization of these
hypothetical events and their hypothetical perception.16—But how can such
a mind-bogglingly complex interweaving of narration and focalization ever
be translated into a feature film, and how have the film-makers interpreted
the novel’s juggling of dream and reality?
16 I use “hypothetical narration” in analogy to David Herman’s proposal of a “hypothetical focal-

ization” (Herman 2002: 303).
5. Focalization and Visual Distortion in

Institute Benjamenta or This Dream People Call Human Life
A novel without a plot, narrated by a protagonist with no defining personal-

ity, would in any case seem an odd choice for a film adaptation, but espe-
cially for a first feature film. However, the twin directors of Institute Benja-
menta or This Dream People Call Human Life, the brothers Stephen and Timothy
Quay, are known for their avant-garde films which consistently and system-
atically subvert normal viewing conventions. Indeed, the Quays seem to have
been drawn to the novel’s anti-narrative aspects, for the film focuses on the
dreaminess and ephemerality of Jakob’s sense impressions and on his rela-
tionships with other characters inside Benjamenta’s school, while the many
scenes where Jakob leaves the Institute and describes his impressions of
busy life in the modern metropolis are left out altogether. Without the realis-
tic elements of urban life to balance it off, the school interior merges seam-
lessly into a surreal or fantastic space. This fantastic interpretation of the
novel is supported through an anachronistic film aesthetic referring back to
the expressionist films of the 1920s, with the choice of black and white, the
exaggerated and pathos-laden gestures of the actors and the hints at inter-
and subtitles evoking the silent film of the 1910s and 20s. The film also inte-
grates elements from puppet and shadow theater and from animation film.
Through its recurrent use of self-reflective techniques and its highly un-
usual aesthetic, which is far removed from audience expectations gleaned
from realistic Hollywood movies, Institute Benjamenta self-consciously fore-
grounds the presence of a cinematic narrator. How, then, is Jakob’s dream-
like focalization conveyed in the film, and how does it relate to the cinematic
narrator? The first thing the spectator notices is that the fairytale world,
which Jakob experienced mainly in the metropolitan street life in the novel
and which was often characterized as unreal through the use of “as if” and
subjunctive clauses, now enters the school and is visualized as the intrusion
of a Grimm’s fairytale forest into the house. The reality status of this intru-
sion is much less certain than in the novel, where it is clearly marked as fan-
tasy or metaphor. Is the novel’s use of focalization—Jakob’s subjective per-
ception—translated, then, into narration (of a fictive reality)? I think not: the
fairytale forest retains a recognizable fantastic dimension. So it remains open
to interpretation whether the fairytale actually enters the house or whether
this is a result of Jakob’s distorted perception. For Jakob is either alone in
these scenes, so that his vision cannot be challenged by other characters, or
else he is together with Lisa Benjamenta, the object of his desire. But his
impressions are never intersubjectively confirmed by other students. It is
therefore impossible to ascertain whether the setting is supposed to be realis-

tic or whether it constitutes a visualization of Jakob’s thoughts and fanta-
sies—what Seymour Chatman has referred to as a “mindscreen” effect
(1990: 159). Thus, the mise-en-scène of those scenes where Jakob is alone in
front of the camera could constitute an effect of focalization.
The disorientation created by the film’s enigmatic visual setting and use
of chiaroscuro effects is heightened through visual distortions created by
filming through a goldfish glass or through uneven window panes. The
film’s foregrounding of setting, décor and props, with great attention to the
marginal, combines with an improvisational style that owes more to a sense
of musical rhythm than to the chronological unfolding of narrative. The
brothers Quay explain:
We demand that the decors act as poetic vessels […] . As for what is called the sce-
nario: at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to
be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations as though lying
in wait to trap the slightest fugitive “encounter.” (quoted in Buchan 1998: 7)
This lack of narrative embedding leaves the interpretation of the film’s visual
style open to the viewer. As Suzanne Buchan writes in an article about the
Quay brothers’ work: “Unencumbered by narrative, the viewer can descend
to various levels of bewilderment or enchantment.” (Buchan 1998: 4) Bu-
chan has named several techniques which the brothers use in order to dis-
turb the viewer’s experience of continuous space, especially the use of macro
lenses “which provide virtually no depth of field” or their landmark “fast
pan shift” or rapid camera movement within a continuous diegetic space,
which results in a flicker effect suggestive of spatial fluidity (ibid.: 9). More-
over, their use of “retroactive cutting,” i. e. cutting from a close-up view to a
more distant camera angle, reverses “expository conventions of narrative
continuity editing” and therefore also serves to strengthen the films’ non-
narrative aspects and to disorient viewers’ expectations (ibid.).
Where Walser’s novel played with the tension between the reality of met-
ropolitan life and Jakob’s dreamlike perception of it, and opposed the famil-
iar milieu of the modern metropolis with the strange setting inside Benja-
menta’s school, the film systematically cuts any ties to the viewer’s reality and
rigidly limits information about the strange, fantastic setting. This makes it
very difficult for viewers to formulate expectations about what is going to
happen and to make interpretative decisions about the status of what they
are seeing.
However, the viewer’s understanding is helped by the film’s fixed inter-
nal focalization through Jakob, whose perception of events remains a con-
stant point of reference. Frequently, Jakob’s role as focalizer is indicated
through POV shots which show him seeing something, often through the
use of optical devices, through windows, keyholes and the like. This might
lead us to conclude that other distorted views are also an effect of Jakob’s
focalization rather than of (cinematic) narration.
That Jakob functions as the film’s internal focalizer is also suggested by
the film’s use of VO. As in Haneke’s adaptation of The Castle, the VO pas-
sages in Institute Benjamenta are verbatim quotations from the novel. Unlike
the impersonal VO narration in Haneke’s film, however, the VO in Institute
Benjamenta is clearly attributable to the central character, Jakob: although the
words are spoken from the off, the camera circles around Jakob—an unusual
form of POV shot which suggests that he is to be identified as the source of
these words. However, the viewer does not at the same time see Jakob’s
mouth speaking these words. This creates the impression that the VO ex-
presses Jakob’s thoughts and is therefore an effect of focalization, whereas
the VO’s source—the written diary in Walser’s novel—belongs, of course, to
the order of narration.
Institute Benjamenta, then, expresses focalization in a number of ways, in-
cluding POV shot, VO, and the use of mindscreen sequences. However,
what does and does not constitute focalization in this film is in effect an
interpretative decision, as evidenced by the fact that the fairytale forest
scenes which I have read as mindscreen sequences (and therefore as focaliza-
tions) have been interpreted as the depiction of a strange parallel world in
the fantasy genre (and thus as narration) by most of the film’s reviewers.
6. Conclusion
Various assumptions circulate around the possible relations between narra-

tion and focalization. By comparing two internally focalized literary narra-
tives, I have shown that there is a fairly straightforward distinction between
narration and focalization in heterodiegetic narrative, but that such a distinc-
tion is considerably more difficult to draw in homodiegetic narrative. Much
of this difficulty rests on the fact that the distinction between the two agents
is not a property of the text but constitutes an interpretation of the reader’s,
with different texts leaving more or less scope for such interpretation. In
Kafka’s Castle, I have identified strong and prominently placed clues that the
narrator’s window of focalization (which includes a description of the castle)
is distinct from that of the focal character, K. (who cannot see the castle and
is later surprised to hear of its existence). From the beginning of the novel,
then, readers are made aware of K.’s limited perspective; in later parts of the
novel, the narrator’s verbatim quotation of the letters K. receives is not rec-
oncilable with K.’s interpretation of these letters, suggesting that K. is to be
regarded as an unreliable focalizer ironically presented by the narrator.
Walser’s Institute Benjamenta leaves a considerably wider scope for inter-

preting the relation between narration and focalization, as evidenced by the
divergent readings given by Walser scholars, which themselves depend con-
siderably on the concept of focalization employed. My own interpretation of
Jakob is that of an unreliable homodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator who fanta-
sizes about attending a school for domestics and produces a fake diary about
these fantasies. According to this reading, there is no character called Jakob,
only a narrator who produces a hypothetical narrative including a narratorial
focalization of a series of hypothetical events and their hypothetical percep-
tion. In both novels, character focalization (in Institute Benjamenta, hypotheti-
cal character focalization) is embedded in a higher-order, narratorial (window
of) focalization, suggesting that focalizers cannot be narrative agents on a par
with narrators, since focalization is always to some extent intermingled with,
and dependent on, narration.
In an article entitled “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpreta-
tion,” Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (2003: 215) have argued that
narratology may serve as a heuristic for the interpretation of narrative texts if
it is neutral with regard to the interpretative framework, i. e. if it is usable in
conjunction with various approaches to interpretation.17 However, if narra-
tological concepts such as focalization and narration do not objectively de-
scribe narrative texts, but are themselves always already interpretations, they
cannot then provide a neutral basis for interpretation. This means that we
have to account for the construction of narrative agents by real readers
(rather than ideal or implied readers) much more closely than most narra-
tological frameworks have done to date. One notable exception is the theory
of psychonarratology proffered by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (2003:
2), who argue “that the forms of narrative discourse are only meaningful
when understood in the context of their reception” and that the narrator, as
well as other narrative agents, must be viewed as a reader construction (ibid.:
72).
The interpretative nature of narratological concepts becomes even more
obvious when employed in the context of film narrative, since narration as
well as focalization has to be inferred by film spectators to a greater degree
than by readers of literary narratives. Moreover, both concepts invariably
undergo great changes when applied to film. Whereas the narrator serves as
a source of spoken or written utterance—often, if not always, of an anthro-
pomorphized nature—in literary narrative, no single, unified or self-identical
source of utterance can be identified in film narrative. The concept of a
“cinematic narrator” remains a highly abstract construction that can never
coincide with any one character in the manner of homodiegetic literary nar-
17 See also Tom Kindt’s article in this volume.

rative. The identification of a film focalizer is, if anything, even more specu-
lative. The camera does not usually represent the visual perspective of a focal
character but that of the cinematic narrator; nor does film easily lend itself to
the representation of cognitive processes. So-called POV shots, which show
a focal character thinking or perceiving something, may be understood as
either narration or focalization. The use of VO, which has been suggested as
another source of focalization, remains at best an auxiliary construction and
one that can, again, be constructed either as narration or as focalization. Not
only is the identification of narrative agents in film narratives an interpreta-
tive act, it also has far-ranging consequences for how the fictional world is
interpreted. Thus, depending on whether we understand the POV shots in
Institute Benjamenta as narration or focalization, the fairytale forest can be as-
signed two ontologically distinct interpretations, either as a real forest in a
fantasy setting, or as Jakob’s subjective imagination within a more realistic
setting.
The application of narratological concepts to film thus remains some-
what speculative. Furthermore, it bears repeating that terms like ‘narration’
and ‘focalization’ describe distinctly different phenomena in film and in tex-
tual narrative. The great differences between literary and film narration and
focalization suggest that narratological concepts are not neutral categories,
but media-dependent; as Fotis Jannidis (2003: 50) has written, “narrative
should always be treated as something anchored in a medium,” making ‘nar-
ratology’ “a collective term for a series of specialized narratologies and not a
self-sufficient metascience of its own”.
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Rodopi, p. 189-202.
SANDRA HEINEN
(Wuppertal)
The Role of Narratology

in Narrative Research across the Disciplines
1. The Narrative Turn in the Humanities and the Social Sciences
It has been repeatedly remarked that narrative research is no longer confined

to literary studies but has gained great currency in many other disciplines
within the humanities and social sciences, ranging from cultural and media
studies to linguistics, to historical theory and historiography, to anthropol-
ogy, philosophy, theology, psychology, pedagogy, political science, medicine,
law and economics.1 The rising tide of narrative research is a direct conse-
quence of an altered conception of narrative, which is no longer considered
to be merely a literary genre, but instead raised to the status of “a basic hu-
man strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman
et al. 2005: ix), “a mode [which] is alive and active as a cultural force [and
which] constitutes a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us
to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events
taking place in it” (Bal 2002: 10).
If there “is nothing in narrative’s intrinsic form, nothing in its inherent
structural or textual properties [...], that can be used to separate fictive from
non-fictive stories”, but “it is, rather, the different functions they perform,
manifested in their different claims about their connection to the world and
the web of responses to these claims, that create the distinction” (Kreiswirth
2000: 314), then it seems only natural that the heightened attention paid to
narrative in the different disciplines should result in a fruitful interdiscipli-
nary exchange, in which narratology, which is concerned with ‘the way narra-
tive works’—i. e. its defining constituents, the processes of its production
and reception or its specific function—might play a pivotal role.
And indeed, “narratology is increasingly appealed to as a master disci-
pline” (Fludernik 2005: 47) and it is ascribed potential to allow for truly in-
terdisciplinary research. Yet, this claim is only minimally reflected in the
1 See for example Kreiswirth (1995; 2000; 2005), Mishler (1995), Herman (1999b), Nünning/
Nünning (2002b: 8ff.), and Fludernik (2005a: 46ff.).
194 Sandra Heinen
practice of narrative research and the growing interest in narrative and story-
telling across the disciplines has certainly not led to a convergence of theo-
retical frameworks and methodological approaches. Since, as Mieke Bal
(2002: 11) puts it, “[s]imply borrowing a loose term here and there [will] not
do the trick of interdisciplinarity”, the assumptions about narrative research’s
interdisciplinarity are challenged by disciplinary boundaries determining the
research actually undertaken.
Surveys of the various academic approaches to narrative beyond litera-
ture have already been proposed by Barry (1990), Mishler (1995), Kreiswirth
(2005) and Hyvärinen (2006a). Unlike their classifications, which try to en-
compass the whole range of narrative research in the wake of the narrative
turn,2 I will focus in my discussions primarily on those approaches which
explicitly make use of theoretical concepts developed within narratology.
The application of this criterion reduces the number of relevant approaches
considerably, since, as Kreiswirth (2005: 381) remarks pointedly, “just as
traditional narratology neglected the alethic potential of narrative, history,
law or medicine’s attempt to scrutinise story qua story has, until very re-
cently, neglected practically everything else.”
The term ‘narratology’, it has to be added, is outside its academic field of
origin applied to a variety of phenomena and is thus, not a reliable indicator
of the actual nature of an approach. To give just a few examples of—from a
literary narratologist’s perspective—obvious misnomers: Posner (1997a)
defines “legal narratology” as the writing of didactic law fiction by professors
of law. When Wood (2005) writes about “interventional narratology” he is
simply making the case for physicians’ narrative reconstruction of their pa-
tients’ history of illness to account for their individual experiences. Schütt
(2003) equates narratology and storytelling, which he defines as a managerial
method which analyses existing ‘stories’ in an organization and then devel-
ops and circulates new, alternative stories containing a message the manager
wants to convey.
A definition of ‘narratology’, which would be accepted by everyone,
does—particularly in the wake of narratology’s many expansions (see Her-
man 1999a; Nünning/Nünning 2002a; Meister 2005)—not even exist in
literary studies. Most recently this has been demonstrated by the controver-
sial contributions to a volume with the programmatic title What is Narratol-
ogy? (Kindt/Müller 2003a): Whereas Kindt/Müller (2003b) and Meister
(2003) favour a very restrictive use of the term narratology, Nünning (2003)
suggests a differentiating, yet much broader conceptualization of different
2 The title of Barry’s article—“Narratology’s Centrifugal Force”—is therefore misleading: he uses

the term ‘narratology’ in a very broad sense denoting any form of literary narrative studies.
Narrative Research across the Disciplines 195
forms of narratologies usually subsumed under the heading of postclassical

narratology.3
In this broader understanding, postclassical narratology has itself devel-
oped into “an inherently interdisciplinary project” (Herman 1999b: 20) by
turning to other disciplines in order to develop hypotheses about narrative
which depart programmatically from narratology’s earlier focus on textual
features. Particularly the findings from research on natural and non-literary
story-telling are increasingly incorporated into narratology in order to refine
or redefine its categories and assumptions. Prime examples are, of course,
the approaches put forward among others by Manfred Jahn, David Herman
and Monika Fludernik, often subsumed under the term ‘cognitive narratol-
ogy’.4 As Fludernik (2005: 47) holds, the “cognitivist paradigm shift could
thus [even] pave the way for a closer companionship of narratology with the
empirical sciences”.5 A case in point is the study of Bortolussi and Dixon
(2003: 35), which follows an empirical approach to the reception of narrative
in order to “understand the psychological processing of narrative form” and
amend for narratology’s “failure to make a clear distinction between the text
and its formal description on one hand, and the reader and the reading pro-
cess on the other.” (Ibid.: 31)
Although the borders of the field of ‘narratology’ are, thus, highly con-
tested and notoriously fuzzy, I will for pragmatic reasons in the following
survey of narratology’s application to non-fictional texts across the disci-
plines apply the term ‘narratology’ to any kind of narrative theory which has
noticeable roots in classical narratology6. This does not per se amount to an
exclusion of the so-called postclassical narratologies, which, in one way or
other, also refer back to classical narratology. The actual reception of literary
narratology in non-literary disciplines, though, pays hardly any attention to
the more recent developments of postclassical narratologies.
3 See also Nünning’s chapter in this volume, which is a revised version of his earlier argument in
Kindt and Müller’s volume.
4 See, for example, Fludernik (1996), Jahn (1997), Herman (2002) and Herman (2003). See also
Fludernik’s and Herman’s contributions to this volume.
5 Fludernik’s contribution to this volume demonstrates what such a companionship might look
like, when she combines methods of corpus linguistics with the broader framework of narratol-
ogy. A similar approach is followed by Herman (2005).
6 Classical Narratology is usually associated with the theories of Roland Barthes, Seymour
Chatman, Jonathan Culler, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, Gerald Prince, Tzvetan Todorov or
Claude Bremond—to name but the most prominent theorists.
196 Sandra Heinen
2. Interdisciplinary Applications of Narratology
The attempts to apply narratological theory to non-literary narratives are—in

the huge heap of narrative research—few and far between. My main interest
is to outline what happens to narratology if it is imported into disciplines
concerned with non-literary and non-fictional narratives. In my categoriza-
tion I distinguish three different types, which differ first of all with regard to
their chief research aim, i. e. with regard to their motivation to engage in a
narratological analysis of their object of study. Not surprisingly, these three
types of applied narratology mirror the existing types of narrative research in
the broader sense.7
Not included into the proposed typology are explicitly intermedial ap-
proaches, because firstly these adaptations of narratology are discussed else-
where in this volume8. Secondly, I think the difficulties which the develop-
ment of e. g. a specific film narratology is facing are of a very different, much
more specialised kind than those which the applications of narratology in the
social sciences or law and medicine are trying to come to terms with. The
inclusion of intermedial approaches would therefore have demanded a much
more complex description than can possible be given here. Nevertheless, it
goes without saying that a more comprehensive and detailed survey of the
use of narratology across the disciplines would have to include intermedial
narratologies as well.
2.1 Understanding the “Homo Narrans”
The assumption that storytelling is an essential human activity necessary to

make sense of the world and one’s life has proliferated research projects in
many disciplines of the social sciences attempting to further the understand-
ing of the narrative process.9 The objects of this branch of narrative research
are mostly ‘natural’, i. e. spontaneous narratives elicited in interviews or con-
7 It is obvious that the approaches’ conceptual interest is neither the only difference between
them nor the only possible criterion for a typological arrangement. The decision to privilege
one (pivotal) criterion was made for the sake of argumentational lucidity. Other characteristics
of the different approaches will be pointed out in the course of the description.
8 See the contributions by Lippert, Meelberg, Verstraten and Hallet in this volume. On interme-
dial narratology see also Ryan (2004; 2005), Wolf (2003; 2005), and Jannidis (2003: 50) who ar-
gues that “a media-independent concept of narrative is nothing more than a marginally useful
hypostatized abstraction” and contests the idea of “narratology as a medium-independent meta-
science” (ibid.: 38).
9 See for example Jerome Bruner’s influential research on the narrative mode of thought and his
claim that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the
form of narrative” (Bruner 1991: 4).
versations. The form and focus of the analysis depends as much on the spe-
cific research questions as on the researchers’ disciplinary background. In-
terpretations may be supported by quantifiable data or by exemplary analysis,
but as a general tendency it can be held that methodological guidelines in the
social sciences aspire to be more rigorously ‘scientific’ than those in the hu-
manities.
Sociolinguistic discourse analysis shall here serve as an example of the
type of narrative research in the social sciences which contributes to a more
detailed understanding of the way narrative works. In its analyses, the socio-
linguistic approach naturally pays particular attention to the linguistic fea-
tures to be found in storytelling, while literary narratology usually plays no
significant role:
[...] social scientists [and among them sociolinguists] look at the theoretical and ter-
minological apparatus put forward by narratologists in disbelief and ask themselves:
so what? How does that help us find out how narratives work in everyday life, what
they mean to people, how people employ narrative and to what ends? (Mildorf
2008: 43)
Narratological tools are, thus, considered by most social scientists to be sim-
ply irrelevant for answering the questions they are concerned with. It is
therefore not surprising that most attempts to apply narratological categories
to a (socio-)linguistic analysis of natural narratives were made by scholars
who have a background in both literary studies and (socio-)linguistics: David
Herman, Monika Fludernik or Jarmila Mildorf. It seems that only through
their first-hand knowledge of more than one discipline are they able to over-
come the mutually existing prejudices.
In some cases, an application of narratological concepts to natural narra-
tives proceeds surprisingly smoothly, as in Mildorf (2006). In this study Mil-
dorf analyses oral narratives of general practitioners who are talking about
their professional experience with domestic violence. With her application of
narratological concepts to the GP’s accounts Mildorf intends to achieve “a
more systematic investigation into oral narratives of personal experience”
(ibid.: 44) than would be possible by a more conventional sociolinguistic
approach to the empirical material. And indeed, her exemplary analysis of
focalization and the use of double deictic ‘you’ in the GP’s narratives is very
convincing: Mildorf can demonstrate how focalization is used for dramatic
purposes and confers authority on the narrator. A narrator’s frequent use of
the second person singular is shown to have a double function which be-
comes evident once the narratological concept of the double deictic ‘you’ is
drawn on. Through the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’—instead of ‘I’—,
the story-teller can simultaneously distance himself from his own personal
self on the level of the storyworld and “align the interviewer with his view-
point through involvement and discursive inclusion on the level of the inter-
198 Sandra Heinen
view during which the narrative was told” (ibid.: 57). While the narratological
concept imparts a special susceptibility to this double function of distancing
and bonding, according to Mildorf (ibid.), “in a general content analysis ‘you’
would at best be recognised as generic ‘you’”.
While these exemplary results suggest that the literary categories are un-
restrictedly suitable for an analysis of non-literary narratives and that no
compatibility problems ensue, Mildorf explores not only the possibilities but
also “the limits of a cross-disciplinary narratology” in a more recent publica-
tion (Mildorf 2008: 280, my emphasis). While the possibilities of the cross-
disciplinary application of narratological concepts lie above all in the opening
up of a new perspective (in this case: the representation of the consciousness
of another person) and in the provision of a methodological framework (the
mixing of the narrator’s voice and a character’s perspective as well as the
distinction between source, self and pivot in free indirect discourse), the
‘limits’ become apparent in the actual analysis. In oral narratives thought
representation relies on other techniques than in literature, but the narrators
do not forego the construction of other people’s interiority. Whereas the
literary device of free indirect discourse is rarely to be found in natural narra-
tives, constructed dialogues can serve a similar function: “Story-tellers use
direct speech and/or thought in order to make the people they present in
their narratives act out their ‘inner worlds’ to the recipient of their stories
[...]” (ibid.: 297). Since narrators of natural narratives can thus represent
other people’s consciousness without having to rationalise their insight, Mil-
dorf suggests the “re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictional-
ity and truth-commitment”, which are generally used to distinguish factual
from fictional narratives, “in the direction of greater flexibility” (ibid.: 280).
It is not entirely clear whether the term ‘cross-disciplinary narratology’ in
Mildorf’s usage refers to a theory of narrative whose applicability is not re-
stricted by disciplinary boundaries—or whether it refers in a somewhat nar-
rower sense to the application of narratological concepts to non-literary
story-telling. Her general argument suggests the latter since both her contri-
butions fall into this category. In contrast, David Herman’s many studies in
the field of narrative theory have come to stand for the former understand-
ing of narratology. The fundamental interdisciplinarity of his approach can
be illustrated with regard to an article, in which he argues like Mildorf in
favour of the combination of narratology with sociolinguistics. But whereas
Mildorf advances a transfer of literary concepts into the non-literary disci-
pline, Herman (1999c) envisions a combination of the two scientific
branches by outlining an innovative integrated approach, which he terms
‘socionarratology’. Socionarratology, then, is not a form of one-way interdis-
ciplinarity, but a reciprocal exchange enriching both disciplines: not only is
the sociolinguistic approach provided with additional criteria for a descrip-
tion of oral narratives; narratological assumptions about narrative are also

revised in the process. Herman’s analysis highlights the interactional aspects
and context of narrating and, thus, describes narrative as a mode of social
interaction. Where classical narratology restricts itself to the description of
textual features, socionarratology takes up some of these ideas to investigate
“the communicative function of stories in conversational and other dis-
course contexts” (ibid.: 222). Despite allowing for a reciprocal communica-
tion between the disciplines, socionarratology’s main target is to enhance the
understanding of narrative and the narrating process independently of disci-
plinary interests.
2.2 Reaching Behind the Narrative
This is entirely different for the second type of narrative research, in which a
narrative approach is regarded as an “analytic or methodological instrument”
(Kreiswirth 2000: 300) to investigate a phenomenon of disciplinary interest.
Among the wide range of phenomena which have been investigated by this
kind of narrative research are psychological and physical illnesses, aspects of
social interaction, or, more generally speaking, motivations, intentions or
experience.
The advancement of this type of narrative research in social sciences
such as psychology, sociology or political science is linked to “the demise of
the positivist paradigm” (Lieblich et al. 1998: 1) in disciplines which tend to
dissociate themselves from the humanities through their insistence on a sci-
entific methodology. Within these disciplinary contexts, narrative research is
programmatically conceptualised as an alternative to traditional quantitative
methods, such as experiments, surveys or observations, which proponents of
a narrative approach consider too rigid to capture the complexity of human
experience. In contrast to quantitative methods narrative research usually
focuses on the individual, considers the cultural context and “advocates plu-
ralism, relativism, and subjectivity” (ibid.: 2). Yet, ‘narrative’ is rarely a theo-
retical concept, but “enters the discussion as an everyday term” (Hyvärinen
2006b: 26) and functions most often as a metaphor highlighting the con-
structive and subjective aspects of experience. The majority of narrative re-
searchers therefore holds a constructivist position, claiming that real-life
narratives don’t in any way mirror an existing internal or external reality;
instead it is assumed that the storytellers “construct their narratives and ret-
rospectively try to give sense to or make sense of actions and critical events”
(Søderberg 2003: 30).10
10 The irony of the fact that the growing interest in subjectivity in the social sciences resulted in
the adaptation of a literary concept which was “initially developed and theorized in terms of the
scientific rhetoric of structuralist narratology” (Hyvärinen 2006a: 1) and defined with the inten-
200 Sandra Heinen
According to Hyvärinen (2006b: 32), the prevalence of the “essentially

metaphoric approach to narrative has [...] radically narrowed the import of
theoretical and methodological ideas from literary theory of narrative”.11 In
consequence, narrative analysis in the social sciences is unlike literary narra-
tology not concerned with the form of narratives, but with their content. If the
form of natural narratives is considered, this happens mostly from a linguis-
tic—not from a narratological—vantage point. Yet, there are some isolated
attempts to apply narratological concepts as a methodology in the social sci-
ences, one of which is to be found in Anne-Marie Søderberg’s (2003) re-
search on international merging.12 It is a contribution to the scientific field of
organizational studies which investigate the way people act within organiza-
tions. While quantitative methods have dominated organizational research
for the most part of the 20th century, qualitative methods have become ac-
ceptable in the course of the cross-disciplinary narrative turn. Today, differ-
ent forms of narrative analysis are regularly applied in businesses, while the
analysis of stories circulating within an organization prevails. These narra-
tives are usually collected through ethnographical observations—conducted
for example by students ‘pretending’ to do an internment—or through nar-
rative interviews, during which the members of the organization are explic-
itly asked to tell their story of the organization as a whole or of a specific
event concerning the organization.13
Such an event is the takeover of a company by a foreign investor, as
happened to the Danish telecommunications company investigated by
Søderberg. Søderberg is mainly interested in the relationship between differ-
ent perspectives on the process of organizational change. For her, a narrative
approach is especially “well suited to give voice to a wide range of organiza-
tion “to objectify or formalise research” (Andrews et al. 2000: 2), has been noted repeatedly.
The simultaneous but opposing movements of literary studies towards objectivity on the one
hand and of the social sciences towards subjectivity on the other has met interpretations rang-
ing from the observation of an “integration of the sciences and the humanities” (ibid.) to the
evaluation as an “interdisciplinary phantas[m]” not advancing approximation but rather “symp-
tomiz[ing] each discipline’s secret interior wound” (Peters 2005: 448).
11 A curious counter example is Czarniawska (1997), who uses the term ‘narrative’ mostly in a
metaphorical sense, but nevertheless intends to structure her material by applying “interpreta-
tive devices borrowed from literary studies” (ibid.: 29) in order to focus “the form in which
knowledge is cast” (ibid.: 6). In practice, her narrative interpretations are an eclectic application
of literary terms lacking in precision, as when she describes organizational life as a drama, in
which actors take over roles or when she elaborates on the theatricality of leadership requiring a
successful performance and following a specified script.
12 See also Gertsen/Søderberg (2000), which is an early version of this study. On psychology’s
relationship to narratology see Bamberg (2005), Kraus (2005) and Weilnböck (2005).
13 A discussion of the methods applied is an integral part of any empirical study. Usually a great
stress is put on the avoidance of methods which might be seen as manipulating the interviewee.
Weilnböck’s contribution to this volume might serve as an example of this standardized meth-
odological discourse.
tional actors” (ibid.: 5), including those usually marginalised by the dominant
discourse. To capture the complex field of existing voices, Søderberg col-
lected narratives of the acquisition process in interviews with different mem-
bers of the company: the managing director, the shop steward, the human
resource manager and the project manager of the research department. To
account for the dynamics in identity construction processes she conducted
interviews annually over a period of six years.
Søderberg’s analysis of the narratives collected is highly regulated: As-
suming that there is “no structural difference between literary fiction and
organizational narratives” (ibid.: 12), she applies Greimas’ structuralist actan-
tial model to each of the stories she collected. The actantial model claims
that all stories follow the same pattern and Greimas distinguishes six basic
functions, which are the basis of all narratives: These six functions, or ac-
tants, as Greimas calls them, occur in the form of three binary oppositions:
There is the subject of a story and an object (the subject desires the object),
there is a power (which can be a powerful person or an abstract like fate) and
a receiver of the act of power. Finally there is a helper (someone or some-
thing supporting the subject’s quest) and an opponent (someone or some-
thing obstructing the subject’s quest).
Søderberg analyses the stories elicited in the telecommunications com-
pany by identifying these six actants in each story. Or in other words: She
looks at who or what is cast in each story as the subject, the power and the
receiver, and especially what in each story is described as the goal to be
achieved, what as an obstacle to this goal and what as a supporting factor.
The systematic analysis shows that the situation in the organization is per-
ceived quite differently from the different perspectives: Each interviewee
constructs, depending on his or her position in the company, a different plot
of the acquisition process. In the comparison between earlier and later narra-
tives, the application of Greimas’ model proves to be equally productive:
Changes occurring over time are systematically analyzed and thus the “dy-
namics of the […] individual employee’s sensemaking” convincingly cap-
tured (ibid.: 31).
Søderberg uses the narratological approach as a tool to identify interpre-
tations of a given situation, to give voice to individuals and to highlight the
complexity and dynamics of perspectives held in the organization. What she
investigates is not the process of meaning-making, but the resultant meanings,
which can be accessed through the stories in which they are embedded. As
Søderberg suggests, her research results can, then, be put to practical use:
they could, for example, show the way to a dialogue between different stake-
holders and provide instructive information for an organizations’ top man-
agement.
202 Sandra Heinen
Whereas Søderberg’s study is concerned with verbal texts, the concept of

narrative has occasionally been extended from the telling of actions and
events to actions and events themselves. In these cases human behaviour is con-
sidered to be meaningful only if it is conceptualized as part of a narrative
structure.14 This assumption has entered interdisciplinary narrative research
in various forms, one of which is the organization theorist Barbara
Czarniawska’s proposal of an “organization research that conceptualizes
organizational life as story making and organization theory as story reading”
(Czarniawska 1997: 26). Daniel Robichaud’s analysis of a municipal admini-
stration process can serve an example of such an approach, which like
Søderberg’s study makes use of Greimas’ actantial model. But unlike Søder-
berg, Robichaud employs it to analyse actions, in effect therefore he treats
“actions of organizational actors as if they were texts” (Robichaud 2003: 39).
His treatment of organizational actions as text is theoretically founded on the
idea that in any given society there are so-called ‘institutions of meaning’,
which provide a narrative context for our actions: “[T]he enactment of or-
ganizational actions [derives] its meaning from a larger institutional narrative
framework, simultaneously inherited from the past and re-created in situ by
the actors involved, who thus reproduce it.” (Ibid.: 44) Narratives can in this
context be defined as the “central form of the institutionalized practices and
scenes we construct and reproduce in the course of interacting, coordinating,
and organizing” (ibid.: 38).
The information which is necessary for a narrative analysis of organiza-
tional action is gathered by Robichaud through the observation of an organ-
izational operation, in this case a municipal council’s consultation of the citi-
zens. Greimas’ actantial model provides “the analytical language” (ibid.: 52)
that allows Robichaud to stress the recursive element in organizational ac-
tions: Although the city officials are doing something never done before,
they draw on a repertoire of “already institutionalized narratives of practices”
(ibid.: 53) which are providing a frame for their actions and thus render them
meaningful. What is narrative in Robichaud’s analysis, thus, are in contrast to
his own claim not so much the actions of the organizational members as the
underlying mental patterns guiding the actions. Given this result it is quite
surprising that Robichaud does not mention cognitive sciences or cognitive
narratology, since his idea of an ‘institutional narrative framework’ guiding
the actions of people, seems to be very closely related to the concept of cog-
14 This understanding of narrative is famously verbalised in the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s

much-quoted definition of man as “essentially a story-telling animal” (1981: 216). MacIntyre
maintains that “enacted dramatic narrative is the basic and essential characterization of human ac-
tions” (ibid., my emphasis). With his theory MacIntyre objects to those narrativists who consider
storytelling a second order activity which makes sense of the contingencies of life only in retro-
spect.
nitive scripts, i. e. mental representations of standard action sequences,

which facilitate a person’s orientation and acting even in unfamiliar situa-
tions.
Although both Søderberg and Robichaud are acutely aware that they are
exploring new research methodologies and although one of their goals is to
demonstrate the potential of narratological analysis for organization studies,
their investigations do not intend to shed light on the way narratives work,
nor are they interested in contributing to narratological theory production as
such. It is characteristic of this form of narratological application that con-
cepts of classical narratology are chosen, whereas more current trends of the
postclassical narratologies are rarely adopted.
2.3 Demythologizing ‘Factual’ Knowledge
This can with equal validity be said about the third type of narratological
research outside of literary departments. The research in this group also
stresses the constructive aspect of narrative, but evaluates it quite differently.
This has to do with the fact that the domains or disciplines turned to are
considered to deny or suppress their narrative elements in order to
strengthen their discursive authority. By bringing to light the discourses’
narrativity, the research of this third group questions their truth-claims and
with it the discourses’ authority.
Arguably, the most widely discussed critique of a discipline’s claim to
represent reality occurred in the field of history writing: Hayden White’s
metahistorical approach (1972; 1987) drew attention to the fact that histori-
cal writing can not maintain to provide a neutral account of the past in a
transparent text.15 Instead the selection and arrangement of events is always
steered by the interest of the scholar, who—according to White—falls back
upon a set of existing narrative patterns to present his story of the past.
White’s distinction between four tropes guiding the historian’s selection and
four corresponding modes of emplotment determining the narrative struc-
ture of the historiographic text has “inspired a new and challenging research
program focusing on the historical text as text” (Ankersmit 2005: 221).16
Because the emphasis on historiography’s narrativity often went hand in
hand with the implication that historical narratives are “verbal fictions, the
contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have
15 Even if White is often considered the “most influential contemporary historical narrativist”
(Ankersmit 2005: 220), he is of course not an isolated figure. As other important narrativists the
philosophers Arthur C. Danto and Louis O. Mink have to be mentioned at least in passing. See
also Canary and Kozicki (1978), and Ankersmit (1983).
16 Among these are also several specifically narratological perspectives: See Barthes (1981 [1967]),
Cohn (1990), Genette (1990), Jaeger (2002), Fulda (2005), Rüth (2005), and Julia Lippert’s con-
tribution to this volume.
204 Sandra Heinen
more in common with their counterparts in literature than with those in the
sciences” (White 1978: 82, emphasis original), many of these investigations
have been concerned with uncovering historiography’s strategies of sense-
making. Historical narrativism in the wake of White thus puts a strong stress
on the constructive (rather than reconstructive) aspects of historical narra-
tives and its diction is often characterised by a gesture of revelation, which
can already be found in Barthes (1981[1967]), who asks:17
Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks
onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical ‘science’, bound to
the unbending standard of the ‘real’, and justified by the principles of ‘rational’ ex-
position—does this form of narration really differ, in some specific trait, in some
indubitably distinctive feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic,
the novel, and the drama?
Barthes’ answer is, of course, that it doesn’t; that the discourse of history is
“in its essence [...] an imaginary elaboration” (ibid.: 16), with ‘imaginary ela-
boration’ standing in contradiction to historiography’s proclaimed objectiv-
ity, its scientificity. Such rhetoric of disclosing narrative elements in a pre-
sumably objective discourse is characteristic of a number of studies on narra-
tive in non-literary disciplines. Under scrutiny is mostly the disciplinary dis-
course, whose objectivity is questioned by the narrative analysis. Obviously
such a form of narrative research is particularly precarious for discourses
which depend on a general acceptance of their truth-claims to be able to
fulfil their daily task—as is e. g. the case with law or medicine.
Both legal and medical reasoning tend to present themselves as purely
scientific, as neutral applications of established rules resulting in an objective
judgement. In legal trials, though, the presence of narratives has been widely
acknowledged: not only do lawyers, victims, defendants and witnesses tell
stories trying to explain a crime—the verdicts of judges also depend on the
plausible narrative (re)construction of a sequence of events:18 “After all here
is a domain which adjudicates narratives of reality, and sends people to
prison, even to execution, because of the well-formedness and force of a
winning story.” (Brooks 2002: 2)
Richard A. Posner, a former judge, who was mentioned earlier for his
definition of the term ‘legal narratology’, is well aware of this. As he shows in
his article on “Narrative and Narratology in Classroom and Courtroom”, he
17 As a later example of this rhetoric see Munslow (1997: 2), who argues that “the genuine nature
of history can be understood only when it is viewed not solely and simply as an objectivised
empiricist enterprise, but as the creation and eventual imposition by historians of a particular
narrative form on the past”.
18 See the volume edited by Brooks and Gerwitz (1996), in which a broad range of narratives in
the law are discussed. Most research on the role of narrative in the law refers to the Anglo-
American common law tradition, in which narratives play a particularly potent role, and does
not consider the continental civil law tradition.
also knows how to use basic narratological concepts to identify and describe
narrative techniques with regard to the narrative situation, narrative speed,
plot structure etc. Nevertheless he is not interested in analysing narratives in
or of the law. On the contrary, he intends to ban narratives as far as possible
from the courtroom, since they can manipulate the outcome of a process
exactly because they are stories: because they suggest causality without prov-
ing it and because they appeal to their addressees on an emotional level,
which makes them powerful and antirational at the same time. Narratives in
the courtroom are considered therefore an imminent danger to “standards of
historical accuracy” (Posner 1997b: 300). The presence of potentially ma-
nipulating narratives is particularly threatening in the case of jurisdiction,
because it questions the very idea that it is possible to arrive at a just verdict:
a just verdict requires an objective and absolute knowledge of the crime,—or
to speak in literary terms: it requires and presupposes an authorial narrator,
familiar with all outer and inner motivations and causalities. An authorial
narrative situation can of course in reality—or the courtroom—not even be
attained by adding up all existing first person narratives.
Peter Brooks opposes Posner’s warning against narratives in the court-
room in maintaining that although narratives might be necessarily subjective
or even manipulative and construct meaning, they are nevertheless “inevita-
ble and irreplaceable” (Brooks 2005b: 6)—especially in the courtroom.
Brooks claims, that if “narrative form were to be entirely banished from the
jury’s consideration, there could be no more verdicts” (Brooks 2005a: 36).
Because of the crucial position narratives have in trials, they should be thor-
oughly ‘denaturalised’ (Brooks 2005b: 53), so that the legal actors become
conscious of what they are doing: Brooks considers narratology an ideal tool
to analyze narrative perspectives, the construction of causality and narrative
authority or modes of speech representation. Although Brooks himself
mainly mentions concepts of classical narratology, he also stresses the poten-
tial importance of cognitive narratology:
A legal narratology might be especially interested in questions of narrative transmis-
sion and transactions: that is, stories in the situation of their telling and listening,
asking not only how these stories are constructed and told, but also how they are lis-
tened to, received, reacted to, how they ask to be acted upon and how they in fact
become operative. What matters most, in the law, is how the ‘narratees’ or listen-
ers—juries, judges—hear and construct the story. (Brooks 2005a: 424)
So far though, such an analysis of storytelling in the courtroom within a cog-
nitive framework still remains to be undertaken, while a few isolated re-
courses to classical narratology—like Jackson’s (1998) application of Grei-
mas’ actantial model to the legal process—exist.19
19 Jackson (1998) argues that legal reasoning is not scientific in the strict sense but makes use of
narrative forms. Interestingly, he sees historiography and adjudication as parallel processes.
206 Sandra Heinen
Roughly the same observations can be made with regard to medical prac-
tice. Medicine’s self-representation as a science has been questioned repeat-
edly with reference to the narrative construction of meaning within the dis-
cipline. This has most vehemently been pointed out by Kathryn Montgom-
ery Hunter (1993), who stresses that “medicine is not a science as science is
commonly understood: an invariant and predictive account of the physical
world” (ibid.: xviii). Instead “the knowledge possessed by clinicians is narra-
tively constructed and transmitted” (ibid.: xvii). Hunter herself does not have
recourse to narratological concepts in her book-length analysis of Doctors’
Stories in medical practice and medical education, but a few applications of
narratological categories to medicine can be found for example in a volume
edited by Charon and Montello (2002). In her contribution to this volume,
Suzanne Poirier (2002) looks at voice and narrative levels in medical narra-
tives and describes how the convention of reporting patient’s case histories
erases all indications of the subjectivity and heteroglossia which in fact shape
every medical narrative. This becomes particularly problematic from the
ethical point of view taken up by all contributions to the volume: “As a nar-
rative voice that strives for professional uniformity and objectivity by ob-
scuring narrative levels and the diverse human input of those levels, the case
presentation runs the risk of being a medically useful but ethically limited
form.” (Ibid.: 52)20
Interestingly, most narratological analyses on narratives in law, medicine,
history and other non-literary sciences with truth-claims are conducted by
scholars with a background in literary studies: Hayden White, Peter Brooks,
Suzanne Poirier, Rita Charon, Martha Montello, Tod Chambers and Kathryn
Montgomery Hunter all have a formal education in the literary field. This
raises not only questions about the prerequisites of interdisciplinary research
projects (Is a dual education necessary?) but also suggests that the narrative
research of this group might be placed in the broader context of disciplinary
legitimation: This form of narrative research could be viewed as an attempt
to undermine the authority of the empirical sciences and thus shift the bal-
ance of power between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ sciences in favour of the
latter.
3. Narrative as a Key to More Interdisciplinarity?
Summing up one can say that the application of narratological concepts in

non-literary disciplines exists so far mainly in the form of isolated experi-
ments. The research questions behind the projects are as diverse as within
20 In the same volume, Chambers and Montgomery (2002) underline the constructive aspect of
narrative emplotment in medical narratives.
the field of interdisciplinary narrative research as a whole: While the scholars

of the first group are mainly interested in the mechanisms and functioning of
narrative as such, the approaches of the second group consider narratology
an analytic means to investigate the semantic constructions it produces. A
special case in this group is Robichaud’s study of an organizational process
because it extends the concept of narrative to interactions of real people.
The third group regards narratives as potentially ‘dangerous’ if they are part
of non-fictional discourses with truth-telling claims, because in these con-
texts narratives are considered to conceal their constructivist nature like
myths sensu Barthes,—and like Barthes’ myths they have to be demytholo-
gized in the eyes of scholars like White, Brooks or Poirier.
The majority of these experiments in interdisciplinary applications of
narratology fall back on concepts developed in ‘classical’ narratology, while
the potentiality of the postclassical approaches is at best hinted at. Here a
partial exception has to be made for the research projects of the first group:
because they understand themselves as contributions to the fields of socio-
linguistics and narratology, they link up with current discussions in both
fields, while all other projects turn to well established narratological concepts
and apply them in isolation from any narratological debate. The interdiscipli-
nary exchange remains therefore mostly an eclectic one-way importation.
Nevertheless, the research projects do much more than just ‘borrow a loose
term here and there’ and their endeavours as well as their results are promis-
ing. Unlike the many purely metaphorical applications of the term ‘narrative’
they indicate the potential a more reciprocal trading of concepts might have.
Such a new interdisciplinarity would above all have to involve an agree-
ment on how to deal with discipline-specific or even project-specific inter-
pretations of theoretical concepts. From the narratological perspective,
which has from the start been motivated by a desire to develop a universal
language to describe narrative, it is sometimes hard to accept the “elastic”
(Rimmon-Kenan 2006: 11) use of narratological concepts. But as Bender
(1995: 32) points out, insisting on the “strict axiality, the semantic rigour, of
terminology [...] to which narratology aspires” is likely to become an im-
pediment in any form of cultural analysis. Yet, to avoid that terms like ‘narra-
tive’ become “emptied of all semantic content”, Rimmon-Kenan (2006: 17)
suggests a consensus at least on the basics. As sensible as this is in theory, as
obvious become the difficulties of any de facto agreement in practice: the
minimal definition of narrative suggested by Rimmon-Kenan (narrative
agency and double temporality) would deny Robichaud’s project the status
of being narrative research, because his narratives meet neither of the two
criteria. A more liberal position is occupied by Mieke Bal (2002: 11) when
she holds:
208 Sandra Heinen
Even those concepts that are tenuously established, suspended between questioning
and certainty, hovering between ordinary word and theoretical tool, constitute the
backbone of the interdisciplinary study of culture—primarily because of their poten-
tial intersubjectivity. Not because they mean the same thing for everyone, but because
they don’t.
Differences in conceptualization are not necessarily obstacles to (interdisci-
plinary) communication, but can be motors for such a dialogue in the first
place. In the long run, narratology will have to live up to the challenge posed,
either by re-evaluating its self-image as a universal meta-science or by revis-
ing its theoretical frameworks to achieve a greater flexibility which allows the
inclusion, rather than exclusion, of other forms of narrative research.
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ASTRID ERLL
(Wuppertal)
Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies
1. Introduction
Arguably, the most fundamental scene of all narrative is oral storytelling.1

One major mode of such oral narration is storytelling as part of everyday
conversation: children tell their parents what happened at school, grandpar-
ents tell their grandchildren what happened in the war. In many ways differ-
ent from such everyday-life forms of conversational storytelling is a second
important mode of oral narrative, that of the epic. From Homer’s Iliad,
which, as Milman Parry (1971) has pointed out, is based on an ‘oral poetics’,
to those manifold epic stories which were told in preliterate societies and
have never found their way into the written medium—such stories are usu-
ally about a shared, mythical past, and often about battles and heroic deeds.
With these examples two important links between narrative and memory
are already uncovered. The first has to be located at the intersections of indi-
vidual and sociocultural memory: It is about remembering a day at school or
experience in a war and turning it into part of a personal autobiography by
way of telling others about it.2 The second belongs to a cultural-collective,
often national, level. Communities ritually renarrate events of a distant past,
in order to represent shared values and shape cultural identities.3
This article is about such intersections of narrative and what has in a re-
cent development in the humanities and social sciences come to be sub-
sumed under the umbrella term ‘cultural memory’.4 It asks how narratology
1 This has been argued in detail and convincingly by Monika Fludernik (1996: 12) who maintains
that “oral narratives […] cognitively correlate with perceptual parameters of human experience
and that these parameters remain in force even in more sophisticated written narratives”.
2 In social psychology such forms are called ‘conversational remembering’ (see Tulving/Craik
2000).
3 This is what cultural historians such as Pierre Nora (1996-98) or Jan Assmann (1992) are inter-
ested in. For the distinction made here see also section 3 of this article.
4 In broad terms, cultural memory can be defined as the interplay of present and past in sociocul-
tural contexts. For a more detailed analysis of the term ‘cultural memory’, see section 3 of this
article.
Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies 213
and cultural memory studies have profited from each other and may con-
tinue to do so in the future. In the following, I will consider the relation of
memory and narrative, and the research being done on both phenomena, in
three different perspectives. These will be called “Viewing Narratology
through Memory” (section 2), “Viewing Cultural Memory through Narratol-
ogy” (section 3) and “Re-viewing Narratology through Cultural Memory
Studies” (section 4). Thus, proceeding from the role that concepts of mem-
ory already play in traditional structuralist and postclassical narratology, I will
consider the relevance that narratology bears for the relatively new field of
cultural memory studies before turning, finally, to the question of what the
combination of these two theoretical approaches may yield for narratology,
and what fields of further research might open up when using this double
perspective on narrative phenomena in culture.
2. Viewing Narratology through Memory:

Genette, Stanzel, and Beyond
It would be the matter of a monograph in its own right to review the notions
of memory that implicitly or explicitly pervade the classic texts of structural-
ist narratology. I will confine myself to two of the probably best-known con-
tributions, Gérard Genette’s and Franz Stanzel’s works, in order to show
how, even at the beginnings of classical narratology, concepts of narrative
and memory were very closely linked, although the acknowledgement and
systematic exploitation of this fact certainly seems to belong to what David
Herman (1999) has termed the ‘postclassical narratologies’.
In his Narrative Discourse (1980), Genette, interestingly and also quite tell-
ingly, bases his new (and ‘neologistic’) taxonomy on what is arguably the
greatest ‘novel of memory’ written in the twentieth century: Marcel Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). Why should he have done so? Because
acts of memory and narrative are in many ways closely linked, and it is in
fictional representations of remembering that the manifold possibilities of
narrative discourse best come to the fore.
Storytelling is per definitionem an act of ‘memory’, in the broad sense
proposed by Augustine, namely an act of connecting the temporal levels of
past, present and future. Conversely, cognitive psychologists hold that acts
of memory which belong to the episodic-autobiographical memory system
(i. e. the memory of lived experience) can only be realized by way of storytel-
ling.5 At the heart of both autobiographic memory and narrative, then, lies a
5 Cognitive psychologists differentiate between different systems of human memory. There are
‘explicit systems’, such as semantic and episodic memory, and ‘implicit systems’, such as proce-
dural memory and priming (see Schacter 1996). Not all human memory is primarily organized
214 Astrid Erll
process which Paul Ricœur describes as a ‘grasping together’ and ‘integrating’

“into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events” (Ricœur
1984: x).6
Going through Genette’s Narrative Discourse, it is striking how little in fact
the author explicitly reflects upon the relation of memory and narrative. Af-
ter two decades of sheer obsession with ‘all things memorial’ in the humani-
ties, Genette’s work, read from today’s perspective, reveals a neglect of this
aspect, at least on the surface, that seems quite improbable. And yet, tellingly
enough, about half of this theoretical text is devoted to the issue of the rep-
resentation of time. Viewed from a memory-studies perspective Genette’s
very detailed introduction of the categories ‘order’, ‘duration’ and ‘frequency’
seems not accidental but dependent precisely on the choice of his major
example. A la recherche du temps perdu is a ‘novel of and about memory’, a novel
which is based on the narrator’s act of remembering and which minutely
observes and problematizes the processes of memory, that is, the act of con-
necting different time levels. Not surprisingly then, Genette’s categories of
narratological time analysis are also apt descriptions for major memory pro-
cesses. Thus remembering is always an ‘anachronic process’. While recon-
structing the past we never proceed chronologically but jump from here to
there, creating ‘prolepses’ and ‘analepses’. Important events, and especially
those which have a traumatic quality, tend to be remembered in a ‘repeating’
way. A different matter are the ‘general events’ of our autobiographic mem-
ory.7 An example would be the famous first sentence of Proust’s novel: “For
a long time, I went to bed early”. Such general events are usually recalled in
the form of a ‘summary’ or in an ‘iterative’ way. Readers consider novels like
in a narrative way; there are different forms of cognitive organization, which may be based on
the visual or the corporeal. Inherently narrative is only the episodic-autobiographic memory
system. Episodic memory allows us to recall the personal incidents that uniquely define our
lives (‘my first day at school’). Episodic memories are experienced as a ‘mental time travel’, a
way of ‘reliving the past’ (Tulving 1983). Thus, the subjective experience connected with the
episodic memory system is one of ‘remembering’, whereas we experience recall from the se-
mantic memory system (which contains conceptual and factual knowledge, such as ‘the Earth is
round’) as ‘knowing’. Narrativization turns episodic memories into autobiographic memory.
6 Ricœur’s phenomenological approach to the relation of time and narrative is, of course, closely
linked to notions of memory. But again, this connection functions more as an implicit horizon
of reference than as something made explicit and productive by the author. In Ricœur’s works,
‘memory’ is (as so often) thought of mostly in opposition to ‘history’ (see the very title of
Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, 2000).
7 Psychologists differentiate between three levels of episodic-autobiographic remembering: life-
time periods, general events and event-specific knowledge. In literature, the representation of
each of these levels is conventionally connected with specific narrative patterns (see Erll 2003:
165f.; 2004). General events “refer to periods of time measured in days, weeks, and possibly
months, and represent knowledge of goal attainment and personal themes relating to specific
sets of events or to extended events such as ‘Holiday in Italy,’ ‘Friday evenings with X, Y, and
Z,’ ‘Working on project W,’ and so on” (Conway 1996: 297).
Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to be realistic because such literary narra-

tives represent the past in a way that appears to conform to our own, ‘real
life’ ways of remembering.
My second example is Franz Stanzel’s Theory of Narrative (1984). Here we
do find explicit mention of the issue of memory, in a short chapter called
“Point of view and memory in the first-person narrative”. For Stanzel, a
main difference between first-person narrative and authorial narrative lies in
the “creative power of memory”: the narrator “evokes his story in an act of
recollection” (Stanzel 1984: 216). In fact, not only Stanzel’s but all narra-
tological taxonomies of first-person narration (or ‘homodiegetic’ or ‘diegetic’,
if you will) operate, at least implicitly, with assumptions about acts of recol-
lection. The classic example is the autodiegetic narrative, where the distinc-
tion between the ‘narrating I’ and the ‘narrated’ or ‘experiencing I’ (in Ger-
man, ‘erzählendes Ich’ and ‘erlebendes Ich’) is actually a distinction between
a ‘remembering I’ and a ‘remembered I’, between the act of memory and the
content of memory. Literary first-person narrative is, therefore, a fiction of
episodic remembering. It is the enactment of “mental time travel”, which is
how the psychologist Endel Tulving (1983) defined episodic memory.
The restrictions of the first-person narrator are the restrictions of the
rememberer: you cannot remember what you yourself have not experienced,
and what therefore is not part of your episodic memory system. Neither can
you recall what you have not heard, read, or seen, and what therefore is not
part of your semantic memory. Whenever a first-person narrator relates ex-
tensively what he or she has not experienced or known, narratologists tend
to resort to other explanations: a transition to the authorial mode, an unreli-
able narrator etc. But leaving such gross transgressions of our real-world idea
of the powers and restrictions of memory aside, we will, of course, very of-
ten find in literary first-person narrative more detailed descriptions and more
exact dialogue than one would think a person would actually be able to re-
member. Franz Stanzel’s explanation for this phenomenon is that first-
person narrative is characterized by a mingling of “reproductive memory and
productive imagination” (Stanzel 1984: 215). And Stanzel knows that this
applies not only to literary narrative, but to all acts of narrative memory:
“Remembering itself is a quasi-verbal process of silent narrating by which
the story receives an aesthetic form, primarily as a result of the selection and
structuring inherent in recollection” (ibid). It is precisely on such intersec-
tions of memory and narrative—firstly the mixture of ‘actual’ traces of the
past with imagined elements, secondly the basic processes of selection and
structuring, and thirdly the shaping and amplification of memory through
the repertoire of narrative forms—that a ‘narratology of cultural memory’
focuses (see section 2 below).
216 Astrid Erll
The move from classical to postclassical narratology can be described as

a move from studies which are pervaded by implicit notions of memory to
studies which explicitly draw on certain branches of memory theory in order
to explain the production and reception of literary narrative. One notion of
psychological memory studies has been particularly influential in this context:
that of (narrative) schemata. This concept was popularized by the British
psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett, in his seminal study Remembering (1932), in
which he had his test subjects remember and repeat a strange story. Bartlett
observed how culture-specific schemata shaped and altered the memory of
this story. It was not until the 1990s, however, that a ‘cognitive narratology’
emerged in literary studies, which worked precisely with notions such as
narrative schemata, scripts and frames (which had been further developed by
cognitive sciences since the 1970s), thus heralding the ‘age of interdiscipli-
nary narrative research’ (see Fludernik 1996; Jahn 1997; Herman 2003).
Cognitive narratology currently belongs to the best known and defined
branches of postclassical narratology; it promises not only to build on the
work of classical narratology but at the same time to enrich structuralist
categories with concepts that were unavailable at the time of Stanzel and
Genette (see Herman 2007). The questions addressed by cognitive narratol-
ogy are different: indeed most of them have to do with human memory in its
biological dimension. Because a great deal of research is already being done in
this particular field, I will confine myself in the following to a slightly differ-
ent (albeit in fundamental ways connected) perspective on the relation of
memory and narrative, that is, the cultural dimension. The next section will
therefore address the question of what cultural or collective memory actually
is, and how cultural memory studies can profit from narratological research.
3. Viewing Cultural Memory through Narratology:

Narrative Modes of Remembering
Cultural memory studies came into being at the beginning of the twentieth
century with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective (collective
memory).8 In the course of the last two decades this area of research has
witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a conse-
quence, the study of the relation of ‘culture’ and ‘memory’ has diversified
8 See Halbwachs (1925; 1950). Halbwachs introduced the term ‘collective memory’. Jeffrey Olick
(1999) prefers to describe similar phenomena with the term ‘social memory’. I use the term ‘cul-
tural memory’ in order to emphasize the fact that it is cultural formations which shape individ-
ual memories and which build ‘cultures of memory’, with their rituals and media constructing
and representing a shared past. In the anglophone discussion as I see it right now the terms
‘collective’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ memory are more or less interchangeable, hinting above all at
the disciplinary background of the respective researcher.
into a broad range of approaches. Today, the complex issue of cultural

memory is part of interdisciplinary and international research. There are con-
cepts of cultural memory in cognitive and social psychology, in psychoanaly-
sis and neurobiology, in history, literary and art studies, philosophy, theol-
ogy, and in the social and political sciences. Moreover, cultural memory stud-
ies is a decidedly international field. Important concepts have been generated
in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, the USA and the Nether-
lands.9
‘Cultural’ or ‘collective’ memory is a multifarious notion. Practices, struc-
tures and media as diverse as myth, monuments, historiography, ritual, con-
versational remembering, configurations of cultural knowledge and neuronal
networks are nowadays subsumed under this wide umbrella term. Because of
its intricacy, collective memory has been a highly controversial issue ever
since its very conception in Maurice Halbwachs’ studies. Just as his contem-
porary Marc Bloch (1925) accused Halbwachs of simply transferring con-
cepts from individual psychology to the level of the collective, today’s schol-
ars keep challenging the notion of collective memory. Given that ‘myth’,
‘tradition’ and ‘individual memory’ are well-established concepts, there is no
need, they argue, for ‘collective memory’ as a further, and often misleading,
addition to the existing repertoire of terms (see Gedi/Elam 1996). What they
overlook, however, is that it is exactly this umbrella quality of the term ‘col-
lective memory’ which helps us see the (sometimes functional, sometimes
analogical, sometimes metaphorical) relations between such phenomena as,
for example, ancient myths and the personal recollection of recent experi-
ence, and which, furthermore, enables disciplines as diverse as psychology,
history, sociology, theology and literary studies to engage in a stimulating
dialogue.
It is important to note, however, that the notion of ‘cultural’ or ‘collec-
tive’ memory proceeds from an operative metaphor: The concept of ‘re-
membering’ (a cognitive process taking place in individual brains) is meta-
phorically transferred to the level of culture. In this metaphorical sense,
scholars speak of a ‘nation’s memory’, a ‘culture’s memory’, or even of ‘lit-
erature’s memory’ (which, according to Renate Lachmann, 1997, is its inter-
textuality). Jeffrey Olick draws attention to this crucial distinction between
two levels in cultural memory studies when he claims that there are in fact
two aspects to collective memory: that of ‘collected memory’ and that of ‘col-
lective memory’ in a narrower sense:
[T]wo radically different concepts of culture are involved here, one that sees culture
as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that
9 For an overview of the state of the art in the field, see Erll (2005) and Erll/Nünning (2008). See
also the new journal dedicated to the field, Memory Studies (since 2008).
218 Astrid Erll
sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society. (Olick

1999: 336)
The term ‘collected memory’ refers to biological memory. It draws attention
to the fact that no memory is ever purely individual, but is always inherently
(and not merely metaphorically—see section 3 below) shaped by collective
contexts. From the people we live with and from the media we use, we
gather (or ‘collect’) schemata which help us recall the past and encode new
experience. Our memories are often triggered as well as shaped by external
factors, ranging from conversation among friends to books and to places. In
short, we remember in sociocultural contexts. It is especially within oral his-
tory and social psychology that collective memory is understood according
to this first aspect of the term.
The term ‘collective memory’ (in the narrower sense), on the other hand,
refers to the symbolic order, the media, social institutions and practices by
which social groups construct a shared past. ‘Memory’, here, is used meta-
phorically. Societies do not remember literally; but much of what is done to
reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of indi-
vidual memory, such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the crea-
tion of versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs. In
the fields of sociology and history much research has been done with regard
to this second aspect of collective memory, the most influential concepts
being Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s notion of
kulturelles Gedächtnis.
The two forms of collective memory can be distinguished from each
other on an analytical level; however, they exert their power in cultures of
memory only by interacting, through the interplay of the levels of the indi-
vidual and the collective. There is no such thing as precultural individual
memory; but neither is there a Collective Memory (with capital letters) which
is detached from individuals, embodied only in media and institutions. Just
as sociocultural contexts shape individual memories, a ‘memory’ which is
represented by media and institutions must be actualized by individuals, by
members of a community of remembrance, who may be conceived of as
points de vue (Maurice Halbwachs) on shared notions of the past. Without
such actualizations, monuments, rituals and books are nothing but dead ma-
terial, failing to have any impact in cultures of memory.
As is always the case with metaphors, some features can be transferred
with a gain of insight, others cannot. Thus the notion of cultural memory has
quite successfully directed our attention to the close connection that exists
between, say, a nation’s version of its past and its version of national identity.
That memory and identity are closely linked on the individual level is a
commonplace that goes back at least to John Locke, who maintained that
there is no such thing as an essential identity, but that identities have to be

constructed and reconstructed by acts of memory, by remembering who one
was, and by setting this past Self in relation to the present Self.
Needless to say, this identity-creating process is usually realized in the
form of narrative, and the dyadic idea of ‘memory and narrative’, with which
this article started out, actually has to be extended into the triadic model of
‘memory, narrative and identity’. Families, friends, nations, social classes,
ethnic and religious communities tell their stories in order to create identi-
ties. The German protagonists of cultural memory studies, Jan and Aleida
Assmann, have called such stories ‘founding stories’ or ‘myths’. In his influ-
ential book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis Jan Assmann defines ‘myth’ in the fol-
lowing way: “A myth is a story that is told in order to provide an orientation
about oneself and the world; it is a ‘truth’ of a higher order that is not simply
correct but which moreover makes normative claims and has formative
power.” (J. Assmann 1992: 76; my translation)
Assmann’s distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘formative’ functions has
become an important notion in a cultural-memory perspective on the uses of
narrative. Stories connected with cultural memory tend to give an answer to
the question ‘where do we come from?’ This is their formative or identity-
related aspect. And they answer a second question, namely ‘what shall we
do?’ This is their normative, or ethics-related, aspect. The normative and
formative dimensions of narrative can be found in the Bible as well as in
Homer’s epics, in Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as in the great national histo-
riographies of the nineteenth century, in twentieth-century war novels as well
as in cinematic versions of 9/11.
But if the main research objects of cultural memory studies are myths,
and therefore narratives, then narratological approaches might provide in-
sights into how exactly versions of the past are created, how concepts of
identity are conveyed, and how values and norms are inscribed into these
‘cultural texts’.
To give just one example of the possible uses of narratological categories
in the field of cultural memory studies, I will refer to my own work on
Gedächtnisromane (‘memory-making novels’; Erll 2003), which conceives of
literary narratives as media of cultural memory.10 It takes a look at the exis-
tence of what is called a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’ in German and Brit-
ish war novels of the 1920s. Several modes of such a rhetoric can be distin-
guished: experiential, monumental, historicizing, antagonistic and reflexive
modes, for example.
The past is not given; it must be reconstructed and represented. Thus,
our memories (individual and collective) of past events can vary to a great
10 A similar notion can be found in Rigney (2004), who calls literary narratives ‘portable monu-
ments’.
220 Astrid Erll
degree. This holds true not only for what is remembered (facts, data), but also
for how it is remembered, that is, for the quality and meaning the past as-
sumes. Thus, there are different modes of remembering identical past events.
A war, for example, can be remembered as a mythic event (‘the war as
apocalypse’), as part of political history (the First World War as ‘the great
seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’), as a traumatic experience (‘the
horror of the trenches, the shells, the barrage of gunfire’ etc.), as part of a
family history (‘the war my great-uncle served in’), as a focus of bitter contes-
tation (‘the war which was waged by the older generation, by the fascists, by
men’).
Different modes of remembering are closely linked to different modes of
narrative representation. Changes in the form of representation may effect
changes in the kind of memory we retain of the past. In the following I will
give some examples of how such memorial modes are constituted in the
medium of literary narrative. It is, however, never one formal characteristic
alone which is responsible for the emergence of a certain memorial mode;
instead we have to look at whole clusters of narrative features whose inter-
play may contribute to a certain memory effect. How stories are interpreted
by actual readers, of course, cannot be predicted; but certain kinds of narra-
tive representations seem to bear an affinity to different modes of collective
remembering, and thus one may risk some hypotheses on the potential me-
morial power, or effects, of literary form.11
Experiential modes are constituted by literary forms which represent the
past as lived-through experience. They are thus closely connected with what
Aleida and Jan Assmann call ‘communicative memory’12 and with its main
source: the episodic-autobiographical memories of witnesses. Typical forms
of the ‘experiential mode’ of literary remembering are the ‘personal voice’13
generated by first-person narration; forms of addressing the reader in the
intimate way typical of face-to-face communication; the use of the present
tense or of lengthy passages focalized by the ‘experiencing I’ in order to con-
vey embodied, seemingly immediate experience; and a very detailed presenta-
tion of everyday life in the past (the effet de réel turns into an effet de mémoire). In
English war novels of the 1920s, for example, the experientiality of a recent
past is evoked by autodiegetic and I-as-witness narration (as in Siegfried Sas-
soon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930), by extensive internal focalization
11 For different modes of remembering in the literature of the Great War, see Erll (2003; 2004);
for modes of remembering the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857/58, see Erll (2006).
12 See J. Assmann (1995: 126): “For us the concept of ‘communicative memory’ includes those
varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications.” It is
oral history that is primarily concerned with communicative memory, e. g. with the passing on
of war memories between generations. Lived experience is the object of communicative mem-
ory; its time frame therefore never extends beyond some 100 years.
13 In the sense of Lanser’s (1992) feminist narratology.
(as in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, 1924-28), and by the representation
of soldiers’ slang by means of skaz (as in Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts
of Fortune, 1929).
Literary forms which help to promote one version of the past and reject
another constitute an antagonistic mode. Negative stereotyping (such as call-
ing the Germans ‘the Hun’ or ‘beasts’ in early English novels of the Great
War) is the most obvious technique for establishing an antagonistic mode.
More elaborate is the resort to biased perspective structures in which only
the memories of a certain group are presented as right, while those versions
articulated by members of conflicting cultures of memory are deconstructed
as false (see Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, 1929). The resort to we-
narration may underscore this claim (see Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet
on the Western Front, 1929, or Helen Zenna Smith’s Not so quiet…, 1930).
Literature always allows its readers both a first and a second-order ob-
servation. It gives us the illusion of glimpsing the past and is (often at the
same time) a major medium of critical reflection upon such processes of
representation. Literature is a medium which simultaneously builds and ob-
serves memory. Prominent ‘reflexive modes’ are constituted by narrative
forms which draw attention to processes and problems of remembering, for
instance by explicit narratorial comments on the workings of memory, the
juxtaposition of different versions of the past (narrated or focalized), or—
jumping to the literature remembering the Second World War—by highly
experimental narrative forms, like the inversion of chronology in Kurt Von-
negut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) as a means of representing the bombard-
ment of Dresden. Most present-day historiographic metafiction, for example
novels by Julian Barnes, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd, uses the narrative
forms of a reflexive mode. And this also shows that the different modes of
narrative remembering can be encountered in various literary genres and
periods.
What I termed a ‘narratology of cultural memory’ (Erll 2003) is actually
not so much a theory as a method. The main focus is on using existent narra-
tological categories as a toolbox for looking at texts and their relation to
cultural memory. Not that I think research into narrative and memory need
necessarily be restricted to such forms of ‘applied narratology’. Insights into
the forms and functions of memory can also trigger a reconsideration of the
basic categories of structuralist narratology, and thus promote a more intense
theoretical discussion of the issues involved. This assumption leads directly
to my last point: the ‘re-viewing of narratology through cultural memory
studies’.
222 Astrid Erll
4. Re-viewing Narratology through Cultural Memory Studies:

From ‘Forms Made by Memory’ to Remediation
After looking at the concepts of memory which implicitly or explicitly per-

vade classical and postclassical narratology, and giving some attention to the
possible uses of narratology for studies in cultural memory, I would like to
conclude by asking how present-day narratological research can profit from a
dialogue with cultural memory studies. My suggestions refer to two possible
strands of such future collaboration: firstly the incorporation of (historical)
concepts of memory into the study of narrative forms (‘forms made by
memory’); secondly the extension and combination of both narratology and
memory studies with respect to media theory.
My first bundle of suggestions concerns the historicizing of narrative
forms with a view to the ever-shifting concepts of memory that cultures
develop. Narrative forms change over time: they are connected to contem-
porary systems of knowledge and belief, as well as to practices of representa-
tion. In what respect, then, are certain forms such as first-person narration,
but also free indirect discourse and interior monologue, related to historical
concepts of memory? How do these forms change as concepts of memory
develop over the centuries? It is certainly no coincidence that the heyday of
stream-of-consciousness techniques is also the heyday of the memory theo-
ries of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson. And our current, highly memory-
reflexive age has brought forward new narrative forms for conveying mem-
ory, forms that are highly intermedial (see Erll/Rigney 2009).14 Concepts of
memory and of ways of narrating the past are subject to historical change.
There is a dialogic relationship between narrative forms and cultural con-
cepts of memory which has to be taken into consideration not only in cul-
tural studies but also in theoretical narratology.
Connected with this insight, one might want to consider what can be
called the ‘ideology of first-person narrative’. Narrative forms cannot be
analyzed without the cultural context in which they appear and are used, and
in the western world (especially in the Protestant tradition), autodiegetic nar-
ratives have long been used as forms of self-exploration and also self-
legitimization. This cultural function has naturally exerted some influence on
the form itself. One example is the teleological plot structure of many first-
person narratives. The story of the ‘experiencing I’ tends to end up, if not
precisely where the ‘narrating I’ started, then at least at a point in its develop-
ment where the way leading up to the identity of the ‘narrating I’ is in clear
view. The whole idea of a temporal, epistemological and moral distance be-
tween ‘narrating I’ and ‘experiencing I’ rests on such a teleological concept
14 See Wolfgang Hallet’s article in this volume. Many of his examples are, in one way or another,
‘novels of memory’.
of memory in the service of identity.15 This is clearly another instance of

literature’s dialogic relationship with cultural concepts of memory and iden-
tity, a dialogue which extends to the level of narrative forms and is therefore
a challenge for narrative theory.
Another way to incorporate concepts of memory into the study of narra-
tive forms is to rethink some narratological categories in the light of our
increasing knowledge about the workings of memory. In an article on the
‘Erinnerungshaftigkeit’ (the ‘memory-ness’) of literary texts, Michael Basseler
and Dorothee Birke (2005) have intriguingly argued that there might be a
third category hidden between the ‘narrating (or remembering) I’ and an
‘experiencing I’ proper. They call this third category the ‘remembered I’,
which is, just like the ‘experiencing I’, a character on the level of the story;
yet at the same time, the ‘remembered I’ is clearly an identity-based construct
of a past Self made by the present narrator. The narratological criterion is
free indirect discourse and thus a form of double focalization: The past Self
perceives the world, but at the same time, this perception is clearly shaped
(and probably even retrospectively altered) by the discourse of the present
Self. Another way of rethinking narratological categories might be to take a
fresh look at the various kinds of unreliable narration, which is more often
than not a ‘mimesis of troubled memory’. It is the literary representation of
problems of memory (such as forgetting and distortion) or a fragmented
traumatic memory that may in many cases lie at the heart of unreliability.
My second bundle of suggestions concerns the currently most exciting
area of research in cultural memory studies and in narratology: the extension
of both to media studies. To show the relevance of this idea, let us go back
to the notion of ‘cultural memory’. As already pointed out, this notion hinges
on an operative metaphor. Yet as soon as we consider the role of narrative,
we start to realize that the literal level as well—i. e. the very level of biologi-
cal memory—is in a sense ‘cultural’. It is inherently shaped by sociocultural
contexts. This idea of a cultural (or collective) memory in the literal sense
goes back to Maurice Halbwachs (1925) and his notion of cadre sociaux de la
mémoire, the social frameworks of memory, which can be understood as an
early formulation of the concept of cultural schemata. The idea of an inher-
ent culturality of our brain has convincingly been backed up in recent col-
laborations between neuroscientists and sociologists such as Markowitsch
and Welzer (2005). One of the major cultural shaping forces that work on
our individual brains and minds is narrative patterns, as Jerome Bruner
(1991) and other narrative psychologists have pointed out.16 Certain plot
15 How a rhetoric of autobiographic memory works in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield has con-
vincingly been shown by Löschnigg (1999).
16 For an excellent overview of the current state of narrative psychology, see Echterhoff/Straub
(2003/2004).
224 Astrid Erll
structures, micro-narratives or metaphors give our life-stories form and co-

herence, or, in Ricœur’s words again, they help us ‘grasp together and inte-
grate into one complete story our multiple and scattered experience’. Narra-
tive patterns, provided by the sociocultural context, turn our incoherent lived
experience into autobiographical stories (Eakin 1999; Brockmeyer/Carbaugh
2001).
But how exactly are cultural contexts and individual minds linked? Why
do all of us apparently have some kind of access to a shared reservoir of
narrative forms? The answer is that in the ‘real world out there’, these forms
do not exist as abstractions (as neat narratological categories), but as trans-
medial phenomena. They are realized again and again ‘across media’ (Ryan
2004), for example in oral stories, in novels and plays, in movies and TV
serials, in comic strips and popular songs. Objectivized in these media, narra-
tive forms are circulated in societies, and via media reception they have the
power to influence individual remembering. The social psychologist Harald
Welzer (2002), for example, discovered in interviews with Second World
War veterans that certain stories they told him about their war experience
closely resembled episodes of famous war movies, such as All Quiet on the
Western Front. Apparently, certain plot elements (such as sharing a cigarette
with the enemy in no-man's-land or a ‘last-minute rescue’) can serve as tem-
plates for the telling of autobiographical stories. They give a shape to inco-
herent and often traumatic experience. Certainly, this process is not straight-
forward or monocausal in the sense that the ‘movie directly influences the
memory’. Rather, a simultaneous circulation of certain narrative patterns in
different media must be assumed. And what’s more, these patterns may pre-
form experience as well as reshape memory.
In a more diachronic perspective, and with regard to imperial and post-
colonial memory cultures, I have shown in a recent publication (Erll 2007)
that certain plot structures, time structures, character constellations and
points of view which were typical of the representation of India in the nine-
teenth century (e. g. in newspaper articles, novels and historiography) were
carried across media over a period of more than one hundred and fifty years.
They were ‘remediated’ in melodrama, poetry, painting and photography,
and they can still be found in movies of the twenty-first century. Cultural
memory carries not only contents, but also narrative forms. The interesting
point here is to ask why there is a preference in memory cultures at certain
times for certain media to convey their narratives (in the nineteenth century
the historical novel, after wars and other catastrophes often the diary, right
now apparently the history film) and to look at the media-specificity of such
remediated narratives (see Erll/Rigney 2009).
To conclude this article I would like to raise some questions which are of
significant interest for the kind of interdisciplinary ‘memory and narrative’
research envisaged here: How exactly are certain narrative forms realized in
different media? How are they circulated, how do they travel across media?
How are such forms conventionalized to serve as vehicles of collective re-
membering? How are they even canonized to become objects of national
cultural memory? What are transnational memory narratives composed of
(such as the ubiquitous Holocaust and 9/11 narratives)? And finally, how
can such narrative forms (and this concerns reception theory and cognitive
narratology) turn into the resource, or the very stuff, that our most personal
memories are made of?
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JULIA LIPPERT
(Halle)
A “Natural” Reading of Historiographical Texts:

George III at Kew
1. Introduction
Since the early 1990s, George III has been reinvented. With the theatre play
The Madness of George III and its highly popular filmic version The Madness of
King George Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner set off a wave of medial pres-
entations which has resulted in the rehabilitation of this eighteenth-century
monarch. In the radio play The Grapes of Roi (Radio 4, 1995), for example, he
featured as a confused but warm-hearted individual; TV programmes such as
Timewatch (BBC2, 2004) and Royal Deaths and Diseases (Channel 4, 2003)
cleared him of the stigma of madness; he was characterized as an enlightened
monarch by a major exhibition at the Queen’s gallery (2004); and the histo-
rian Jeremy Black in his biography George III: America’s Last King (2006) ac-
quitted him of the blame for the loss of the American colonies.
The last two decades have witnessed a popularization and commodifica-
tion of history, and the historical figure of this Hanoverian monarch is a case
in point. One important result of this development has been the blurring of
the distinction between argumentative academic historiography on the one
hand and experiential popular history on the other. Attention has been
drawn to the narrative nature of historiography in general by the rise of “nar-
rative non-fiction”, a term Peter Mandler (2002) has coined to denote works
such as Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats that combine scholarly research with
popular/fictional methods of presentation. This and other developments
within the field of history-writing make it vital to find an analytical narra-
tological approach that can both accommodate such hybrid textual forms
and be applied across media and genres. Cognitive theory offers an exciting
prospect for a narratology uniquely suited to historiographical texts covering
the range from academic discourse to popular biographies to museum exhi-
bitions.
In her paper “Signposts of Fictionality” (1990), Dorrit Cohn proposed
some “rudiments” for what she called a “historiographic narratology” (Cohn
A “Natural” Reading of Historiographical Texts 229
1990: 777) and at the same time questioned whether established categories of
narrative theory are or are not fiction-specific. She concluded that some of
the dominant and long-standing criteria of fictional narratology such as the
story/discourse model, Genette’s concept of focalisation and the traditional
category of voice would have to be modified and extended in order to make
them applicable to historical narratives (see Cohn 1990: 778-89). As Ansgar
and Vera Nünning pointed out in their survey of the current state of narra-
tive theory (Nünning/Nünning 2002: 18), a narratology of historiographical
texts had yet to be developed, and this remains the case to this day.
Taking up Cohn’s proposal, I shall trace out the first steps towards a nar-
ratology that considers the particular make-up of historical narrative. After a
short introduction to narrative approaches to historiography outlining cur-
rent trends that emphasise a cognitive methodology, Monika Fludernik’s
“natural” reading model will be introduced as a useful tool kit for the analy-
sis of historiographical texts across genres and media. The final task will be
to demonstrate the usefulness of the model by isolating one specific element,
modes of presentation, and applying it to a narrative analysis of the Kew
Palace exhibition dedicated to George III. My overall aim is to illustrate the
model’s potential for analysing such multi-media historiographical presenta-
tions. More specifically, I will show how this approach successfully addresses
one of the long-standing problems of transmedial narratology, namely the
systematic analysis of narrative agency in non-language-based texts.
2. Historiography and Narrative Theory
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the historian Hayden White rejected the
common notion of causality as the determining factor in history writing; he
pronounced historiographical texts to be “verbal structures in the form of a
narrative prose discourse” (White 1973: ix) or “verbal fictions, the contents
of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more
in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in
the sciences” (White 1978: 42).1 For White, literature and history could be
treated on equal terms, since he regarded both as linguistic constructions
determined by the tropology of language; furthermore, in their constructed-
ness both could be treated as fiction. White’s theory of the poetical and lin-
guistic deep structural make-up of historical discourse triggered a wave of
literary criticism within historiographical studies. Because White postulated a
structuralist approach that focused on the narrative nature of historical writ-
1 As Fulda (2005: 175f.) points out, Hayden White’s work was anticipated by Hans Michael
Baumgartner’s inquiry into the process by which narrative schemata are part of the configura-
tion process of history writing.
230 Julia Lippert
ing, scholars concentrated on the narrative construction of such texts:

Gossman (1990) and Gearhart (1984), for example, analysed the narrative
structure of eighteenth-century works, while White (1973), Bann (1984),
Suessmann (2000) and Rigney (1990; 2001) concentrated on the nineteenth
century, and Carrard (1992) and Berkhofer (1995) on texts written in the
twentieth century.2 Most of these narratological approaches, however, re-
mained sketchy and restricted to a very narrow range of narrative criteria.
For example, Carrard focused his survey of the poetics of French New His-
tory and Annales on narrative mediation and illustrated that the new histori-
ans’ claim to a profoundly objective presentation of historical facts clearly
clashed with the modes of presentation they applied, namely the conscious
use of a first person narrator. Next to the narrative criterion of voice,
Carrard also looked at aspects of perspective and emplotment, as did most
of the above-mentioned narratological analyses of historiographical texts.
Voice (narrative agency), perspective and plot thus became the pivotal crite-
ria for the analysis and differentiation of literary as well as historiographical
narratives. However, all of these case studies dealt exclusively with written
texts, utilising existing narratological categories that were originally arrived at
by looking at fictional texts.
More recent attempts at developing a systematic narratological approach
to historiographical texts have been undertaken by Stephan Jaeger (2002)
and Daniel Fulda (2005). Fulda has suggested a cognitive approach, pointing
out that history is narrativized in two ways: in the composition process of
the historian (erschreiben) and in the reading or ‘selecting’ process (erlesen) of
the recipient (Fulda 2005: 178). Cognitive theory defines narrativity as some-
thing attributed to a text. This process of attributing narrativity affects his-
tory in two stages: first, when it is composed by historians from chronicles
and other non-narrative sources, and then when the historians’ texts in their
turn are ‘read’. Fulda is especially interested in the second stage of narrativiz-
ing history. Accordingly, he defines narrative as “[. . .] a scheme which a re-
cipient brings with him or her to organize historical experience” (ibid.: 187).
In his case study of the so-called ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’, Fulda discusses
two aspects of the narrative scheme for understanding history: “contextuali-
zation” and “wholeness”3. His main achievement has been to show that
cognitive methodology could be a useful means of developing a narratology
2 See Jaeger 2002: 245.

3 “Contextualization” refers to the embedding of individual facts or events into their respective
context. With the concept of “wholeness” Fulda describes the tendency of history to look at
events from different angles and to consider many possible perspectives on the “story” (see
Fulda 2005: 183-4, 187). The ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’ immediately invokes both aspects. Cov-
ering the involvement of the German armed forces in civilian atrocities during World War II, it
caused quite a stir in Germany in recent years.
of history since it allows for the inclusion of narrative frames that are spe-
cific to the writing of history.
Importantly, cognitive theory’s notion of narrativity as something attrib-
uted to the text by the perceiving subject liberated the approach from its
restriction to historiographical writing. As Fulda—in accordance with Sob-
chack (1996)—points out, “history today is hardly ‘composed’ or ‘selected’ in
verbal texts alone” (ibid.: 180).4 Fulda considers history-writing as a cultural
phenomenon; not restricted to the academic world: history occurs in various
medial forms such as film, TV programmes and exhibitions. It is upon pre-
cisely this concept of history as the sum of the synchronic discourse about
the past in a specific society that my proposal for a cognitive, trans-medial
narratology is premised.5 With its cognitive reading model, Monika Flud-
ernik’s ‘natural’ narratology offers a possible key to developing a histo-
riographical narratology that can be used for narratives in all kinds of medial
and generic forms. In the following I will attempt to demonstrate some as-
pects and criteria of Fludernik’s model that render it an especially useful
point of departure for such an endeavour.
3. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology of Historiographical Texts
The theoretical framework of ‘natural narratology’ relies on a cognitive

reader-response approach which is based on the assumption that any given
text becomes a narrative when the reader ‘perceives’ it as such. The fact that
it is ‘read’ in a narrative manner may be determined largely by formal and,
particularly, contextual factors. As a consequence, the model can be applied
to any variety of media and genre. Thus far, the problem of working across
genres and media has been solved. The main issue still to be addressed is the
extent to which historical texts can be treated as ‘narratives’ in accordance
with the definition provided by ‘natural’ narratology.
4 Jaeger, in his discussion of the links between narratology and history (2002), attempts to make
exactly this point and to go one step further by arguing that historiography occurs in so many
different generic forms (fictional and non-fictional) that any narrative approach needs to take
this on board as well (2002: 260-1).
5 According to Siegfried J. Schmidt and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of constructive realism, a
society’s reality is formed in an active process of reception. This also implies that all the images
of the past produced within a given social group determine the way they perceive and remem-
ber it (Schmidt 1992: 425-449; Luhmann 1996: 138-157). Luhmann (1996: 144) further argues
that within today’s mass-media society, it is mainly media contents which determine our con-
cept of reality. Along similar lines, Aleida Assmann (1980: 7-8) describes reality as a collective
construct, created by the historically specific world-discourse (Weltdiskurs) of a society.
232 Julia Lippert
Monika Fludernik herself defines historiographical texts as non-narrative

in nature and describes them as tending towards the argumentative text type.
She argues thus:
In terms of the theoretical set-up of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, historical narra-
tive displays a degré zéro of narrativity since the purpose of historical narrative is
not to portray the experience of individual characters that will allow readers to make
sense of life by vicarious projection into the situation of a fictional protagonist, but
the function of history is to provide an argument [. . .] (2001: 93).
In other words, for Fludernik historical texts are only narrative on a discur-
sive level. On the level of the macro-genre, she places them with the argu-
mentative, since they do not set out to constitute narrativity. Narrativity,
according to ‘natural’ narratology, is “constituted by a narrative’s creation of
experientiality, and experientiality to a large extent relates to a protagonist’s
consciousness” (ibid.: 93). Experientiality, then, is defined as the “quasi mi-
metic evocation of ‘real-life’ experience” (1996: 12), requiring an experiencer
and a mediating consciousness (see ibid.: 311). According to Fludernik, his-
toriography is not concerned with the portrayal of human experience but
“attempts to weigh documentary evidence, to deliberate between causality
patterns and explanatory proposals, [and] to sift the wealth of detail for con-
figurational possibilities” (ibid.: 39).
It ought to be noted that Fludernik considers history a “scholarly pro-
ject” (2001: 93); her focus is on academic writing. In the light of the recent
popularization of history, however, history can be taken to comprehend all
historical presentations as they occur in today’s society, including so-called
‘pop history’.6 As Fulda convincingly states, ‘History’ is created by the histo-
ries of a given society (2005: 176).7 The histories of contemporary British
society oscillate between the popular and the scientific and thus between
historical argument and experiential narrative. Based on this assumption, I
propose a narratological solution that will encompass historical writing in all
its forms, from the academic to the popular.
A case-study of the wide range of current popular history texts on
George III reveals that for the most part they can not only be described as
narrative on the discourse level, but also in the sense of Fludernik’s defini-
tion of the macro-genre. That is to say, these texts concentrate on the ex-
perience of individuals and their evaluation of or reaction to it. In many
6 Peter Mandler, in his survey of current history writing in Britain, accurately depicts the current
state of affairs: “By the end of the [20th] century, then, the divide that had opened up since the
beginning of the century between the worlds of popular and academic history had begun to
close. Separate spheres remain, but between them now lies a thick stretch of overlap and inter-
mingling. Historians are battling it out with novelists and scientists for the public’s attention [. .
.]” (2002: 139-40).
7 Fulda differentiates between History as “the narrative organization of all events which we know
as ‘history’” and histories as individual stories of the past (2005: 176).
cases the concentration is deliberate: Susan Groom, for example, the main
organizer of the Kew Palace exhibition on George III and his family, stated
in an interview: “[. . .] it’s about the man himself rather than his role as king”
(audio transcript of an interview between Susan Groom and myself in June
2006).
The tendency to concentrate on the experience of an individual could
arguably be attributed to the biographical nature of the work under scrutiny,
which might justifiably be regarded as constituting a special case in historiog-
raphy. However, in the current historiographical landscape as a whole, biog-
raphy is no longer exceptional. There is a clearly discernible trend towards
presenting history as created by individuals and away from the social and
cultural histories of the 1970s and 1980s.8 As a consequence, histo-
rio(bio)graphy has come to be one of the most popular genres of writing.9
But let me turn back to those aspects of Fludernik’s textual typology that
furnish tools for analysis. Fludernik’s differentiation between the narrative as
discourse type and narrative as macro-genre allows an interesting preliminary
sifting of historiographical material into experiential and non-experiential
narrative. This sifting enables the identification of the purpose of each work,
whether it be a description of events, argumentation, or conveyance of the
experience of historical personages. All texts identified as belonging to at
least the narrative discourse type (which applies to most of them) could be
analysed according to White’s criteria of storification and emplotment. The
main point of interest here is which contents or historical events have been
selected for presentation and how they are linked into specific stories, plot
patterns and genre types.10
8 Mandler (2002) and Cannadine (2004) describe how especially in the 1990s history writing,
primarily although not exclusively in the popular realm, concentrated to a large extent on the
history of individuals as well as individual histories. According to them, this trend was primarily
due to a new search for identity. As Cannadine points out: “[...] the decline of the idea of Brit-
ish unity in the face of resurgent Welsh and Scottish nationalism on the one hand, and growing
integration into Europe on the other, have left the English wondering who on earth they are.
[...] History and the national heritage are where English people are looking instead” (Cannadine
2004: 12).
9 Book sales data from the Book Sales Yearbook: an Analysis of Retail Book Sales in the UK (1999-
2003) indicates that there has been an enormous increase in the publication of history books in
general (from somewhat more than 2000 in 1990 to almost 6000 titles in 2000) from the end of
the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, and that biographies of historical personages
figured regularly among top-selling titles.
10 It must be taken into account that Fludernik does not actually exclude non-experiential or
report-like narratives from her model. She defines them as having a degré zéro of narrativity and
then largely excludes them from her discussion, since they are not narratives in her definition of
the macro-genre. Nonetheless, on the level of mediation of her model she includes the so-called
mode of ACTING which refers to the “processuality of event and action series” (Fludernik
1996: 44) and can therefore be applied to report-like narratives. In short, although ‘Natural’
Narratology excludes such texts from its definition of narrative proper, the make-up of the read-
ing model allows the inclusion of non-experiential texts. As a consequence, it is possible to use
234 Julia Lippert
Next—and this is the crux of the matter—all texts that can be identified
as belonging to the macro-genre of experiential narrative can be analysed
according to Fludernik’s reading model. I shall briefly sketch the basic struc-
ture of the model, since it serves as the theoretical foundation of my argu-
ment.
Fludernik’s model describes the process of narrativization by the reader
on the basis of four levels of ‘natural’ categories. Level I comprises parame-
ters of real-life experience (identical with Ricoeur’s Mimesis I) shared by
readers and producers of texts alike, i. e. “subconscious cognitive parameters
by which authors and readers cognise the world in terms of fundamental
processes of human being in the world” (Fludernik 2003: 258). It is con-
cerned with schemata such as agency and the natural comprehension of
event processes, including their supposed cause-and-effect explanations. On
level II Fludernik differentiates four basic viewpoints from which the ‘action’
can be perceived, mediated or understood. They correspond to the cognitive
scripts of perceiving and mediating the ‘world’. The model distinguishes
between: (1) TELLING/REFLECTING, (2) EXPERIENCING, (3) VIEW-
ING, (4) ACTING. The mediating consciousness can be situated either in the
‘text’—narrator (1), protagonist (2)—or in the recipient (3/4). Level III
comprises culturally perceived cognitive parameters, i. e. storytelling patterns
and genres, the so-called “large-scale cognitive frames” (Fludernik 1996: 44).
These genre patterns developed over time, and through habits of reception
they have become part of the human cognitive apparatus. They contain con-
cepts of, for example, conventional relations between narrator and recipient,
official vs. private narratives, performance and narratological concepts
(chronological order, flashbacks, authorial omniscience, possibility of a bodi-
less narrator as well as his ability to enter all the protagonists’ minds), as well
as the recipients’ understanding and expectations of a particular genre. Fi-
nally on level IV the reader narrativizes the text, utilizing “conceptual catego-
ries from levels I to III in order to grasp, and usually transform, textual ir-
regularities” (ibid: 45). All four levels describe the process of reading. How-
ever, they are not to be understood as hierarchical, but rather as a dynamic,
simultaneous interaction of different cognitive scripts.
In four respects this reading model seems particularly suited to the task
at hand. First, Fludernik’s model allows an analysis of the full range of media
presentations used in historiographical discourse, because its definition of
narrative depends on experientiality at a deep structural level rather than on
any specific form of discourse. Secondly, at this stage the model is more like
a rough blueprint that allows and invites adaptation, with specific criteria and
frames for particular purposes. Thirdly, the ‘natural’ reading model succeeds
the model in order to locate differences and similarities between non-experiential and experien-
tial historiographical discourse.
in including the three core aspects of cognitive theory: parameters of text-

(production), context and reception. Production parameters are involved on
levels I to III; contextual aspects feed in on level III (comprising media con-
ventions, cultural context etc.), and, since it is a reading model, the act of
narrativization—the reader’s reading of the text as narrative—occurs on all
four levels. Finally, if it proves fruitful, the model’s diachronic nature would
allow a survey of texts produced at different points in time, i. e. the reception
of a particular historical phenomenon across the centuries, enabling further
insights into the workings of history and collective memory.
Thus far the groundwork for a cross-medial and cross-generic cognitive
analysis has been laid. I will now proceed to apply one aspect of the model,
namely modes of mediation (on level II).
The concept of narrative mediation via some kind of storyteller (Stanzel)
or narrative agency/instance (Chatman, Bordwell) has for a long time made
any transmedial analysis of texts impossible, or at least somewhat awkward.
It has been especially difficult to account for a narrative agency in film or
drama. This has led to rather obscure categories such as David Black’s in-
trinsic narrator for film that describes an agency which is “congruent with
the discursive activity of the medium itself” (Black 1986: 22), with discursive
activity comprising all filmic and cinematographic codes that constitute the
filmic narrative.
Fludernik’s model, however, is able to shift narrative mediation from a
primarily production-based concept of someone telling somebody something
towards a reception- and consciousness-based concept of perceiving through
the consciousness of either a narrator, a protagonist or the recipient, de-
scribed respectively as modes of TELLING/REFLECTING, EXPERI-
ENCING and VIEWING. Thus the mode of telling is no longer a must for
narrative texts but only one possible mode of mediation among others.
So far the criteria on level II as proposed by Fludernik are applicable to
any kind of text, irrespective of the idiosyncrasies of historiography. One
aspect particular to historiographical discourse is its extratextual logic. Ri-
coeur explains in Temps et récit (1983: 311-322) how historical writing, apart
from relying on the causal connections of facts established by the fabula, is
based on a pre-compositional logic of, for example, which event caused
which result. The producer of historical texts deliberates about possible
causal relations and eventually comes up with his version of the past as only
one possible interpretation. This pre- or extra-fabula logic is usually ex-
pressed in historical narratives via what Roland Barthes describes as shifters
of discourse and Dorrit Cohn as perigraphic apparatus,11 referring to the
11 Cohn adapts this term from Carrard’s “périgraphie” first used in 1986 in a case study of French
historical writing on World War I, in which he looks at the discursive norms of narrative his-
tory.
236 Julia Lippert
“stratum of testimonial evidence” or the “textual zone intermediating be-

tween the narrative text itself and its extratextual documentary base” (Cohn
1990: 282). Barthes differentiates between shifters of listening and organiza-
tion on the one hand and signs of the writer/sender on the other (1989: 128-
131). Both scholars consider such testimony as obligatory to historiographi-
cal discourse, and as such it must find expression within a historiographical
reading model.
I am suggesting here that cues of testimonial evidence could be integral
parts of the REFLECTING mode on level II of the ‘natural’ reading model.
REFLECTING in Fludernik’s concept does not denote the reflector mode in
Stanzel’s terminology but refers to a “consciousness in the process of rumi-
nation” (Fludernik 1996: 44). REFLECTING as such is a variant of
TELLING and “invokes parameters of rumination, arguing, memory, self-
criticism, and so forth” (ibid.: 372). Cohn’s perigraphic apparatus and
Barthes’ shifters are not parts of the narrative strand but consist in more or
less direct comments on the process of writing, researching and composing
this particular version of history. A few examples of how this finds expres-
sion on the discourse level are: a) inferential or conjectural syntax, such as he
must have felt angry or he possibly felt angry, b) comments by the sender as to
how he arrived at his conclusions, and c) references to sources. Such extra-
narrative comments are what Fludernik means by “ruminations”, which in
fictional accounts would find expression, for example, in reflections by the
narrator on the writing process.
In what follows, a short inquiry into the narrative modes of the Kew
Palace exhibition organized by Historic Royal Palaces will apply Fludernik’s
reading model to a mode of history-writing that comprises a whole range of
forms of mediation, and will examine its use of the REFLECTING mode
deemed obligatory for historiographical productions.
4. Modes of Mediation:
A Case Study of the Kew Palace Exhibition (2006)
The permanent exhibition at Kew Palace, launched in April 2006, courts its
audience with the promise of a glimpse into the private life of King George’s
family. The flyer announcement invites them to “Unlock the secrets of Kew
Palace and discover a royal family home and a compelling story”. The family
home is the small, flaming red palace in the lovely setting of Kew Gardens.
But what is the compelling story? People are led to wonder and are thus
enticed to come and find out for themselves. My project goes somewhat
further by asking who tells the story, or more appropriately, how it is medi-
ated.
13.1. King George III, studio of Allan Ramsay, oil on canvas, (1761-1762)
© National Portrait Gallery, London
The exhibition begins in a welcome centre situated in a building separate

from the actual palace. Using pictures and written commentary it exhibits a
general timeline of political events from 1759 to 1898 and parallel develop-
ments at Kew. George III appears five times in the timeline. The first time
the visitor encounters him is in the image of a young man in his coronation
robes in the well-known portrait by Allan Ramsay (fig. 13.1.). This is fol-
lowed by three written comments: he is described as suffering his first attack
238 Julia Lippert
of porphyria, during which he was confined to the White House at Kew, as

signing the Act of Union, and finally as leaving the scene in 1811 when por-
phyria struck again and his eldest son George took over the affairs of state as
Prince Regent until the king’s death in 1820. The last uncommented glimpse
we get at the welcome centre is a large portrait, showing him as a desolate
old man in a dark cloak (fig. 13.2.).
13.2. King George III, by Samuel William Reynolds, mezzotint, (1820)

© National Portrait Gallery, London
The flyers, posters, internet ads and welcome centre can be regarded as the
framing borders, to use Werner Wolf’s terminology,12 of the exhibition’s
narrative, influencing the audience’s perception and ‘reading’ on level III of
the model. On the one hand, the timeline, the chronological order of politi-
cal events and the explanatory comments give the whole project the factual
tone of an exhibition documenting historically accurate information. On the
other hand, the rather passionate comments concerning George III—such as
“suffers his first terrifying attack of porphyria”, “porphyria strikes again” and
“compelling story”—combined with the juxtaposition of the two portraits of
the monarch, first as a sparkling youth and then as an almost unrecognisably
aged man, set the scene for a personal story of suffering which ends tragi-
cally. I would argue that these framing borders prepare the ground of the
reception process in three respects: firstly, they evoke the macro-genre of
narrative in the form of the experiences of George’s sufferings, and thus
support a process of narrativization of the exhibition by the visitor. Sec-
ondly, they evoke the genre of tragedy. Finally they frame the ‘story’ as real.
Upon entering the palace through the ante-room, one is immediately
confronted by a bust of George III modelled from life by Madame Tussaud
herself around 1809. It is accompanied by a written comment (from Tus-
saud’s 1823 catalogue):
Whether we view him as a king, as a husband or as a father, his character shone.
When future historians record the events of our times, they will place the name of
George III among the best, the most beloved and honoured of sovereigns.
Entering the room, one comes not only face to face with the king but is even
spoken to by him. The speech, audible in the whole room through loud-
speakers, is a eulogy of his life and achievements and a guide to how he
would like to be remembered in the British collective memory:
If I am to be remembered for one thing let it not be any fleeting malady or inconse-
quential foreign loss ... but for the creation of Britain. What what? This is what I am
to the marrow—a Briton. And let future generations know that I glory in the name
of ... Briton. (unpublished audio script)
The ante-room demonstrates well the different channels of communication
the exhibition employs. First of all there is the arrangement of objects in the
different rooms; each room focuses on a specific theme or aspect of the
king’s life such as his interests, his sickness, his children, family and public
perception. Secondly, the voice of an authorial narrator surfaces at times in
the form of written comments on tags or slides. Thirdly, there are speeches
and dialogues by family members played in a number of the rooms—some
addressing an audience, some staged as glimpses into private conversations,
12 Werner Wolf defines “framing borders” as textual framings or cognitive meta-concepts that
guide the reception process. Situated at spatial and temporal “edges”, they strongly influence
the development of that process (2006: 22).
240 Julia Lippert
including the sound of rattling newspapers and china tea cups. Finally, dif-
ferent contemporary voices are added to the chorus in the form of quotes on
plates or within the dialogues.
Using Fludernik’s level II of the reading model, two modes of mediation
can be identified: TELLING and VIEWING. TELLING occurs in two differ-
ent forms. There are authorial comments, as for example in Princess Eliza-
beth’s Dressing Room. Here they accompany a picture show in which the
pictures are consistently followed by written commentary. A picture of the
celebration at the Golden Jubilee of George III, for example, is followed by
the comment: “There was often affection for the King behind the carica-
tures”; or Gillray’s cartoon Reconciliation carries the remark: “The royal family
could swallow their differences at times”. These direct narrative comments
guide the visitor’s perception. In the example given they point at the irony in
the pictures. Furthermore, there are the family members, who more or less
implicitly tell the story of their lives and sorrows to other family members or
imaginary listeners.
It is primarily the visitor’s task to narrativize, to connect the different
elements and cues—the arrangements of objects, dialogues and voices—in
order to arrive at the “compelling story” they were promised. It is the visi-
tor’s consciousness that takes over the task of mediating, of constructing a
narrative, thus allowing for different interpretations. It is the mode of
VIEWING that dominates the perception process. Indeed, the analysis of the
Kew exhibition based on Level II of the ‘natural’ reading model reveals how
wisely the organizers chose their words when they announced that the visitor
would have to ‘unlock’ a story. In fact, there is no omnipresent authoritative
narrator. There are different bits and pieces of information, different cues
and clues as to how George and his family experienced life, but in the end it
is the ‘perceiver’ who has to come up with the reading.
Yet, with all this room for the recipient to read and interpret, it can still
be argued that the exhibition fosters its own reading as a narrative. It clearly
aims to evoke experientiality and, more precisely, the experiences of George
III along with his own evaluation of them. Next to the framings already
mentioned, it is above all the emotional overtones connected with objects
such as a little egg boiler given to George by his children for his birthday, the
waistcoat he wore during his final years discoloured with what look like
blood stains, and the desperation in the voices of the children and the queen
when they talk about the king’s illness that trigger a reading of the life of
George and his family as a tragic narrative.
Finally, of course, the speeches by the king that frame the exhibition
raise expectations in the visitor of the unfolding of a personal story. The king
not only welcomes the visitor, he is also given the last word, accompanying
the final image, that of the old man in the cloak:
What, what. I am old and weak. Kings, too, become old and weak. I decline, but my
country thrives. My country has no need of me anymore. So it should be. Let them
think of me for a moment and then pass on as history passes on. Leaving half-
understood events for future generations to muse over.
Thus far Fludernik’s level II of the reading model has been tested only for its
general applicability to multi-media texts. Testimonial evidence still remains
to be identified in the form of the REFLECTING mode. In the exhibition at
Kew the REFLECTING mode is as good as non-existent. The organisers
seem to absent themselves from the discourse, employing neither inferential
nor conjectural syntax nor shifters of organisation. There is only the occa-
sional label to hint at the origin of the different objects on display. Spoken
and written dialogue and commentaries give no evidence of their source.
Barthes refers to such a systematic absence of “any sign referring to the
sender of the historical message: [in which] history seems to tell itself” as
“referential illusion” (1989: 132). He further argues that such an illusion is
intentional on the part of the historian, who claims that the “referent speak
for itself”, and denounces it as quite improper to historical discourse (ibid.).
Barthes’ indignation in this respect shows the importance he attaches to the
perigraphic apparatus and specifically to the signs of the sender as integral
parts of historical writing. Indeed, the total absence of referential allusions at
Kew gives the impression of a self-contained historical discourse. Reasoning
with Barthes, this absence of referential allusion implicitly raises the specious
claim that this particular story of the king’s life is not merely one possible
version among many but the one “true story”.
5. Conclusion
The Kew exhibition is a prime example of the different mediating channels

employed in the (re)construction of past events. It stresses the necessity,
emphasised earlier by Fulda, Jaeger and Vera and Ansgar Nünning, of devel-
oping a narratology of history that works across genres and media. As the
case study of George III has illustrated, ‘natural’ narratology could serve as
an appropriate basis for such a project. Fludernik’s cognitive reading model
is not only applicable to different forms of mediation, it also allows the in-
corporation of aspects specifically connected to historiographical discourse,
as the integration of perigraphic discourse on level II of the model exempli-
fies. Furthermore, ‘natural’ narratology’s definition of narrative as the media-
tion of experientiality does not prove an inhibiting factor in the analysis of
historiographical texts. On the contrary, it allows comparison of their evoca-
tion of experientiality and the reader’s narrativization. As the curators of the
Kew exhibition were well aware, reading history as the past experience of
242 Julia Lippert
individuals has become one of the dominant modes in contemporary popu-

lar historical discourse. For this reason, the ‘natural’ reading model seems
ideally suited for a narratology of history. In the course of time, as conven-
tions of perceiving the world and the past evolve, the method may require
adaptation. But at this moment in time it seems a promising beginning.
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VINCENT MEELBERG
(Nijmegen)
Sounds Like a Story:

Narrative Travelling from Literature to Music and Beyond
1. Introduction
Within the several disciplines of the humanities tools, theories and ap-
proaches are developed and used to study their respective objects. And while
some disciplines may use very similar approaches—think for instance of the
study of the different languages—others apply methods that are more or less
unique for their respective fields of study. Musicology is one such discipline.
One of the main tools of the musicologist, music theory, is bound to the
medium it is developed for. It is very hard, if not impossible, to apply music
theory to cinema (except of course when it concerns the music that is used
in a movie), literature, or visual art in any way that transcends a very superfi-
cial, metaphorical comparison.
Thus, musicology does not really provide tools that could be used in in-
terdisciplinary research, i. e. research in which methods and/or approaches
developed within a certain discipline are used to study an object belonging to
another discipline. Yet it is quite possible to study music with the aid of me-
thods established in other disciplines. Many disciplines have invented tools
that are not limited to the objects for which they were originally developed.
These tools are medium independent. They allow for the study and compari-
son of different media, precisely because they do not presuppose a particular
medium.
In this article I want to examine whether narratology, which is usually as-
sociated with verbal texts, can function as a medium-independent tool. More
specifically, I will investigate the possibilities of applying Mieke Bal’s narra-
tology to music. First, I will elaborate in what way narrativity might be useful
for the comprehension of music. Next, I will try to counter the main argu-
ment against musical narrativity, namely that music cannot have a narrative
content, before outlining the narrative aspects that can be identified in mu-
sic. Finally, I will conclude that the narrative study of music can teach us
about the way the listener makes sense of music, and that Bal’s narratology is
Sounds Like a Story 245
well suited for studying the narrative aspect of music, and of media in gen-
eral, in a productive manner.
2. Narrative Understanding
Music listening consists, first of all, in the recognition of sounds as musical

sounds. The listener qualifies sounds as musical, because s/he hears certain
characteristics that lead him/her to believe that s/he is hearing music. These
sounds more or less comply with the musical precedents s/he is familiar
with, and therefore s/he calls these musical sounds. This results in the lis-
tener assuming a listening stance that differs from everyday listening. As
soon as s/he has decided to regard a series of sounds as music, other con-
ventions, criteria, and precedents are used while listening. Once this stance is
assumed, a melodic minor second, say, will be regarded as a leading note,
and not as a series of sound waves with a small difference in frequency. Thus
the acoustic material gives up its original physical qualities in favour of musi-
cal qualities as soon as a listener who assumes a musical listening stance ex-
periences it.
However, to be able to decide that a certain series of sounds represents a
leading tone is a step beyond just regarding sounds as musical. At that initial
stage the listener’s musical experience consists of nothing more than a con-
catenation of sound perceptions that s/he identifies as musical. Yet, the ex-
ample of the leading tone shows that the listener’s musical experience is not
to be equated with the pure labelling of sounds as musical. The listener is
capable of relating musical phrases to other phrases within the same piece,
and this relating is regarded as one of the most important characteristics of
music. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, for instance, states that
“[m]usic presents order relationships in time” (quoted in Grant 2001: 135).
Additionally, the listener may relate musical phrases to other musical works
or practices, or to nonmusical ideas or phenomena. In short: the listener
relates music while listening to it. This capacity, together with the ability to
recognize musical sounds, makes up a musical listening experience.
During such an experience, which can be regarded as a unifying activity,
the listener tries to structure the music. The strategies used for this purpose,
however, may differ from listener to listener. Fred Everett Maus (1999: 182-
183) suggests that a narrative strategy might be successful in helping to struc-
ture the music:
[T]he association of music with a story is a way of attributing musical unity: the
parts of a story belong together, somehow, and in associating music and story one
is, somehow, transferring that unity to a musical context. Second, as I understand it,
the notion of a musical story is not an alternative to the notions of musical experi-
ences or musical world. They are related as follows: a listener may have a unified
246 Vincent Meelberg
experience, and that experience may include the imagining of a fictional world, and
the events within that fictional world may form a story.
In the course of a musical listening experience, a listener might regard the
music s/he is listening to as a story, i. e. structure the music as if it were a
musical narrative. In this way, the music is regarded as a structural whole,
namely a narrative, and, consequently, musical comprehension might be
gained.
But what does it mean to grasp something in a narrative manner? David
Herman (2003b: 2) observes that human beings often interpret events by
creating stories around them in order to get some kind of grasp of these
events:
As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and
with specific consequences, stories are found in every culture and subculture and
can be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process,
and change.
Moreover, Kitty Klein adds that “[n]arrative has often been viewed as the
product of a universal human need to communicate with others and to make
sense of the world” (2003: 65). Stories are important both in grasping the
world and in communicating this grasp. Thus, broadly speaking, narrative
has two interrelated functions: on the one hand, it can be regarded as a
means of making sense of the world, structuring the human subject’s experi-
ences and integrating these into a graspable whole. On the other hand, narra-
tive functions as an account with which the human subject can communicate
these experiences. As Herman puts it: “[N]arrative is at once a class of (cul-
tural) artifacts and a cognitive-communicative process for creating, identify-
ing, and interpreting candidate members of that artifactual class” (2003b:
170). Stories are both cultural objects and the manner in which human sub-
jects talk about those objects.
Roy Schafer remarks that narrative is not an alternative to truth or reali-
ty; rather, “[…] it is a mode in which, inevitably, truth and reality are presen-
ted. We have only versions of the true and the real […] Each retelling
amounts to an account of the prior telling” (quoted in Frawley et al. 2003:
88-89). Narrative is the manner in which the individual subject has access to
other people’s experiences; it is a way to distribute experience and knowled-
ge. Through stories, Herman contends, human subjects have “[…] a way of
structuring the individual-environment nexus, constituting a principled basis
for sharing the work of thought” (2003c: 185). Moreover, Herman (2003b:
8) claims, via stories the subject can have access to events that are separated
from him/her in time and/or space:
[N]arrative can be seen to facilitate intelligent behavior. Stories support the (social)
process by which the meaning of events is determined and evaluated, enable the dis-
tribution of knowledge of events via storytelling acts more or less widely separated
from those events in time and space, and assist with the regulation of communica-
tive behaviors, such that the actions of participants in knowledge-yielding and -
conveying talk can be coordinated.
In short: stories are an effective means by which knowledge, experience,
beliefs, desires, and fantasies can be represented. They are one of the most
important means by which human beings communicate. Narrative is an in-
strument for distributing and elaborating the perspectives that can be
adopted on a given set of events. Moreover, stories aid in enriching the
whole compound of past, present, and possible future events that constitutes
the foundation of human knowledge. Narrative, Herman (2003c: 184-185)
concludes, therefore serves a dual function:
[…] correcting for biases and limitations that can result from a particular cognizer’s
efforts to know; and integrating such individual efforts into a larger human project
that takes its character from the way it is ongoingly distributed in social and histori-
cal space. In short, the process of telling and interpreting stories inserts me into the
environment I strive to know, teaching me that I do not know my world if I con-
sider myself somehow outside of or beyond that world.
By producing and listening to narratives, the subject places him/herself
within a social environment; through stories both his/her particular place
can be articulated, and knowledge of this environment can be gained.
Klein furthermore adds that “[o]ne of the marvelous features of narra-
tive is that it can transform memories of unspeakably awful experiences into
streamlined representations that lose their ability to derail cognition” (2003:
65). Thus, narrative not only locates the subject within a social environment,
but also helps him/her cope with traumatic or stressful events. Creating a
narrative around such an event, Klein remarks, involves the subject’s cogni-
tive functions and enhances psychological wellbeing: “[M]any psychologists
believe that in addition to helping people understand stressful events, narra-
tive changes the memory representations of these events, making them less
likely to erupt into consciousness” (77). By consciously integrating a trau-
matic event into a narrative frame, the subject may be able to control his/her
trauma.
When a subject tries to make sense of events through the creation of a
narrative, s/he has an inclination to construct a story that is as clear and
simple as possible, H. Porter Abbott contends: “[A]s a general rule, human
beings have a cognitive bias toward the clarity of linear narrative in the con-
struction of knowledge” (2003: 143). Because narrative is essentially nothing
more than a “basic pattern-forming cognitive system bearing on sequences
experienced through time” (Herman 2003c: 170), the subject tries to struc-
ture these sequences in the most straightforward way possible, which is lin-
ear. If possible, s/he interprets successive events causally, the earlier being
the cause of the appearance of the later, as Klein explains: “Identification of
causal relations is particularly important for narrative […], because to under-
stand the text the reader must make numerous inferences to establish the
relations between various parts of the narrative” (2003: 75). Thus, causal
relation is one of the most important kinds of structuring within a narrative.
Richard J. Gerrig and Giovanna Egidi (2003: 44) acknowledge this:
[Research has] provided evidence that one product of readers’ narrative experiences
are causal networks that represent the relationships between the causes and conse-
quences of events in a story. Some story events form the main causal chain of the
story whereas others, with respect to causality, are dead ends. When asked to recall
stories, readers find it relatively more difficult to produce details that are not along
that main causal chain.
Stories representing events that are hard to connect causally are not as easily
remembered as stories whose events can be causally related. This implies that
stories that show many causal relations can be grasped in a clearer way than
those that lack these relations. Klein (2003: 75) elaborates how a subject
detects causal relations:
To detect causal relation, the reader must connect inferences from immediately pre-
ceding text still in working memory, information from earlier text, now located in
long term memory […], and background knowledge that was not in the text but that
is also in long term memory.
As I will show below, this process is similar to the process of detecting mu-
sical events within a composition that is received and assimilated aurally.
In the next section I will also explain that the notion of musical causati-
on is used as a metaphor. Musical events do not actually, physically cause
other musical events; they can only be interpreted as being a cause. Yet, as
Herman (2003c: 176) observes, this is the case not only in music, but in lite-
rary narrative, too. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, he remarks that
[…] narrative understanding depends fundamentally on a generalized heuristic ac-
cording to which interpreters assume that if Y is mentioned after X in a story, then
X not only precedes but also causes Y. Indeed, one can detect the operation of this
same heuristic in a variety of discourse contexts, as when language users are able to
‘read in’ temporal and causal relations in the case of conjunctions that do not con-
tain explicit time-indices or markers of causality.
A narrative can be understood because its succeeding events can be inter-
preted as being related in a causal manner, regardless of whether this relation
is a reality or a projection of the apprehending subject. Hence, music that
can be interpreted as containing events that are somehow—metaphorical-
ly—related in a causal manner might be more easily grasped as well.
Can an object such as music, however, that is not a literal narrative be in-
terpreted in a narrative manner, and might this result in a more profound
comprehension of that object? Monika Fludernik believes this is possible.
She contends that narrativity “[…] is not a quality adhering to a text, but
rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets the text
as narrative, thus narrativizing the text” (2003: 244). In the case of literature,
it is the reading process that is “[…] fundamental to the construction of nar-

rativity—that which makes a narrative narrative” (244). Yet this does not
mean that the object is irrelevant. For is it possible to narrativize, say, an
ordinary coffee cup? Perhaps stories around this cup could be made up, but
the cup itself, though interpreted as a cup, is not thereby interpreted as a
story. The object itself has to have some qualities that invite the observer to
regard it as narrative. It has to have narrative potentiality and context. Not
just anything can be regarded as narrative simply because the observer wants
to regard it so. A coffee cup and a story about a coffee cup are artefacts (or
objects) on two different experiential levels.
The narrativization of cultural objects amounts to the creation of a con-
struction, a structure in which (causal and other) temporal relations between
events are identified. Some objects can more easily be regarded as narrative
than others. Narrative depends on both the narrative potentiality of the ob-
ject and the act of narrativization of that object by an observer. By narrativiz-
ing an object, the observer might comprehend this object in a better, or dif-
ferent, way. Turning an object into a story means establishing some other,
maybe wider kind of grasp of this object. And the study of narrativity is an
inquiry into the manner in which an apprehending subject acquires this kind
of comprehension.
This implies that narrativity is not exclusive to those objects that we tra-
ditionally call narratives, such as novels. According to Mieke Bal, narratology
can be used on other objects than narrative texts, just as narrative texts can
sometimes be better approached with other methods than narratological
(1990: 730). With the aid of narratology, the narrative aspect of objects can
be studied, regardless of whether they are linguistic or other. I propose the
following working definition of narrative, which is derived from Bal’s narra-
tology, and which, to my surprise, has proved more controversial than I had
anticipated: a narrative is the representation of a temporal development. It is
the representation of a sequence of events in time. Thus, the construction of
a house, say, can be regarded as a sequence of events, but it is not in itself a
narrative. Rather, it is a process on a different experiential level from the
process of narrative. But as soon as I record this process on video, for in-
stance, the recording can be regarded as a narrative. After all, we now have a
representation, in the shape of a video recording, of a temporal develop-
ment, namely the construction of a house.
Lyric poetry might be a representation as well, but not all lyric poems
can be regarded as the representation of temporality or of a temporal devel-
opment. This is not to say that lyric poetry, or fragments within a lyric poem,
can never be regarded as representations of a temporal development. In
these cases one might conclude that this particular poem has narrative mo-
ments or characteristics. Conversely, novels such as Samuel Beckett’s The
Unnamable (1953, English translation 1958) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
(1939) problematize the notion of temporal development in narrative. Yet
this does not automatically imply that the working definition of narrative I
gave above has to be revised. Rather, it shows that these novels are not nov-
els in any conventional sense, because they do not neatly fit into the category
of narrative. Chronologies, timetables, and weather reports, finally, are repre-
sentations that refer to temporal phenomena, but to what extent can they be
considered representations of temporal development? As I explained above,
causality plays an important part in narrative. Because one can identify par-
ticular events as (metaphorically) causing other events, the perceiving subject
is able to regard this succession of events as constituting a development, a
transformation from one state to another. Thus, if it is possible to identify
causal relations within a chronology or a timetable, one could conclude that
this object is, to a certain degree, narrative. But I cannot say a priori whether
or not these objects can be regarded as such. That depends on the particular
representation that is being considered.
The narrativization of an object amounts to the creation of a structure in
which (causal and other) temporal relations between events are identified.
Some objects can more easily be regarded as narrative than others. Narrative
depends on both the narrative potentiality of the object and the act of narra-
tivization of that object by an observer. By narrativizing an object, the ob-
server might comprehend this object in a better, or different, way, and the
study of narrativity is an inquiry into the manner in which an apprehending
subject acquires this other kind of comprehension.
In her 1997 study on narratology, Bal aims at giving “[...] a systematic ac-
count of a theory of narrative for use in the study of literature and other
narrative texts” (ix). Bal’s narratological theory offers a very elaborate and
systematic account of narrative elements, but it does not presuppose, and is
not confined to, verbal narrative: indeed, it extends to many other narratolo-
gies. Even more importantly, it takes the apprehending, narrativizing subject
as its starting point, and follows the order in which this subject accesses and
experiences a narrative object. As a result, her approach may account for the
way the perceiving subject recognizes a particular structure in a perceptible
object, and how s/he distils from this a series of logically and chronologically
related events caused (or passively experienced) by actors. Bal regards her
theory as a readerly device, a heuristic tool that provides focus to the expec-
tations with which subjects process narrative (xv).
A narrative text, according to Bal, is a text in which an agent relates a
story in a particular medium (5). This definition may seem to compete with
the definition of narrative given above, namely narrative as the representati-
on of a temporal development. However, the two definitions are comple-
mentary rather than competing. The definition of narrative as a representati-
on of temporal development is more basic and general; it is devoid of narra-

tive jargon; it determines whether or not a particular object can be narrative
at all. All narratives are representations, for telling a story means representing
a sequence of logically and chronologically related events. When an object
complies with this working definition, thus when it can be regarded as a re-
presentation of a temporal development, narrative aspects such as narrative
agent and story can be identified, and the definition of a narrative text as one
in which an agent relates a story in a particular medium will become relevant.
Bal distinguishes three layers in a narrative text: text, story and fabula. A
text is a finite, structured whole composed of signs. A story is a fabula that is
presented in a certain manner, and a fabula is a series of logically and chro-
nologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event
is defined as a transition from one state to another, whilst an actor is an
agent that performs actions. To act, finally, means to cause or experience an
event (5).
It is because Bal’s narratology consists of a trichotomy, rather than a di-
chotomy, that it is an appropriate model for the study of the narrative aspect
of an object, verbal or otherwise. Especially when it concerns narrativity and
intermediality, this trichotomy is crucial. If one were to use a theory based
on a dichotomy, it would be very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to dis-
cuss with any precision the consequences of relating the same story in a dif-
ferent medium. For in this case one could only distinguish between fabula
and narration, and with each change of medium the entire narration would
change as well, since text (as medium) and story (as content) are conflated on
this level. Thus, the division of a narrative object into three, instead of two
(or no) layers allows for a more accurate study of narrativity, especially when
it concerns intermedial approaches. Bal’s narratology enables investigation
into the narrative comprehension of any object that has narrative potentiali-
ty, as well as the comparison of narrativity in different media.
So, what about the medium of music? Comprehending a musical piece
means recognizing its constituent sounds as musical and being able to relate
musical phrases to other phrases within the same piece, as well as to other
musical works or practices and nonmusical ideas and/or phenomena. Com-
prehending a musical piece implies the structuring of sounds, the establis-
hing of relations within and without the piece concerned.
A possible way to structure music is to narrativize it, to regard it as a nar-
rative. By narrativizing a musical piece, the listener may get a better (or diffe-
rent) grasp of it. Turning music into a story means establishing some kind of
control over, or comprehension of the music, creating a sense of certainty in
an uncertain situation, which listening to an ephemeral object such as music
might sometimes be.
2. Narrative Doubts
As I explained earlier, narrativizing an object implies both a narrativizing

subject and an object that has some narrative potentiality. Since music is a
temporal cultural expression, it would make sense to assume that music has
such a potentiality. After all, temporality is an important aspect of narrativity.
Moreover, many musical works, especially tonal ones, consist of the exposi-
tion of one or more themes and their development. Through this treatment
of themes, a temporal development can be represented and a musical narra-
tive might be created. Yet it is not an easy task to explain what this narrative
is exactly about, since, in contrast to language, music has no clear referential
qualities.
For this reason the notion of musical narrativity is highly disputed. Ver-
bal narrative is able to represent many phenomena, ideas, and views that
cannot be represented in music in the same straightforward manner. For
instance, in verbal narrative it is possible to posit an unreliable narrator. A
verbal narrative can represent a character’s thoughts, or retell historical
events. Music, because it lacks the referential qualities of language, is not
capable of doing this; it cannot, therefore, Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990: 257)
concludes, be narrative:
[…] music is not a narrative and […] any description of its formal structures in
terms of narrativity is nothing but superfluous metaphor. But if one is tempted to
do it, it is because music shares with literary narrative that fact that, within it, objects
succeed one another: this linearity is thus an incitement to a narrative thread which
narrativizes music. Since it possesses a certain capacity for imitative evocation, it is
possible for it to imitate the semblance of a narration without our ever knowing the
content of the discourse, and this influence of narrative modes can contribute to the
transformation of musical forms.
Nattiez evidently acknowledges that music has the potentiality to be narrativ-
ized—not, however, because he thinks music can be properly speaking nar-
rative, but because it can have the appearance of narrative as a result of its
linear character. Nonetheless, Nattiez holds that because music has no narra-
tive content it cannot be narrative. This is a standard argument against musi-
cal narrativity. Werner Wolf (2002: 77-78), for instance, claims that
every discourse that is said to be narrative has to be able to achieve precise hetero-
reference, i. e. a reference that goes beyond the work and its medium, in order to
comply with the basic representational quality of storytelling. The visual arts are un-
doubtedly capable of this, at least as concerns spatial objects, and of course verbal
speech, too; speech cannot escape heteroreference at all, as the possibility of estab-
lishing referentiality in even the most extreme literary experiments shows again and
again. The ‘language’ of music, however, is only capable of such reference in very
few exceptional cases, and is in general resistant to precise nonmusical referentializa-
tion to such a degree that its linguistic character is often denied altogether. [my
translation]1
Again, because music cannot explicitly refer to nonmusical phenomena, it
does not comply with the most basic function of narrative. For both Nattiez
and Wolf, verbal narrative is evidently the paradigm with which every narra-
tive has to comply. Thus, in contrast with the definition of narrative that I
use, in which narrative is the representation of a temporal development, their
conception of narrative is medium dependent. But in my definition, too, the
element of referentiality is accounted for, as narrative is explicitly stated to be
a representation of temporal development and must, therefore, refer to such
a development.
Temporal developments can indeed be represented in music; the listener
can perceive expectations and resolutions, yet these are not caused by the
music itself. Music elicits expectations by giving the impression that musical
events lead to or cause other events. This in turn results in the suggestion of
forward motion. With regard to this suggestion, Bob Snyder (2000: 113-114)
remarks:
[M]usical events are seen as ‘leading to’, or ‘causing’ successive events that are close
to and similar to them. This is, of course, all metaphorical because musical events
do not actually cause each other in the way that other kinds of physical events do
(although they can imply each other). It is interesting to note that causation is also
an important factor in the construction of linear verbal narrative; sequences of nar-
rative events are also often linked by chains of causation.
Snyder, too, acknowledges that music generates expectations by giving the
impression that musical events lead to or cause other events. It is not real
causation that takes place in music, but rather a (musical) representation of
causation. A dominant seventh chord, say, does not necessarily have to re-
solve to the tonic. There is no physical necessity for this chord to resolve.
Rather, the listener expects it to resolve accordingly, as a result of the musi-
cal conventions and precedents s/he is familiar with. In other words, the
listener interprets a dominant seventh chord as wanting to resolve to the
tonic. This chord is a musical representation of tension, rather than actually
being unstable or tense; indeed, the physical makeup of the chord is as stable
as any other sound. Thus tension and resolution, which can lead to temporal
1 “Jeder Diskurs, der im Dienst des Narrativen stehen soll, muß zur Erfüllung der basalen Dar-
stellungsqualität des Erzählens zur präziser Heteroreferenz, d. h. zu einer Referenz jenseits des
betreffenden Werkes und seines Mediums, befähigt sein. Die bildende Kunst ist hierzu zweifel-
los in der Lage, wenigstens was räumliche Gegenstände betrifft, und natürlich auch die verbale
Sprache; ja diese kann der Heteroreferenz gewissermaßen gar nicht entkommen, wie die Mög-
lichkeit der Referentialisierung selbst extremer literar-sprachlicher Experimente immer wieder
zeigt. Die ‘Sprache’ der Musik kann dagegen nur in eng begrenzten Ausnahmefällen einer ver-
gleichbaren Referenz dienen und ist allgemein so resistent gegen präzise außermusikalische Re-
ferentialisierungen, daß ihr Sprachcharakter sogar überhaupt in Abrede gestellt wurde.”
development, are not physically present in the music, but are represented by
it.
This is not to say that the physical makeup of this chord has nothing to
do with the fact that the listener considers it to be tense. As I stated above,
narrativization is only possible if an object has a narrative potentiality. In the
case of a dominant chord, the dissonant wavelengths induce the listener to
interpret this chord as being tense. The physical makeup is one of the rea-
sons the chord is interpreted in this way. However, this does not mean that
the chord is compelled by physical necessity to resolve to the tonic. The ne-
cessity (embodied in the tension) is an act of (cultural) interpretation on the
part of the listener.
Furthermore, Snyder recognizes a relation between this phenomenon
and verbal narrative, in which causation between events also plays a constitu-
tive role. A verbal narrative consists of representations of events and it is the
whole body of these representations that is related to the reader. Such narra-
tives, then, relate representations of the causality between events, rather than
presenting actual causation. For example, in a story that tells about a person
falling out of a tree there is no physical necessity for this person to actually
hit the ground. The words that make up this story do not necessarily, physi-
cally, cause this. The reader might expect the person to hit the ground, but
this does not have to happen just because the story implies it. Real, physical
causation does not exist in verbal narratives; nor does it exist in music. Even
so, Wolf (2002: 78-79) maintains that
the progression of a musical discourse and its coherence is in general far more de-
pendent on form and medium, i. e. determined by an intramusical syntax. As a con-
sequence, it is at odds with the progression and coherence of narrative created by
causality and teleology that relates to the logic of a fictional world outside of the re-
spective narrative medium. [my translation, emphasis in original]2
Against this it can, nevertheless, be argued that causality, linearity, and goal-
directedness are not inherent to the music itself, but are represented by the
music. This means that the music does refer to phenomena that are outside
of itself, namely the phenomena of causation and teleology. Musical causa-
tion, which can give rise to linearity and teleology, is ultimately the product
of representation.
A musical narrative’s capacity to refer to extramusical phenomena, in this
case to a temporal development, might not be explicit enough for Wolf and
Nattiez. They might want to know what this development means, and verify
2 “Die Progression eines musikalischen Diskurses und dessen Kohärenz ist insgesamt wesentlich
form- und mediumsabhängiger, d. h. bedingt durch eine innermusikalische Syntax, und steht
damit quer zur Progression und Kohärenz des Erzählens durch Kausalität und Teleologie […],
die sich auf die Logik einer scheinbaren Welt jenseits des jeweiligen narrativen Mediums bezie-
hen.”
whether its meaning is intersubjectively shared, before acknowledging that

music can be narrative. I have to admit that music is probably unable to meet
such demands. Nonetheless, the temporal development that can be heard in
music is the result of a representation. It is this temporal development that is
the content of the musical narrative, however abstract that content might be.
3. Aspects of Musical Narrative
The content of musical narrative is related by a narrator, the agent that re-
lates a story in the medium of music at the textual level, which consists of
perceptible sounds. The musical narrator is almost always imperceptible and
external, and as such does not take part in the story it is telling. Yet, this
agent is not the performer. The performance is the musical focalizer, the
function that colours the story with subjectivity. This function belongs to the
story level, the musical structure.
The jazz composer and musician Carla Bley also uses colour as a meta-
phor when describing her compositions: “I write pieces that are like draw-
ings in a crayon book and the musicians color them themselves” (quoted in
Benson 2003: 135). The interpretation of a written score, which is the crayon
book that is coloured in during performance, is translated into sounds by
that performance.
A score is a way to ensure the continuing existence of a musical work,
and at the same time to guarantee a wide variety of different performances.
As soon as the writing is done, the composer him/herself can no longer
control the way the music will sound in performance, other than trying to be
present during rehearsals and hoping the directions s/he gives will be acted
upon.3 A musical text, then, which I earlier defined as a finite, structured
whole composed of musical signs, does not receive its final aspect when the
musical score is written by the composer, but only during performance, the
moment in which, to use Bruce Ellis Benson’s expression, the musical work
is “embodied” (2003: 82).
The reason why a listener favours one performance of a musical work
over another cannot be found in the notes themselves, either. The lines in
the crayon book, the musical score, stay the same, but it is the colouring
within and over these lines that shapes the listener’s preferences. The per-
formance thus determines how the music is communicated to the listener:
3 Yet, even when the composer him/herself conducts his/her own music, total control over the
music is impossible. Benson for instance refers to the many recordings in which Igor Stravinsky
conducted his Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), each of which differed from all the others (2003: 79).
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that these differences occurred because the views of the com-
poser changed between two successive recording dates.
performance acts as musical focalization, the point from which the musical
events are perceived.4
A literary focalizer always gives a limited and specific account of events.
Through focalization it is determined how limited or specific the image is
that the reader receives. When performing a musical work, the ‘image’ of the
musical events that is given to the listener is also always limited and specific:
the performer or performers have to make choices about the interpretation
of the piece, by deciding for instance whether or not the rendition will be
historically ‘authentic’, how to interpret dynamic and tempo marks (which
are by definition only approximate) etc. In other words: the focalization in a
musical work always results in a limited account of the musical story.
The musical score, however, is not the musical story. In fact, the score is
itself a text consisting of visual signs relating a story, based on a fabula, by an
imperceptible external narrator. This text, story, and fabula are related to the
text, story, and fabula of the musical performance, but are, by definition, not
identical with them. For their semantic medium is different: in my elabora-
tion of musical text, story, and fabula I explicitly refer to sounds, rather than
to visual signs.
Thus the object of narrativization is music-as-sound: the performance is
part of the narrative. And the musical narrative that I discuss here is per-
formed music. The performance is an integral part of the narrative itself, not
simply an interpretation of a narrative. What it interprets is the score, which
itself might be considered a narrative, but a narrative of a different nature, in
a different (visual) medium.
Still, it is not at all clear what it means to give a ‘true’ account of musical
events. This cannot be the transparent presentation of a musical score, if
only because this would imply that improvised music would not be focalized.
Yet, in the performance of improvised music, too, choices are made, options
are rejected, and alternatives are selected. Consequently, in improvised music
a limited and specific account of musical events is given as well.
Moreover, the musical events in a score are not represented transpar-
ently, i. e. unfocalized. For the score of a musical narrative is itself a narrative
text. Its story is related by an imperceptible external narrator in a visual me-
dium that consists of musical notation. As a text, the score is itself focalized,
which again results in a coloured representation of events. Nevertheless, the
events in a score necessarily belong to a different ontological category; they
have been turned from audible into visual signs. Unfocalized, and thus by
4 In the case of a recording, the musical focalizer is augmented with the technology and produc-
tion used to create the recording.
definition unperformed, musical events are necessarily abstract entities that

can only be made concrete in a sounding text, which is always focalized.5
Focalization does not manifest itself in music in the same way as in lit-
erature. First of all, whereas in literature the focalization or focalizations are
identical for every reading of the narrative, in music the focalization can, and
almost always will, change in each performance. No two performances are
the same, and therefore different interpretations, and thus different focaliza-
tions, of the same musical work may well exist. A reader interprets the focal-
ization(s) in a novel in his/her own way and that interpretation can change
with every reading, whereas the presentation of this focalization stays the
same. In music, however, both the focalization and the listener’s interpreta-
tion can change with every performance. As a result, one cannot speak in
musical narratology of different performances of the same musical narrative.
Each performance of the same musical piece has to be regarded as a new
musical narrative, a new work. Each of these performances has a different
focalization, and thus every performance of the same piece results in a dif-
ferent musical narrative.
Aleatoric music demonstrates this point in a very explicit manner. Two
performances of the same aleatoric piece, say Imaginary Landscape No. 4
(1951) for twelve radios, 24 performers and a conductor, composed by John
Cage, cannot be identical. If this piece can be considered as narrative, then
the resulting narratives are very different. It is also possible that one per-
formance of this piece can be regarded as narrative, whereas another per-
formance cannot. The performance is such a radically determining factor in
the experience of the piece that it can even control the degree of narrativity
of the work in question.
In literature, more than one focalizer, the subject through whose percep-
tion the reader perceives the events, can be found, while in music there is
only one focalizer. After all, only one performance of a piece can be heard at
any given time. Although many musical pieces have to be performed by
more than one musician, each musician contributes to the performance as a
whole, and it is this performance through which focalization takes place. A
performance is the end result of the creation of an interpretation of a musi-
cal work, a creation in which each performer shapes his/her interpretation of
his/her individual part in order to achieve the desired end result. A rendition
of a musical work by an ensemble of musicians is not the presentation of
5 It is impossible to have a sounding musical narrative that is not focalized, for performance,
which is a necessary element in the production of sounding music, always implies focalization.
Hence, one could regard a musical narrative as making explicit Bal’s assertion that a narrative is
always focalized. In order to create a musical narrative—which in my definition is always a
sounding musical narrative—the music has to be performed, and this necessarily implies focal-
ization.
several focalizers, each giving his/her own view of the musical events at the
same time, but the joint presentation of a single focalizer, i. e. the perform-
ance. Or, more precisely: the performance acts as an external focalizer, an
anonymous agent situated outside the fabula (Bal 1997: 148), whereas the
individual musicians contribute to the performance, and thus to the focaliza-
tion.
This does not mean, though, that only one focalization is possible. A fo-
calizer can ‘change its mind’, as it were, and give a different ‘view’ of the
same situation. In a musical piece, for instance, the same musical phrase can
be repeated in different ways by the same focalizer. When this occurs, the
function of external focalizer stays assigned to the same agent, i. e. the per-
formance, and only the focalization, the way that phrase is performed, has
changed.
Finally, there is one more important difference between a literary and a
musical focalizer. With regard to literature one can distinguish between in-
ternal and external narrators. In the case of ‘internal focalization’ the “focal-
ization lies with one character which participates in the fabula as an actor”,
whereas the term ‘external focalization’ means “that an anonymous agent,
situated outside the fabula, is functioning as focalizer” (Bal 1997: 148). Mu-
sic, in contrast, can only be focalized externally, for the performance (the
musical focalization) is never given by an agent that is part of the fabula, and
thus can never be internal.6
The performance cannot be part of the musical fabula, which is the final
narratological level of music, because a musical fabula consists only of a se-
ries of logically and chronologically related musical events caused or experi-
enced by musical actors. Neither the performance nor the performer(s) are
musical actors. Rather, a musical actor can be defined as the musical parame-
ter or parameters that cause closure; it is closures, therefore, that create mu-
sical events. After all, an event is not complete until it has reached some kind
of closure, and it is closure that makes the listener recognize the events and
their organization in music. Thus, a musical actor can be a temporal interval
that is larger than the immediately preceding ones, a significantly different
sound, or the end of a continuous change. At the same time, a musical actor
may be the musical parameter that changes during a musical event, since an
actor can not only cause, but can also experience events.7
6 In Bal’s conception, the qualification of a focalizer as external or internal depends solely on

whether or not the agent that focalizes is situated within the fabula. If so, the focalizer is inter-
nal. Otherwise, it is external. This account may differ from the classical distinction of internal
and external focalization made in other narratologies.
7 Thus a musical actor is the parameter that creates closure or that changes during an event,
whereas a musical event consists of all the parameters that sound during a particular period, re-
gardless of whether they create closure, change or remain unchanged during that period.
By identifying these narrative elements in music, and investigating the

manner in which they constitute narrativity, it is possible to understand the
process of narrativization in music. Bal’s narratology thus enables the study
of the narrative potential of music, as well as inquiry into the narrative inter-
action between music and listener.8 But most importantly, it facilitates the
comparison between narrativity in music and other media.
Conclusion
Narrativization is a fundamental human tendency enabling the human sub-

ject to come to terms with temporal phenomena. It is a tendency that de-
pends on both the narrative potentialities of a phenomenon and on an inter-
pretative act on the part of the human subject. As a result, a narrative listen-
ing stance, a stance in which music is narrativized, explicitly calls for the ac-
tive contribution of the listener in order to structure the music in time.
By the listener’s assumption of a narrative stance music is transformed
into another artefact, namely a narrative. Yet the interaction between listener
and music that leads to this other artefact is based on a natural human ten-
dency. The narrative analysis of music focuses on this interaction, and does
not search for an essence or truth in or of the music itself. In the end, musi-
cal narrativity concerns the manner in which the human subject can cope
with the temporal phenomenon of music.
Bal’s narratology proves particularly productive in these analyses. I be-
lieve that because her theory does not presuppose a medium, and because it
takes the apprehending, narrativizing subject as the focus of narrative analy-
sis, it can be used as a starting point for developing a ‘lingua franca’ for in-
terdisciplinary, or rather intermedial, discussions of narrative.
Works Cited
Abbott, H. Porter. 2003. “Unnarratable Knowledge. The Difficulty of Understanding Evolu-

tion by Natural Selection”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 143-162.
Bal, Mieke. 1990. “The Point of Narratology”. In: Poetics Today 11, p. 727- 753.
Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Second edition. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. A Phenomenology of Music. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
8 In Meelberg (2004; 2006) I give a more elaborate musical translation of Bal’s narratological
elements.
Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”. In: Herman
2003a, p. 243-267.
Frawley, William; John T. Murray and Raoul N. Smith. 2003. “Semantics and Narrative in
Therapeutic Discourse”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 85-114.
Gerrig, Richard J. and Giovanna Egidi. 2003. “Cognitive Psychological Foundations of Nar-
rative Experiences”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 33-55.
Grant, Morag J. 2001. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herman, David (ed.) 2003a. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publica-
tions.
Herman, David. 2003b. “Introduction”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 1-30.
Herman, David. 2003c. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking”. In: Herman 2003a, p. 163-192.
Klein, Kitty. 2003. “Narrative Construction, Cognitive Processing, and Health”. In: Herman
2003a, p. 56-84.
Maus, Fred Everett. 1999. “Concepts of Musical Unity”. In: Nicolas Cook and Mark Everist
(eds.). Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 171-192.
Meelberg, Vincent. 2004. “A Telling View on Musical Sounds. A Musical Translation of the
Theory of Narrative”. In: Mieke Bal (ed.). Narrative Theory. Critical Concepts in Literary
and Cultural Studies. Volume IV. London: Routledge, p. 287-316.
Meelberg, Vincent. 2006. New Sounds, New Stories. Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Leiden:
Leiden University Press.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. “Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?” In: Journal of the Royal
Musical Association 115, p. 240-257.
Snyder, Bob. 2000. Music and Memory. An Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wolf, Werner. 2002. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik.
Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie”. In: Vera Nünning und Ansgar
Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheorie. Transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT, p.
23-104.
ANDREAS MAUZ
Theology and Narration:

Reflections on the “Narrative Theology”-Debate and Beyond*
“… that God himself demands narration.”
Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (1977)
1. Introduction
Narrative is a central element in the founding document of Christianity, the

Bible. The Bible tells stories: of the creation of the world and of the human
race, of the destiny of the chosen people of Israel, of the incarnation of God
in Jesus Christ, of the early Christian communities and of the end of the
world. For this reason if not for any other the theological reflection of Chris-
tian faith will of necessity be concerned with narration. Theology has the
task of rendering these stories intelligible in and to its contemporary world—
both as individual narratives and in their overall context as the one story of
God’s dealings with creation. The narrative quality of the biblical writings is,
however, only one of the reasons why storytelling is a pre-eminently theo-
logical theme. The Christian tradition that grew out of these narrative foun-
dations has itself produced a wealth of stories, which together constitute the
history of the church (or rather of Christianity)—a history that unquestiona-
bly, and not only from a perspective critical of religion, reads in part as a
‘crime story’ (K.-H. Deschner). Episodes of this story are told and retold in
Christian religious education, in school classes or in preparation for confir-
mation. The sermon is another locus of narration, frequently in the form of
an interpretive retelling of an episode from the life of Jesus—himself a story-
teller, as the parables demonstrate. Finally, storytelling is of decisive impor-
tance for the individual Christian: why a Christian lives thus and not other-
wise is the stuff of narrative: a tale interwoven with the story of Jesus and
those other stories that derive from it.
In this rudimentary overview ‘history’ and ‘storytelling’ are used in a
broad, integral sense. This does, nevertheless, indicate that the concept of
narration—which does not immediately suggest a relation to theology—is of
* I am indebted to Dr. Barbara Piatti (Zürich/Prag) for her comments on this essay and Joseph
Swann (Wuppertal) for his translation.
262 Andreas Mauz
central importance to that discipline and to the church that it serves. Christi-
anity, it is sometimes said, is in its essence a ‘storytelling community’—its
deep structure is narrative:
Storytelling is basic for faith because only in the act of telling can our story be
bound in with that of God and Jesus; because this story must be told; and so that it
can be told as an unfinished story into which the faithful write their own stories
and, in so doing, carry the story forward. Thus at its elemental level Christian faith
has a ‘narrative deep structure’. (Arens 1988: 24)
Narration, then, is a recurrent topos of theology. It is not, however, the only
way in which theology speaks, nor is it the only mode of speech relevant to
theology. Theo-logy, in the broad sense of ‘God-talk’, takes on many different
forms, concretized in the multiple categories of myth, hymn, gospel, vision,
psalm, legend, prayer, creed, confession of sins, song, sermon, dialogue, cate-
chism, tract, commentary, concordance, law, review, essay, dogma etc. The
series is manifestly one of increasing abstraction, with the language of prayer
situated worlds away from academic discourse on ‘the problem of God’.1
The decisive difference is not simply a matter of form and style: the mode of
utterance is different. Thus, where academic discourse speaks of God, prayer
(also) speaks to him: the speech mode of prayer is one of witnessing or con-
fessing, which involves the subjectivity of the speaker to an incomparably
higher degree than does the act of academic writing.
The awareness of the inherent multiplicity of ‘God-talk’ has generated
theological schemes and orders of immense variety. Taking up the distinc-
tion just mentioned, Hermann Deuser (1999: 22ff.), for example, suggests a
three-fold division of religious, theological and confessional language. Religious lan-
guage (paradigmatically in prayer) is a vital enactment of faith, while theological
language is an academic reflection on faith (and thus on religious language),
and confessional language is situated somewhere between the two as the lan-
guage of church teaching, bound up with the institution2 and combining the
implicit theology of religious language with its explicitation in theological
language. Again, there is an evident scale of abstraction here, with prayer as
the “first and immediate expression” of faith, the confession of faith (or
creed) as “its more general and repeated form”, and theology as the “criti-
cally reflected” expression of that form. (That this sequence can be readily
inverted is also apparent: a concrete act of faith in the form of prayer may
well be based on a creed that itself incorporates much theological reflec-
1 I. e. from theological reflection on the being of God, more precisely his reality, essence, and
action.
2 See the Confession of Faith of the German Lutheran Church, the Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/89),
or the Account of Faith (1977) of the Union of Protestant Free Churches in Germany.
Theology and Narration 263
tion.)3 Another way of expressing this scale would be to speak of object lan-
guage and metalanguage. In these terms theology is a metalanguage, meta-‘God-
talk’, a type of utterance that refers back to and assumes into the methodol-
ogically controlled discourse of science the immediacy and multiplicity of the
religious and confessional modes. As the critical reflection of these other
modes theology ideally impacts upon them in its turn.
Applied to narration, Deuser’s modal scale raises the key question of the
level at which storytelling takes place. That it occurs de facto in religious
language is clear—prominently (though not exclusively so) in the biblical
narratives. But does it also play a role in confessional and theological lan-
guage? Put like that, the issue is one of description. It becomes theologically
interesting—if not hazardous—when the descriptive perspective is joined by a
normative one and the question arises: should narration play a role—given that
it can and does so—at these more abstract levels?
Reduced to its lineaments, that is the frame within which discussion of
the relation between theology and narration generally occurs: prima facie,
narration appears to be one mode of ‘God-talk’ among others. The aim of
the following reflections is to demonstrate in what sense and on what
grounds it has been termed the neglected central mode not only of religious
but also of theological language. This task can only be undertaken on a mod-
est scale in the present context. Accordingly, despite the many areas of theo-
logical concern in which, as has been indicated, storytelling plays a significant
role, the present argument will confine itself to the impact of the concept on
modern Protestant systematic theology in German.4 This immediately excludes
two other widely ramifying areas of discussion: biblical criticism (both Old and
New Testament research)5, and practical theology6. Here too, however, narra-
tion has a role to play, for it focuses the question of the openness of these
sub-disciplines to new parameters—which, in turn, impinges on their very
legitimacy.
3 That the spectrum of religious articulations includes (not just marginally but essentially) non-
verbal forms such as image, dance, glossolalia, silence etc. is an aspect that can only be touched
upon in this context.
4 Systematic theology (or dogmatics) is concerned with the doctrinal development of the contents of
belief. It covers such areas as God, creation, Jesus Christ (christology), the trinity, sin (hamar-
tiology), redemption (soteriology) and the last things (eschatology).
5 Specifically what has been called ‘narrative exegesis’ (see Marguerat/Bourquin 1999).
6 Practical theology is concerned with the day-to-day practices of the church, including church
services and preaching, church leadership, counselling, social work and religious education. It is
what Schleiermacher called “the theory of practice”. For a general introduction to the theologi-
cal subdisciplines and their interrelations see Deuser (1999: 177-184).
264 Andreas Mauz
After an initial survey of the debate that has taken place among German-
speaking theologians around the concept of ‘narrative theology’ (2)7, I aim
to draw a provisional balance (3) more closely involving the perspective and
terminology of literary criticism. The significant absences that become evi-
dent in this context indicate the holistic—and by the same token polemic—
nature of the theological view of narration. These reflections lead (4) in the
direction of a remarkable contribution made by the literary scholar Klaus
Weimar, who sees narration and theology as engaged in an entirely different
type of systematic relation: Weimar has demonstrated how central the-
ologumena recur in a covert fashion in the distinctions and categories of
narratological theory. His observations provide an appropriate springboard
for my concluding reflections on the topic (5). So far as the manner of pres-
entation is concerned, the overall aim of this article is to report on a field of
discourse at the interface of theology with literary science rather than to pro-
vide an independent contribution to that discourse. To do this in 2008 is to
revive a discussion whose heyday lies somewhat in the past. Nonetheless, the
mode of report selected here may indicate its continuing topicality.
2. Research: An Overview
2.1 The “Narrative Theology” Project (Weinrich, Metz) …
Considering the many theological contexts in which storytelling plays a sig-

nificant role, it may come as a surprise to learn that—in the German tradi-
tion at least—the concept of narrative theology was a real discovery, not
only at the descriptive but also at the prescriptive level. For narrative theology,
when it came, was the name of a critical theological programme containing
several quite heterogeneous strands.8
The beginning of the debate can be precisely dated to May 1973 and the
appearance of an issue of the progressive Catholic periodical Concilium de-
voted to “The Crisis of Religious Language”. It contained two essays,
printed side by side, which sketched out the contours of the later discussion.
The first of these was, remarkably, not from a theologian at all, but from the
well-known linguist Harald Weinrich. Indeed he seems to have been the first
to use (in the title of his essay) the controversial compositum narrative theol-
7 The earlier discussion in the English-speaking world has a clearly different emphasis. See for a
general overview Wenzel (1998). See also Comstock (1987), Hauerwas/Jones (1989) and
Loughlin (1996).
8 The survey that follows is defined by its focus on the explicit concept of ‘narrative theology’,
albeit to the exclusion of many other contributions that bear on the issues involved.
ogy.9 The second text, “Brief Apologia for Storytelling” came from the pen of
the Catholic fundamental theologian Jean Baptiste Metz (1973).10 Both writ-
ers intended to launch a programmatic line of thought, but with different
emphases. Where they agreed was in the underlying thesis that not only
theological discourse but present-day society as a whole had entered a “post-
narrative” phase (Weinrich 1973: 331; cf. also Metz 1973: 336)—hence
Metz’s formulation of his thesis as an apologia.11 They both saw theology as
particularly affected by this crisis; for, as Weinrich put it, “Christianity is a
narrative community” (Weinrich 1973: 330), an axiom which Metz (1973:
336) qualified with the differentiation: “[Christianity is] not primarily a com-
munity of argument or interpretation but quite simply a narrative commu-
nity.”
For Metz the narrative problem stands in a broader context. Narrative
theology is one aspect of the ‘political theology’ programme he conceived in
the manner of the Frankfurt School as a critique of contemporary society.12
He saw narration as a mode of theology sensitive to experience, and espe-
cially to unatoned suffering. He speaks in this context of a “memorative-
narrative theology” (ibid.: 339) and of the memoria passionis—which sets all
suffering in relation to that of Christ—as a “dangerous memory” (ibid.: 337)
disrupting the argumentative force of the ‘victor’s history’ wherever that
occurs. Narrative takes on a virtually sacramental quality as “the medium of
salvation and of history” (ibid.), a stance diametrically opposed to a theology
that would, on simple theoretical grounds, “banish [narrative] to the sphere
of precritical expression” and allocate “all linguistic expressions of faith to
the category of objectivizations” (ibid.: 335). To do this, Metz argues, is to
render the experience of faith indefinable, and the “exchange of experience”
(ibid.) that is the proper material of narrative impossible.
Metz does not, however, (as he is sometimes accused of doing) draw the
reciprocal conclusion that argumentation has no place in theology. What he
is interested in is a “relativization of argumentative theology” (ibid.: 340). A
fundamental trait of his theological programme becomes apparent in his
explicit referral of the bond between narrative and experience to Walter Ben-
9 Weinrich (1973). The concept itself is a good deal older. In 17th century theology the concept
of “theologia historica seu narrativa” was used to distinguish the history of dogma from “the-
ologia dogmatica” in the proper sense. See O. Ritschl (1920).
10 See also the collection co-edited by Metz in the same year: Metz/Jossua (1973). For an intro-
duction to Metz’s theology see Delgado (2000).
11 This agreement is so fundamental that it requires no further reason – which is all the more
interesting in view of the irreducibly anthropological dimension of narrative on which (with
Schapp and/or Ricœur) they here and elsewhere insist.
12 The essay is extant in a revised form in Metz (1977). His project must be distinguished from
that of Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie that has continued to attract interest ever since its initial
publication in 1922. See Brokoff/Fohrmann (2003).
266 Andreas Mauz
jamin,13 and in his citation of Martin Buber’s collection of Tales of Hasidim,

together with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Faith (which he calls “a great en-
cyclopaedia of tales of hope”; Metz 1973: 335), as examples of the “practical,
liberating character of narrative” (ibid.). Storytelling in Metz’s view is a spe-
cifically Jewish strength, a Jewish virtue reflected in the messianic slant of his
thought: for Metz, theology “after Auschwitz” is in radical need of a “Jewish
corrective”.14
Weinrich’s approach to narrative theology is more openly historical—and
it is, for him, a history of decline. The narrative quality of early Christianity is
evident from biblical documents; but “in the encounter with the Hellenistic
world [Christianity] lost its narrative innocence” (Weinrich 1973: 331). Mythos
succumbed to logos and, despite the narrative strand that runs through the
history of philosophy (Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Nietzsche), the Christian
theological tradition veered definitively towards the “armies of other phi-
losophers […] who see their task as the construction of systems and theo-
ries, as reasoning and debate” (ibid.)15. What followed was a “generally secu-
lar tendency towards demythologization and the banning of story and its
telling from the Christian tradition” (ibid.: 331)16. In a rhetorical twist (of the
sort familiar to Asterix and Obelix fans) Weinrich then asks: “Every story
…?” His point is that the ban could never be complete: it inevitably col-
lapses in the face of Easter—a highly interesting theological thesis. The ex-
ception marked in the message ‘He has risen’ becomes “the story of stories,
subsuming into itself all other narratable events” (ibid.: 331). Weinrich’s sec-
ondary thesis, prescinding altogether from de facto storytelling, is compara-
tively speculative. He argues that the resistance of this central event to demy-
thologization may mean that it alone remains to be told as a story—“an im-
portant dispensation in a post-narrative time” (ibid.).
The story of decline ends for Weinrich in the “holy or unholy alliance”
(ibid.: 333) between theology and modern scholarship—above all in its rela-
tion to historiography. If (as Danto maintains17) historians are also storytell-
13 Central here (see ibid., 334) is Benjamin’s “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai
Lesskows” (1937). On the general issue of Benjamin’s relevance for Metz see Ostovich (1994).
14 See Delgado (2000) and Müller (1988). The Jewish tradition plays a similar role in Dorothee
Sölles’ (1988) related project of ‘theopoetics’ – as opposed to (and critical of) theology.
15 Weinrich himself seems barely to have noticed the problem of idealization latent in the sugges-
tive phrase “from mythos to logos”, especially in relation to the concept of “narrative innocence”.
Only later did this meet with opposition. For an overview see Wacker (1977: 97ff.).
16 The concept of demythologization is particularly associated with the New Testament theologian
Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) whose powerful but controversial programme – influenced by
Heidegger – involved laying bare the Bible’s existential “core” of mythical discourse, the
kerygma with its divine appeal to existential decision, which he considered dissoluble from its
linguistic and cultural “shell”. See his classic essay: Bultmann (1985 [1941]).
17 Danto (1968: 111): “History tells stories”. Today Weinrich would probably call on the work of
Hayden White (1987).
ers, the pathos of their position lies in the assertion that their stories are true.
Unable to resist the prestige of the true story produced in a methodologically
controlled environment, theology in turn has begun to question the truth-
value of its narratives. Yet what U. Wilckens has called its “retreating skir-
mishes” (ibid.: 332) have concentrated on the periphery—palpably so in the
modest results of classic historico-critical exegesis. Here it was easy to satisfy
methodological standards—easier at least than it would have been to answer
the Easter question “not merely by telling the story, but by telling it with the
emphasis of a historian: ‘He has truly risen!’” (ibid.)
The sweep of Weinrich’s thought, roughly outlined above18, functions in
his discourse as a background against which his real concern is gradually
revealed. His goal is to (at least partially) regain the lost “innocence of the
story” in the form of narrative theology. This will immediately call in ques-
tion “the bond with (academic) history” in whose wake theology “stares
fixedly at the single point where a story is tested for truth” (ibid.: 333). What
will take its place as a criterion of theological relevance, Weinrich suggests—
and here again he is close to Bultmann—is the receptive category of concern
(Betroffenheit): “Facticity is not the sine qua non condition of a story’s impact-
ing and ‘concerning’ us. We receive fictional stories, too, with concern.”
(ibid.) Even as a theoretical science theology need not “small-mindedly
deny” (ibid.) its received fund of stories. In sum, Weinrich installs ‘narrative
concern’ as a positive alternative to historical truth: this corresponds to the
‘nature’ of Christianity as it is revealed, even after the loss of narrative inno-
cence, in the central event of the resurrection: the event that can only ever be
articulated as a story.
If one considers Metz’s und Weinrich’s positions together, it becomes
apparent that, for all their differences, they share a strong model of narrative
theology: narration is not just a mode of religious language: it has a significant
role to play in theological discourse as well. Without entirely disregarding or
devaluing conceptual, argumentative thought, both authors stress the point
18 Weinrich’s position does not fully accord with the exegetical and dogmatic discussions of his
day. It was by no means the case that “theologians held the unanimous and virtually unques-
tioned view that biblical narratives [...] stand or fall on their truth value as determined by the
recognized methods of historical scholarship” (Weinrich 1973: 332.). It was precisely the his-
torically unanswerable question of the historicity of the resurrection that, beginning with the
Enlightenment critique of religion, led to the understanding that historical truth was not neces-
sarily the only criterion of theological relevance. Accordingly, Bultmann’s thesis – whose key
utterance was the assertion “Jesus rose again in the kerygma” – was received with widespread
approval. Bultmann not only bypassed the issue of a methodically convincing historical answer,
but declared the underlying (historical) question itself to be theologically insignificant: “If it is
the case [that he is present to those who hear him], all speculations about the being of the risen
[Jesus], all stories of the empty grave, all Easter legends, whatever portion of historical fact they
may contain, are quite indifferent. Belief in Easter means believing in the Jesus present in the
kerygma” (Bultmann 1960: 27).
268 Andreas Mauz
that theology can only fulfil its scientific task through (also) telling stories—
whether in the spirit of “dangerous memory” of the victims, or in that of
safeguarding the existential moment of concern in the face of rigorous his-
torical methods and standards.—Both Metz’s and Weinrich’s theses met
with wide acceptance, questions being directed, if anything, not to their pro-
gramme itself but to its format. Critique, when it came, was (not exclusively
but for the most part) in the shape of different and weaker models of narra-
tive theology.19
2.2 … and Its Critique: Ritschl and Jüngel
Two critiques of narrative theology made a lasting impression on Protestant

theology: those of Dietrich Ritschl and Eberhard Jüngel.
For the systematic theologian Ritschl (1976: 41), ‘narrative theology’ was a
“misnomer beneath which lay a clearly definable programme”. The pro-
gramme itself he largely shared, but the fundamental distinction he made
between theological and pre-theological discourse led him to prefer the
broader and less technical term ‘story’; and stories, the title of a 1976 essay
put it, are the “raw material of theology”.20 The clear allocation of narrative
to a subordinate position allowed Ritschl to distance himself from what he
called the “modish programme” (ibid.: 36), in contrast to which he outlined
in explicit terms his own understanding of the role (or roles) of theology
proper. These were (1) “clarification (in the service of communication)”; (2)
“safeguarding coherence (in the service of logic and ethics)”; (3) “reflection
on the limited flexibility of contemporary language (respecting tradition)”;
and (4) “stimulation of new thinking and the opening of new perspectives”
(ibid.: 9). Quite evidently, stories have little to contribute at least to the first
three of these tasks: they are situated, Ritschl argued, “‘prior’ to these opera-
tions” (ibid.). This was not to disparage the role of “raw material”; Ritschl,
too, upheld the central significance of narrative structure in and for the bibli-
cal writings; he, too, saw human identity as determined in and by stories.21 In
this sense theology was “in its essence concerned with stories”; but this did
19 For the breadth of this debate see Wacker (1977).
20 Along with Ritschl’s essay the monograph contains a far less widely received article by Jones
entitled “Das Story-Konzept und die Theologie” (‘Theology and the Concept of Story’, 42-68),
along with two sermons illustrating that concept (69-75) – typical evidence of Ritschl’s practical
bent. The significance of his contribution can be judged by its inclusion (in excerpts) in Härle
(2007b). For a self-portrait of Ritschl see Henning/Lehmkühler (1998), 3-23.
21 See ibid., 15.36. Ritschl elsewhere (1984: 49) cites Old Testament scholarship (which he had
also at one time taught) as well as psychoanalysis as defining factors in his concept of story.
This had not primarily developed in the debate with narrative theology. By his own account he
had discussed the theological usefulness of the concept with biblical scholars of his acquaint-
ance from 1958 onwards (ibid., 47). For the precise role of story in Ritschl’s theology see ibid. I
B, H; III B, and Ritschl (2005: 81).
not mean that it “should articulate itself in stories” (ibid.: 7). In the light of
the fourfold task outlined above, “theology itself”, as Ritschl (1984: 51)
axiomatically put it, “is regulative, not narrative.”
Ritschl’s view did not, however, end with this categorical statement; he
took up its implications for the story, listing the various forms and functions
of what he called that “idiom” (Ritschl 1976: 18), and elaborating on the
transition from story (as one type of raw material) to the “regulative axioms”
(ibid.: 39) of theology. Without going into detail, his reflections on that cru-
cial transition should be mentioned, if only because the rigour and precision
of his thought distinguishes it markedly from that of most other writing on
the topic. Finally, lest the impression be conveyed that Ritschl had no inter-
est in a theology concerned with life experience and social relevance (in the
sense advocated by Metz), it must be stated that, despite his plea for aca-
demic rigour in theological thought, his interest in a theology alive and sensi-
tive to the contemporary world was unmistakable.22
In 1977, a year after Ritschl’s ‘raw material’ thesis, Eberhard Jüngel’s ma-
jor study, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (‘God as Mystery of the World’) ap-
peared.23 Its subtitle, ‘towards a theology of the crucified in the dispute be-
tween theism and atheism’ established a context for narrative and narration
entirely different from that postulated by Ritschl. And indeed Jüngel’s inten-
tion could scarcely have been more fundamental: to put theology on a Chris-
tological basis that would speak the language of modernity and take seriously
three crucial contemporary problems: the “linguistic impossibility of placing
God”, the corresponding and “still increasing unthinkability of God”, and
“the inarticulacy of theology” (Jüngel 1992: 2). In the light of what has been
said above, the occurrence of the keyword ‘narrative theology’ in this context
will not be surprising; it is, however, important to focus the specific role
Jüngel accorded to it. Unlike Ritschl, he accepts its basic legitimacy; but like
him he
cannot decide […] whether it is feasible in the form of a rigorous dogmatic theol-
ogy, or whether a narrative theology does not, rather, belong to the sphere of the
church’s practical self-realization with its Sitz im Leben in the proclamation [of the
gospel] 24.
22 See his references to Black Theology (ibid., 33), as well as his assertion that “constructive and
decisively important theology today is above all oral” (ibid. 12, note 9) and is current in the
countries of the south.
23 For a concise presentation of the position of the renowned Tübingen systematic theologian see
Rohls (1997: 805-810; “Jüngel’s Hermeneutic Barthianism”). See also Jüngel’s statement in
Henning/Lehmkühler (1998: 188-210).
24 Ibid., foreword to the first and second editions, XVII. Ritschl (1976: 39 note 28) had earlier
criticized Jüngel’s use of the concept in his classic essay “Metaphorische Wahrheit. Zur Herme-
neutik einer narrativen Theologie” (‘Metaphorical Truth: Towards a Hermeneutics of Narrative
Theology’, Jüngel 1974).
270 Andreas Mauz
Irrespective of this (admittedly central) question, Jüngel gives great promi-

nence to the story topos, and—in contrast to the other authors mentioned—
he does so in the context of dogmatic thought in the strictest sense. Towards
the end of his book the decisive proposition 19 opens the section concerned
with the Christological foundations of theology, the ultimate goal of Jüngel’s
entire argument. Here he returns to the triple question outlined above, in the
form of the “thinkability”, “effability” and “humanity” of God. He an-
nounces his programme in the title of the section: “The humanity of God as
a story to be told. Some prior hermeneutic reflections”; for it is the humanity
of God in Jesus Christ that drives the entire reflection on narrative and nar-
ration. The event of the incarnation signifies a “change of time […] and his-
tory” (ibid.: 413); if this significance is to be articulated at all, it must be in a
linguistic mode appropriate to the event. The language of God’s humanity
must be
structurally geared to expressing time and history. […] This is, however, the case in
the mode of narrative, which genuinely unites articulacy and temporality in a single
order and, along with interjection and evocation, can best claim to represent an
autochthonous language. God’s humanity enters the world in the act of storytelling.
Jesus tells of God in parables before he himself is proclaimed a parable of God.
(ibid.)
Jüngel’s careful and thorough rooting of the need for theological narrative in
the complex of the incarnation sets him over against Metz (ibid.: 425f.)
and—at a critical level—Weinrich (ibid.: 419ff.). His subtle argumentation
touches on the recurrent issue of the implications of narrative theology for theo-
logical narration. If “the thought that seeks to understand God […] is repeat-
edly thrown back on narrative” and must “itself embark on narrative” (ibid.:
414), the need inevitably arises to clarify whether that proposition is also
necessarily narrative. For Jüngel, Metz and Weinrich this is not the case. That
Metz (1973: 336) quotes a Hasidic story25 and Weinrich (1973: 329) opens
his deliberations with an apocryphal New Testament text is merely a stylistic
gambit: their apologias themselves are consistently argumentative. In fact,
the problem of self-referentiality manifestly increases to the extent that nar-
rative is recommended as an alternative to the shortcomings of reasoning
and argument, and this is bound to impact the strong models of narrative
theology more acutely than the weak model proposed by Ritschl. One might
be tempted to call the tension in these strong models a “performative con-
tradiction” (Habermas). At all events the issue of argument versus narration
focuses the need to clarify the definitions and relations of the two opposing
25 The instance quoted for the all-changing impact of narrative is, interestingly enough, precisely
not taken from ‘real life’. This strengthens the suspicion that narrative is here “ultimately deval-
ued into a post factum illustration of the properly argumentative discourse of theology”
(Sandler 2002: 530).
modes. How otherwise could one begin to follow Jüngel’s (1992: 414) state-
ment: “Thinking of God can only be thought of as a conceptually controlled
storytelling of God?” (see ibid.: 428)
Despite his critical stance vis à vis Metz and Weinrich, and his initially
professed “uncertainty”, Jüngel - if we take this dictum seriously - evidently
also proposes a strong model of narrative theology. Indeed this is demanded
(at least as an ideal) by his whole approach. To bridge the gulf that conse-
quently opens between ideal and practice he appeals to what might be called
the exception-clause of genius, citing the case of his own teacher, Karl Barth.
It was Barth’s “specific genius”, he writes, to create “a genuine bond be-
tween argumentative and narrative dogmatics” which “allowed the argumen-
tative power of the story to speak for itself” (ibid.: 427, n. 52)26. This move
of Jüngel’s at least partially draws the sting from the charge of performative
contradiction: not everyone is gifted to combine so faultlessly the two modes
of discourse; enough, then, that the mass of participants confine themselves
to the conceptual argument that is their natural métier.27
2.3 From Mainstream to Backwater
The positions taken by these authors, and their implications for the various
disciplines of theology, attracted much attention, discussion and critique in
subsequent years.28 But a mere decade after the appearance of Metz and
Weinrich’s essays, Bernd Wacker could, in his “Towards a Balance” (1983),
accept the verdict of the religious pedagogue Helmut Anselm (1981: 117)
that “narrative theology was for a short time on everyone’s lips. Today it
seems already a thing of the past.” The decline in interest after the mid 1980s
in both Protestant and Catholic circles was undeniable, and when in 1997 the
Catholic theologian and Germanist Knut Wenzel published his dissertation
Zur Narrativität des Theologischen29 (‘On Theological Narrativity’) it aroused
little interest, despite the fact that Wenzel sought a solution to a repeated
stumbling-block: the theological indeterminacy of the central concepts of
narration and narrativity. Unsurprisingly, he calls on Paul Ricœur, whose
approach to narratology is in any case close to theology (see e. g. Ricœur
1995), arguing that the indeterminacy in question is theologically well
founded:
26 For Barth’s own position on narrative see Wacker (1977: 73-81).

27 It should be mentioned here that Jüngel himself published several much acclaimed volumes of
sermons.
28 The many essays in practical theology, as well as Dietmar Mieth’s benchmark contribution to
the development of a ‘narrative ethics’, deserve special mention. Major works of systematic
theology were the exception at that time. For an overview see the bibliography in Wacker
(1983: 26-29).
29 See also: Wenzel (1996).
272 Andreas Mauz
the indeterminacy of the concept reveals itself […] as an indication of the radical
historicity of a theology that—as narrative—not only has history as its theme, but
sees itself as a voice within that narrative. Yet again: narrative theology is immersed
in its own thematic element of time and history (Geschichte)—history understood in
its double sense of ‘account’ (Historie) and ‘story’ (Erzählung). (Wenzel 1997: 15)30
What Wenzel proposed under the programmatic title of ‘Theological Narra-
tivity’ is something which had, up to that point, been lacking: an explicitly
reflective narrative theology. The scarcely audible response to his thesis was
doubtless due in part to the general shift in thematic focus, but it can be
ascribed with even greater conviction to the hermeneutically refined level of
his argument. A third factor may have been simply denominational: up to
now the discussion had been confined to Protestant theology. Whatever the
case, his work receives no mention at all in the latest contribution to the
discussion, the 2005 volume of essays Dogmatik erzählen? Die Bedeutung des
Erzählens für eine biblische orientierte Dogmatik (‘Narrating Dogmatics? The role
of storytelling in a biblically oriented dogmatic theology’; Schneider-Flume/
Hiller 2005).
2.4 Leipzig Reprise: “Narrating Dogma?” (Schneider-Flume)
The general argument of the volume in question can be discerned in the

contributions of one of its editors, the Leipzig systematic theologian Gunda
Schneider-Flume.31 In her introduction Schneider-Flume (2005a: 3) expressly
cites what she calls the “old programme” of narrative theology, an approach
she judges to be of “limited legitimacy”, in whose “rejuvenation” the essays
presented in the collection are, she makes clear, not interested. On the con-
trary, the relevance of narrative theology is to be understood here in the con-
text of reflection on the traditional task of dogmatic theology, which re-
mains, for her, “the explication of the scriptures” (ibid.). The unmistakably
Lutheran slant to this manifesto carries over into the question that forms the
title of Schneider-Flume’s own first essay (as it does of the volume as a
whole): “Narrating Dogma?”—described in her subtitle as a “plea for a bib-
lical theology”. Schneider-Flume sees narrative theology in the old sense as
harbouring two major “dangers and limitations […]: the arbitrariness, or
ideological […] abuse, of narration on the one hand, and the lack of credibil-
ity of metanarrative remarked by Jean-François Lyotard on the other” (ibid.:
4). However, neither of these deficiencies is further elaborated, nor does it
become clear how they are to be avoided in the author’s own approach.32
30 The German word Geschichte is commonly used for both ‘history’ and ‘story’ [trans.].
31 But see the painstaking review by Linde (2007).
32 The argument that the “unique history of God” is not a metahistory because it “enters [individ-
ual] life-histories as a concrete force” (ibid.) certainly constitutes no objection to Lyotard’s un-
derstanding of metahistory.
Despite the coolness of this volume towards narrative theology, the di-
agnosis underlying its reprise of the topic has a familiar ring: Christians suf-
fer from “inarticulacy” (ibid.: 3) vis à vis their faith; the “great dogmatic
symbols” (ibid.: 6)—sin, justification, providence, God—no longer ade-
quately express Christian experience. In these circumstances the story is
called upon to “break up the[se] great dogmatic concepts” (ibid.: 3). Yet, true
to the principle avowed by Ritschl and Jüngel,33 Schneider-Flume also insists
that dogmatic theology, albeit reflecting narrative and, as such, beholden to
it, should not itself be conceived in narrative terms. Where she differs from
Ritschl is in the scope of what she thinks of in this context as narrative: not
any corpus of stories but the stories of the Bible. These, for her, are the “ma-
terial of dogmatic thought“ (ibid.: 11).
How dogmatic theology is to be practised as the interpretation and ex-
position of biblical writings is demonstrated in Schneider-Flume’s (2005b)
second contribution to the volume, where she directly confronts the prob-
lem, familiar to theologians, of speaking in a single breath of “the many sto-
ries of the biblical tradition and the one story of God.” The narrative prob-
lem, in other words, appears against the horizon of the ‘scriptural principle’
(sola scriptura)34, and even more precisely against that of the unity and centric-
ity of the scriptures. To speak in these terms is to assume the accents of the
Reformers, for whom Jesus Christ was the one binding factor within a multi-
farious biblical tradition. “Take Christ out of the scriptures and what more
will you find in them?” Luther had asked35. The significance of the concept
of scriptural centring was developed in the form of the doctrine of justifica-
tion36; as such it underlies all critical theology, including that whose object is
the matter of the scriptures themselves.37
The postulate of an underlying unity of scriptural intention has certain
problematic consequences for theology. What does it entail, for example, for
that portion of the sacred books of Christianity that comprise the Old Tes-
tament, the majority of whose writings belong at least primarily not to the
33 In contrast to the analysis presented here, Jüngel in these terms represents a weak model.
34 Viz. of the Reformers’ doctrine that the scriptures are the sole source and norm of faith and
consequently also of theology; this contrasted with the Roman Catholic appeal to the authority
of tradition as a second norm – see Ebeling (1966). For a fuller treatment of the scriptural issue
see Härle (2007a: 111-139).
35 “Tolle Christum e scripturis, quid amplius in illis invenies?” (Luther 1525: 606, 29).
36 I. e. the Reformers’ doctrine that mankind, locked in original sin, can and will be uncondition-
ally set in a rightful relation to God (viz. justified) by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone
(sola fide) in the redeeming power of Christ (solus Christus).
37 “It is from the platform of the Bible itself that the Bible becomes both addressee and object of
critical analysis. Because the authority of scripture is derived from the authority of scripture,
Christ’s dealings [“was Christus treibt”, Luther] themselves become the critical standard against
which the utterances of scripture as a whole and of its individual books must be measured; it is
with Christ that they must match.” (Härle 2007a: 138f.)
274 Andreas Mauz
Christian tradition at all but to the Jewish?38 Above all, however, it was the
results of critical historical research that led to what W. Pannenberg has
called “a crisis of the scriptural principle”; for what this demonstrated was
precisely not the unity but the multiplicity of at times contradictory theologi-
cal conceptions. Why, therefore, theology should remain subservient to
scripture is not easy to establish convincingly—which is why the scriptures
tend to play an increasingly background role in recent systematic theological
discussion. Aware of this development, and of the advent in their place of
what she calls “the generalized religious constructs of subjectivity theory”,
Schneider-Flume argues decisively for a new opening of systematic theology
towards narrative and narration. Theology, she says, has forgotten what “ex-
periential riches [are lost] by giving up the biblical tradition […] Faced with
this loss, the work of dogmatic theology must concentrate on finding its way
back to the biblical stories.” (ibid.)
Nevertheless, rather than engaging immediately in this task, Schneider-
Flume turns her attention to a counter-proposition concerned with a modern
approach to scriptural centring: Ingolf U. Dalferth’s (1997: 189) thesis that
the centre of the scriptures is “external […]: not within the semantic horizon
of the biblical texts but within their pragmatic horizon in the work of the
Christian church”39. The texts themselves, Dalferth maintains, do not raise
the question of a ‘centre’ at all; this arises in the wake of the broader attempt
to expound the presence and working of God in the world. For her part,
Schneider-Flume utterly rejects the shift from a received principle of biblical
interpretation to a fundamental principle of theological hermeneutics.
Against Dalferth she hammers home her traditional Lutheran position, exe-
getically enriched with three biblical “traces of the (hi)story of God”, which
she entitles “the realism of mercy”, “hearing the cry for salvation” and
“righteousness and vicariousness” (see Schneider-Flume 2005b: 41-50).
These three strands of biblical history, she argues, reveal the unity of the
story of God within the multiplicity and diversity of the biblical accounts.
Far from deciding the issue, however, her uncompromising riposte pro-
vokes more questions about Schneider-Flume’s position. If her ultimate ob-
jective is to break up the “great dogmatic concepts” because they are no
longer understood, it is not immediately clear how this is to be achieved with
the help of biblical narratives. That it is they (rather than narratives as such)
that are invoked is understandable as a traditional reflex (sola scriptura); but at
least it should be made clear why the frequently lamented alien quality of the
Bible’s textual worlds suddenly no longer presents an obstacle. To put it
mildly, is the “prolongation of the Bible story into the present-day world”
38 See Schneider-Flume (2005b: 34, esp. the works listed in note 7).
39 For an exegetical presentation see Weder (NT) and Hermisson (OT) in the same volume. They
also attract Schneider-Flume’s criticism.
(Linde: 2007: 1116) really as straightforward as the author maintains? A sec-

ond objection concerns a similar discrepancy between the proposed defini-
tion and solution of the problem. If the “inarticulacy” predicated of “Chris-
tians” in their lack of understanding of the “great concepts” (Schneider-
Flume 2005a: 3) is as truly global a phenomenon as it is made out to be, it
scarcely follows that a “biblically oriented dogmatic theology” will be an
appropriate remedy. After all, dogmatic theology is the preserve of academic
theologians, and of an academic language that need not and cannot be intel-
ligible to all Christians. A far simpler (indeed banal) appeal would in the cir-
cumstances be more convincing: that the pastoral clergy should strive more
effectively to communicate a theologically informed and experientially rich
religious language to their communities—which does not, of course, recipro-
cally imply that academic theology can afford to be oblivious of religious
language.
3. Interim Balance: Narration—a Holistic-Polemic Concept
The foregoing discussion of some key approaches to narrative and narration

bears ample witness to the alterity of theological discourse on the subject.
The summary below (which is based on a wider range of publications than
those already cited) will attempt an interim balance from a point of view
closer to that of literary studies. Doing so, it hopes to shed a closer light on
the specific purpose and role of narration for systematic theology. If in the
process certain gaps are noted, this should be understood descriptively rather
than critically; for in an interdisciplinary context precisely those dimensions
(here of the phenomenon of narration) are most interesting that do not enter
the discourse of the partner discipline, or might even disrupt it. What distin-
guishes the theological discussion of narrative and narration, then, can be ex-
pressed in the following propositions:
In all the approaches so far discussed, the concepts of narration, storytel-
ling etc. are, even in the weak models, consistently positive (rather than
neutral).
For theology the narrative problem is neither merely aesthetic nor stylis-
tic, nor is it purely didactic (and as such a topic for practical theology).
On the contrary, it falls (as above all Jüngel’s approach demonstrates)
within the purview of systematic theology in the strictest sense.
Nevertheless it is of little interest to any of these approaches how story-
telling actually operates. The whole issue is derivative: what is crucial is
its status for theology as a whole and/or for the subdisciplines. In other
words, the concept of narrative is not differentiated internally but exter-
nally, in relation to other competing positions.
276 Andreas Mauz
What is undoubtedly lost in the course of the debate is the emancipatory

thrust of its beginnings. What for Metz was a keystone of ‘political the-
ology’ is for Schneider-Flume no more than a keyword of traditionally
Lutheran ‘biblical theology’.
The highlighting of narrative tends to overlook the fact that much but
not all of the Bible falls within that category. The significance of other
genres (poetic, legal, epistolary) for narrative theology remains an open
question—and one to be addressed above all with regard to by Schnei-
der-Flume’s biblical dogmatic theology.
Within the narrative theology discourse, storytelling plays the more or
less simple role of the good alternative to conceptual argumentation’s
bad. Whilst many participants in the debate allow that these are not dis-
junctive opposites, the point is rarely developed. The programmatically
chiastic bond between the two—narration as a mode of argument, ar-
gument as a mode of narration—is passed over in silence, despite the
evidence for this within the biblical tradition, evidence quite as obvious
as that of the oft-cited Tales of Hasidim.40 Nor is mention made in this
context of Deuser’s ‘confessional’ language as a type of ‘God-talk’ medi-
ating between argument and storytelling.41
The alternatives of argument and narration are treated almost exclusively
in abstracto. Above all the proponents of a strong model of narrative the-
ology ignore the practical consequences of their position. For require-
ment and performance do not meet: the requirement to narrate de-
manded of theological language by no means entails an ability to do so
adequately (hence Jüngel’s waiver clause for genius).
The plea for a narrative theology does not carry the same implications
for all the theological sub-disciplines. In its strong form it impacts sys-
tematic theology most acutely, for here ‘God-talk’ takes on its most ab-
stract and highly specialized terminological form.
The more exclusively narration is propounded as the optimal mode of
‘God-talk’, the more pressing becomes the reciprocal question of the
mode of discourse in which that proposition is framed. Most approaches
ignore this self-referential dimension of the problem; those that do ac-
40 But see also Landfester’s (2005) historico-exegetical approach.

41 Petzoldt (2005: 73) crucially asks if the opposition between concept and narrative has not been
overly hasty. In the field of academic theology, too, it is not concepts but propositions (sentences)
that characterize dogmatic utterances: “A dogmatic utterance is only completed when the dog-
matic concept is joined with a predicate to form a sentence or judgment. [...] The utterance can
only enter scholarly discourse once it is expressed as a judgment. In this respect the utterances
of dogmatic theology must also fulfil the propositional postulate of scientific theory.” Petzoldt’s
essay is of particular interest in being the only one to take a critical stance towards the volume’s
overall programme.
knowledge it are content, like Jüngel, with a simple indication of the exis-
tence of the problem:
Before argumentative theology can become truly narrative it must de-
velop an ability to reflect on the mode and matter of narrative: it must
prove its dialectic and discursive capabilities. If “discourse is again [!] to
become narrative […] it urgently requires a discursive theory of narra-
tive” [Mieth]. (Jüngel 1992: 427)
The unquestioning assumption that storytelling is a theological virtue
derives largely from the notion that narrative and experience are one.
Their relation is not further analyzed but itself assumed as a sort of a
priori postulate, frequently backed by a classical reference (e. g. to Walter
Benjamin, see note 24 above). The categorical premise that concepts are
incapable of communicating experience is matched by the assumption
that narrative can do this to a high degree. The reciprocal question
whether narrative is not itself subject to limitations is not raised, nor is
any reference made to the role of experience in non-narrative poetic
modes (especially the Psalms).
Theological assent for narrative and narration invariably regards itself as
assent to a mode whose time is past (not just for theology). Thus,
Schneider-Flume (2005a: 4) wholeheartedly agrees that ‘we’ live in a
post-narrative era, and she, too, appeals to the diagnoses of Benjamin
and Adorno without, it seems, adverting to the huge shifts in the media
landscape that have taken place since they wrote.
Ever since its introduction, the concept of ‘narrative theology’ has largely
oscillated “between the twin poles of ‘storytelling theology’ on the one
hand and ‘theological theory of narration’ on the other” (Wacker 1983:
20).
The main reason for this oscillation would seem to be the very openness
of the concepts of narrative, narration, storytelling etc. Who tells whom
what story how and where frequently remains unclear.42 Standard liter-
ary-critical distinctions relating to the semantics (author versus narrator,
discours versus histoire, fictional versus factual account etc.) and pragmatics
of narration (author/work/reader, narration versus narrative, oral versus
written narrative etc.) scarcely play a role in the theological discussion.
Yet whether we are talking of one of Jesus’ parables or of Proust’s Re-
cherche is—quite apart from the question of differing canonicity—a mat-
42 A standard observation since Metz (1973: 341) and despite Wenzel (see Wacker 1977: 85ff.).
The lack of clear focus inevitably affects the paraphrases given here.
278 Andreas Mauz
ter of considerable consequence for the phenomenology of both narra-

tion and reading.43
The lack of such differentiation can be seen as the very condition under
which narrative and narration can function as a clear holistic alternative
to argument. Only as such can it fulfil the polemic function required of it
by theological discourse.44
4. Analogies: “The God of Texts” (Weimar)
A final reference must be made to an approach that brings narration and

theology into an entirely different relation to each other, and from a quite
different motive and angle. Far from launching a programmatic thesis or
critique (either disciplinary or interdisciplinary), Klaus Weimar’s 1998 essay
“Der Gott der Texte” (‘The God of Texts’) confines itself to a precise de-
scription of a number of striking analogies that appear between the two ar-
eas. In this approach literary-critical (and especially narratological) concepts
and distinctions finally play a central role.
The title of the essay is initially somewhat confusing; beneath it lies the
observation that literary criticism frequently impinges (or draws) upon theol-
ogy even when it is unaware of doing so. Recognizing God “neither as im-
mediate thematic focus, nor […] as historical agent or systematic source of
explanation” (ibid.: 145), literary criticism nevertheless has persistent and
unmistakable recourse to “procedures and concepts that—at least in earlier
times—were part and parcel of theology” (ibid.). Three areas in particular
attract Weimar’s attention: the doctrine of inspiration, the analogical mode of
interpreting and, above all, the concept of author. In each case his argument
proceeds identically, a sketch of the theological dimension of the concept
being followed by examples illustrating its less obvious literary-critical ana-
logue.
Thus the theological doctrine of inspiration, he argues, (like its poe-
tological counterpart) postulates a type of heteronomous utterance: one in
which two voices, that of a divine and of a human author, speak, the latter
(whether orally or in writing) articulating the will of the former. It is an or-
dering that recurs (albeit variously) in the predilection of literary studies to
43 Ritschl’s story becomes an umbrella term “embracing the suffering in Chile or Angola” as much
as the “story of Abraham” or “the story of my child”, irrespective of the profound differences
these present as theological raw material (Ritschl 1976: 10, 37). See also Weinrich (1973: 330f.).
44 The polemic instrumentalizing of the debate within academic theology may be at least partly
responsible for the lack of interest it aroused outside that circle. Significantly, the comprehen-
sive bibliography of narratological research published between 1976 and 1978 in successive is-
sues of the Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik carries no reference whatsoever to nar-
rative theology. See Wacker (1983: 30, n. 28).
read texts as symptoms of e. g. ‘society’ or the ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘dis-

course’. Neither the source of inspiration nor its instrument is in such cases
personal; in this type of global palimpsest the role of muse or Holy Spirit is
taken by an impersonal but all-powerful force. Narratologically the interest-
ing point is that theology, in contrast to poetics, links the blending of the
two voices to two different linguistic modes, the divine language of ‘things’
or ‘realities’—the verbum efficax within whose outreach word and being, word
and world are one (the classical texts being Gen 1 and Ps 33,9)—and human
language, whose words symptomatically lack such efficacy. “When the divine
language of things enters the human language of words per inspirationem, the
human author speaks […] in human words and the divine author speaks
through him […] to the things signified by those words.” (Weimar 1998:
146) The distinction, Weimar (ibid.: 147) argues, recurs in literary scholarship
in the “concept of the dual linguistic level specific to literature, current in
exemplary form in the narratological distinction between author and narra-
tor. […] author and narrator are related to each other as divine inspirer and
evangelist or prophet”. Heinrich Lee in Der grüne Heinrich is in this sense just
as much a creation of Gottfried Keller’s as, in Christian belief, mankind is
the creation of God. Whilst Heinrich speaks with the words of men, Keller
speaks in and through his character’s ‘human’ words the divine word of
‘things’.
The idea that certain texts involve some sort of inspired language under-
lies a wide range of hermeneutic practices. Heteronomous speech demands
interpretive techniques that reveal the higher meaning, the sensus spiritualis,
‘behind’ the immediate meaning of the words. Weimar’s point is that the
anagogical (including the allegorical) interpretation of texts—a traditional
canonical technique of Christian hermeneutics—far from being confined to
antiquity or the Middle Ages, is an accepted procedure of modern literary
science (see ibid.: 148). The mention of a bicycle pump in a text by Joyce
inspires interpretive constructs from phallic symbol to serpent in Paradise
that would be unlikely to occur to the (same) reader of a travel journal. Nev-
ertheless, the difficulty of the (still almost spontaneous) jump from sensus
litteralis to sensus spiritualis in the case of the familiar pump is, in comparison
with the anagogical reading of a biblical text, heightened by the absence of
any regula fidei to serve as prop or guideline. Between phallus and serpent (or
any further alternative) the reader may waver where he or she will not when
confronted with a biblical triad whose reference to the Trinity is canonically
guaranteed.45
Weimar’s deliberations culminate in his third section, devoted to the role
of author—and specifically to the thesis that a traditional idea of God has
45 See Bühler (2000) on Luther’s critique of interpretive reasoning.

280 Andreas Mauz
“slipped into literary studies and taken refuge in the concept of author”
(ibid.: 150).46 For
whenever one posits a ‘language of things’ as the basis for the meaning of things
within a textual world, one must at the same time posit a speaker of that language—
namely the author. The author of a literary text stands to the textual world that he
or she creates as, in received theological doctrine, God stands to the world that he
created. (ibid.: 149)47
Citing a passage from Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart, Weimar demon-
strates that at least eight of the classical attributes of God are predicable of a
human author in relation to the text: omnipotence and omniscience, invisi-
bility and incorporeality, omnipresence and immeasurability, eternity and
infinity. Understood as the creator of a textual world—that is to say from the
point of view of “textual theory” rather than (as is commonly the case in
literary studies) “text-production theory”—the literary author enjoys all these
attributes. And Weimar takes the significant further step of ascribing those
attributes “also, and in fact primarily, to the reader” (ibid.: 153)—for it is a
commonplace that the reader is the real creator of the concrete textual
world, however much readers of Ahnung und Gegenwart may selflessly insist
on ascribing the world of that novel to the historical Eichendorff.48 With or
without this final twist into the aesthetics of reception it remains plausible to
speak of the author as the ‘God of Texts’ for the simple reason that the clas-
sical doctrine of God has formulated, albeit unawares, a concept of author-
ship that perfectly dovetails with textual theory.
5. Conclusion
“Contemporary theological dictionaries are treacherous—above all in what

they leave out.” (Metz 1973: 334) The opening sentence of Metz’s ‘Brief
Apologia’ no longer reflects today’s situation. Recent theological encyclopae-
dias all contain an article on ‘narrative’, and both the Catholic Lexikon für
Theologie und Kirche (3LThK) and the Protestant Religion in Geschichte und Gegen-
wart (4RGG) even carry an independent entry on ‘narrative theology’.49
Thanks at least partly to Metz, one can, then, no longer speak in this context
of omission. It is nevertheless striking that, even in retrospect, the authors
(especially of the systematic sections) of the relevant articles still experience
46 Weimar’s argument doubles as an explication of Barthes’ postulate of the death of the author-
God: see Barthes (1984: 67).
47 Weimar’s concept of God is that of early-modern Lutheran orthodoxy: the texts on which he
draws are Quenstedt’s Theologia didactico-polemica (1685) and Buddeus’ Institutiones theologiae dog-
maticae (1724).
48 For the background to this see Weimar’s theory as expounded in Weimar (1994).
49 See Wenzel (1993) and Arens (2003).
certain difficulties in establishing the scope and locus of narration. Arens

(2003: 53), for example, notes once again the dilemma of the “outreach of
narrative”: are we talking here about “a, or indeed the, genuinely theological
method and approach, or are stories merely the ‘raw material’ (Ritschl) of a
theology whose processes are themselves argumentative”? Current theologi-
cal discourse, however, seems better able to live with these uncertainties than
was the case thirty years ago. The theological relevance of narrative—
especially for a church that confesses allegiance to the sola scriptura princi-
ple—is generally accepted; what has passed into history is the programmatic
foregrounding of ‘narrative theology’, though this does not in turn imply that
the problems that gave rise to that program have passed into oblivion. What
is the appropriate language of (systematic) theology? What is its ‘raw mate-
rial’? To what extent is it legitimate for the metalanguage of theology to dis-
tance itself from the world-centred language of religion? These questions
remain at the forefront of contemporary discussion, and in them the bibli-
cally sanctioned mode of narration is present and active, albeit in a signifi-
cantly altered perspective. Narration today more often features as one aspect
of an aesthetic50, poetic51 or poietic52 (dogmatic) theology that sees itself as a
medially open-ended response to the modern “crisis of the scriptural princi-
ple”.53
Be that as it may, it is not the after-life of narrative theology that is at is-
sue here. More to the point is one final but fundamental issue that emerges
from viewing the interim balance in the light of Weimar’s “God of Texts”.
For the manner in which narration and theology are linked in ‘narrative the-
ology’ raises the prospect of a new and independent type of theology. As we
have seen, it is the function of narration—above all its polemic function—not
its methods that have captivated the interest of theologians. How specific
narrative worlds were constructed and with what critical tools they can be
described was never of pressing interest. Against this background Weimar’s
essay reads—however unintentionally—as a plea for recapturing a lost di-
mension. Its focus on careful deployment of accepted narratological tech-
niques and methods absolves him in any case from the accusation of func-
tionalism. And without wanting to play off one approach against the other—
which (among other things) would fail to do justice to the established discipli-
nary role of narrative theology—one further benefit must be mentioned. For
50 See the three-volume Ästhetische Theologie (‘Aesthetic Theology’) of the writer and theologian
Klaas Huizing (2000-2004). See also Mertin (2002) for a sensitive critical presentation of that
work.
51 See Stock’s (1995-2007) to-date seven-volume Poetische Dogmatik (‘Poetic Dogmatics’), as well as
his essays in ‘pictorial theology’, Stock (1996 etc.).
52 See Bayer (1999).
53 See Huizing (2000-2004; 1996). For an overview of these and other approaches see Bauke-
Ruegg (2004: 199-254).
282 Andreas Mauz
Weimar’s contribution highlights the price that is paid when the twin poles
of narrative theology are joined in a venture whose primary motivation is
programmatic and polemic. The advantage of his more modest horizon is
that it generates results which are of interest to both disciplines involved—
and why else should literary scholarship be interested in the projects of the-
ology? An awareness of the latent theological dimension of a whole series of
critical concepts and procedures opens up new prospects for literary schol-
ars; though whether this breakthrough will be accompanied by joy at the
discovery of new relations or fear and trembling in the face of concepts al-
ready shed by theology centuries ago is hard to say. For theologians, the
prospect is similar. They can perceive their own concerns all the more clearly
through the lens of another discipline, but to do so involves a parallel am-
bivalence. This may be illustrated in a single example: for theology today, the
concept of narration is almost sacramental, its connotations wholly positive,
its outreach virtually unlimited. It will be interesting to see if this evaluation
is affected by an awareness of the limits imposed by the terminology, catego-
ries and concepts of literary narratology. It is at least thinkable that advert-
ence to the limitations of individual narrative perspectives (described, for ex-
ample, in such categories as voice and focalization) might introduce a meas-
ure of scepticism towards the unlimited power of narration and narrative as
such.54
A number of literary scholars and theologians apart from Klaus Weimar
have shown an interest in the relation between theology and narration from a
more closely narratological point of view, where (in contrast to narrative
exegesis) the textual corpus is not restricted to biblical writings. If it were not
for the grandiose overtones of such a term, one might think of their contri-
butions as paving the way for a new and welcome analytical ‘narratheology’.
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HARALD WEILNBÖCK
(Zürich)
Toward a New Interdisciplinarity: Integrating Psychological and

Humanities Approaches to Narrative
1. The Interdisciplinary Potential of Narratological Inquiry
Recent developments in narratology have paved the way for a closer inter-
disciplinary cooperation between narrative research in literary studies on the
one hand and psychology—especially psychotherapy research, psycho-
trauma studies, and developmental psychology—on the other. Although
cross-faculty research projects such as the one outlined in this paper are still
a rare exception,1 the advent of interdisciplinary (including psychological)
narratology coincides with a hermeneutical turn in psychological and social
research which used to be predominantly quantitative and statistical. Thus
qualitative-empirical research methodology employs narratological sequence
analysis to interpret and analyze the oral narratives given by individuals—an
approach that is hermeneutical in essence, albeit in a more systematic and
methodologically rigorous manner than is common in literary studies.
Hence, a potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration comes into sight
that may bridge the traditional gap between the text-theoretical humanities,
the interaction-theoretical social sciences, and qualitative approaches in psy-
chology. The particular approach of narratological Literary and Media Inter-
action Research (LIR), which I have developed over the last couple of years,
might lend itself as an example of such cross-disciplinary undertakings.
2. LIR: Core Research Questions, Theoretical Assumptions,

Societal Relevance
In the following, I will lay out LIR’s basic scientific objectives and research
questions, with particular reference to its interdisciplinary methodology. For
an approach that is truly interdisciplinary—and inter-narratological with re-
1 The Berlin School of Mind and Brain, funded by the German Excellence Initiative, might be an
example of truly cross-faculty cooperation between the neurosciences and the humanities.
Toward a New Interdisciplinarity 287
spect to the narrative theories of different disciplines—will enable us to pur-

sue culture studies in a way that is more immediately applicable and relevant
to the questions of contemporary society and its citizens than may have gen-
erally been the case with humanities scholarship.
The essential goal of narratological Literary and Media Interaction Re-
search is to better understand what people actually do when they interact
with fictional narratives. What precisely happens over the course of a lifetime
in mental, psycho-biographical and developmental respects when people
read novels, engage in aesthetic experience, and/or consume or produce fic-
tional media narratives?
Hence, LIR’s core research questions are: How do individuals—given
their personal and biographical dispositions—mentally interact with literary
texts, aesthetic objects and media productions, in particular with those which
they identify as having been (or still being) of high personal significance?
How does the experience of reading and media interaction relate to a per-
son’s life history and to the patterns of coping that have resulted from it?
More specifically: How does media interaction correlate with the mental
identity construction that people constantly and unwittingly perform in their
everyday life, and through which they consciously and/or unconsciously
meet the particular biographical challenges of their personality development?
This also implies asking the quite difficult question: To what effect—be it
therapeutic, educational or the opposite—do people employ aesthetic inter-
action in their identity forming processes? And to what extent are they suc-
cessful in using it in their continuous efforts to achieve sustainable personal
development?
In the second main dimension of LIR the research question is: What role
does media narrative itself have in this interaction, given its specific content
and form? How does a fictional narrative that has been singled out by an
individual as having been personally significant function in interactive terms?
More precisely: What are this narrative’s textual interaction potentials (re-
gardless of how the person who identified it—or any empirical person—
actually interacted with it)? How can we—while studying people as readers
or hearers/viewers—avoid losing sight of the media narrative as text, and
vice versa? How can we avoid taking the text as a mere trigger of reader re-
sponse, as previous empirical literary and media research tended to do? How
can text analysis and media interaction research be systematically integrated?
It is evident already from these basic research questions how much a
program like LIR is occupied with issues of immediate societal importance.
For asking how literature and media interaction really works in psycho-social
respects—both on the level of the text and on that of empirical persons—
and asking what effects it has, or may potentially have, for an individual in
educational and/or therapeutic respects, also always means asking how me-
288 Harald Weilnböck
dia and literature come into play on the level of societal integration—which
means also of societal conflict and its resolution. In this respect sustainable
personal development is intrinsically interwoven with sustainable societal
development. Hence, one main perspective of any LIR project will always
be: What specific kinds of pedagogic and didactic intervention may be prof-
itable in teaching and/or other forms of cultural social work?
More specifically in psychological terms, touching upon the issue of me-
dia interaction and societal interaction/integration means asking: How does
aesthetic interaction contribute to tackling the quite challenging task of
working through the long-term psycho-social consequences of violence, as
well as other forms of psycho-social stress? How can the transgenerational
effects of violence be neutralized? These have, after all, been found to be
both pervasive and lasting, and tend to propel unwitting cycles of violent and
(self-)destructive behavior. Put slightly differently this question means: How
can literary and media interaction and teaching contribute to building up a
person’s or a group’s mental resilience against stress and violence? And this
genuinely educational and therapeutic vector may remind us of what was
envisioned as the ‘aesthetic education of mankind’ in the 18th century—by
which Friedrich Schiller and others meant the inherent potential of art and
literature to effectively support civilization and culture by instilling humanis-
tic “Bildung”. Thus, interdisciplinary narratological research touches upon
one of the humanities’ most long-standing and enthusiastically advocated
objectives.
The second characteristic of LIR, which is again immediately evident
from its basic research questions, is the complexity of the task. Asking to
what effect and how successfully individuals employ media interaction in
striving to cope with aspects of their life-history, both past and present, and
attempting not only to reconstruct but also to qualitatively distinguish the
phenomena concerned, is a challenging task. It implies estimating in a meth-
odologically secure fashion how an individual’s mental media interaction and
aesthetic practice may support and/or hamper their personal development in
the sense of sustainable individual growth and development of personal
skills.
Successfully tackling such complex questions requires input from various
disciplinary fields. LIR projects therefore combine resources from the hu-
manities (especially text-linguistics and recent narratological literary and me-
dia studies), from qualitative-empirical interaction and social research (espe-
cially recent biography studies), and from developmental, clinical and
psychodynamic psychology and psycho-trauma studies, as well as qualitative-
empirical research in psychotherapy.
This joint project in advancing a new interdisciplinarity requires, first of
all, trans-disciplinary theory-building. For instance, it needs to be spelled out and
discussed how LIR’s underlying theoretical notion of interaction can be un-

derstood to comprise both the social and the mental dimensions of the con-
cept, for interaction is taken here to refer to both intra-psychic and extra-
psychic processes. And the more one thinks about this distinction with re-
spect to the main task of theory—which is to guide the operationalization of
questions for empirical research—the more one wonders whether this is a
reasonable distinction at all. For individuals interact socially with other peo-
ple in real-life contexts; and at the same time they interact mentally with as-
sociations and memories of past occurrences and encounters that are psychi-
cally activated by the present interactive situation. Hence, interaction—being
both a mental and social phenomenon—always has the dimension of time
and biographical memory (Weilnböck 2009b), more precisely: of lived-
through experience in the course of one’s personal development. In a way, a
person’s whole life-history and its major guiding principles is co-present in
all of her/his interactions: interaction is biographically embedded.
Another basic theoretical assumption about interaction is immediately
relevant to narratology: A privileged mode of (biographically embedded)
media interaction is co-narration. Co-narration brings a personally experienced
event (and the accompanying personal associations and memories) into a
narrative form, complete with chronological order and subjective logic, and
into a psycho-affectively charged situational context designed to elicit par-
ticular responses from the co-narrative interlocutor. As opposed to factual
report, description and argument (modes of self-expression which may, ho-
wever, be part of an unfolding narrative), narrating an experienced event is
privileged in that it best serves one of the most important functions of hu-
man media interaction: to help the individual understand and come to terms
with their lived experience, to develop personal knowledge and capability,
and to better anticipate future occurrences and condition future interactions.
This seems to be what humans live for—and why they tell stories (Weiln-
böck 2006a).
Since this pivotal function undoubtedly holds true for co-narrative inter-
action, both with real-life people and occurrences and with fictional media
representations of such people and occurrences—notwithstanding modal
differences between the two (see below)—one additional theoretical ambi-
tion of the LIR approach will be to re-evaluate the distinction between fic-
tional and factual narrative in order to better take into account the parallels
and interrelations between these two modes of narrative and the interactions
they elicit. Remarkably, this synoptic perspective only comes into play at all if
one systematically adverts to the fundamental psychological dimensions of
narration.
With literary studies and the humanities—which almost exclusively han-
dle the area of narratology proper today—this theoretical assumption needs
to be explicitly underlined. Interaction with both fictional media narrative

and factual real-life narrative contributes to the developmental and narrative
processes of biographical identity construction as well as societal discourse.
The LIR approach is based on the—I think genuinely narratological—
assumption that interaction with fictional media narratives may have pro-
found and lasting impact on a person’s—and a society’s—patterns of actual
real-life interaction and biographical decision-making. And this theoretical
assumption is, of course, the basis of LIR’s claim to be able to approach is-
sues of societal relevance.
Most importantly, however, the joint effort of advancing a new interdis-
ciplinarity on a narratological basis requires the creation of a solid methodological
framework and the development of a multi-method research design which is
adequate to the task. The question is: How can LIR’s highly challenging re-
search questions be approached in a methodologically rigorous way which at
the same time allows for intersubjective evaluation? And how can the new
narratological interdisciplinarity play a pivotal role in this endeavor?
3. LIR: Methodological Approach
3.0 Methodological Considerations
The question of what qualitative-empirical interaction research is all about,

how it is narratological and, above all, how it can contribute to inaugurating
a new narratological interdisciplinarity, will now be discussed in more detail.
The object of qualitative social research is oral narration: the impromptu
storied accounts and spontaneous narratives given by individuals in inter-
views. Qualitative research is thus essentially narratological. Its basic assump-
tion is that in (oral) narration individuals express themselves in ways that are
subjectively felt to represent the most authentic and thorough account of
what they experienced in the past and think about in the present interview
situation. Therefore, (oral) narration is considered the prime resource for
anyone aiming to understand how individuals operate in their subjectively
organized worlds—which, of course, are always intertwined in specific ways
with fictional worlds from the literary and media narratives which these indi-
viduals consume.
The aim of the qualitative interaction research derived from such inter-
views is to reconstruct a person’s guiding interactive principles, i. e. isolate
the basic principles of individual biographical development and decision
making, past, present and future. In a way, it is neither more nor less than
asking: ‘What makes that person tick?’—a question that qualitative research
asks, however, in a systematic manner and with methodological rigor. The
reason why qualitative and/or biographical research strives to understand

how individuals ‘tick’—and also how types of individuals and particular so-
cial groups function—is that it wants to find out how people and societies
may best be assisted in arranging their individual and social lives in a sustain-
able manner.
Literary research’s complement to this cannot easily be defined with any
sufficient degree of conceptual precision. But much of what is done in think-
ing about and interpreting literary works might be paraphrased as asking:
What makes the text tick? What are its guiding principles? However, while in
literary studies these questions are generally asked only of the formal and
structural principles of the text, the impetus of LIR is precisely to recon-
struct its interactive principles as well, following the assumption that the
concept of ‘ticking’ for a text also implies some sense of interaction between
author and reader.
The guiding interactive principle of a person’s life history and mode of
arranging their present biographical situation is, however, not easily detect-
able; it is certainly not something they themselves, or any analytic specialist
for that matter, might be able to spell out right away—or indeed at all. Such
principles are sometimes heavily concealed; and their biographical effects
may take various guises and emerge in many unexpected areas. Hence, the
analysis of these principles implies much intricate and laborious work in sys-
tematically probing a multitude of hypotheses, weighing different assess-
ments, and extracting the most operative and influential biographical vectors
from the array of actions, occurrences, intentions, fantasies, impulses, and
opinions that an individual may present in her or his narrative and that have
evolved from the complex web of their history.
Even when an interviewee’s oral narrative presents a clear and convinc-
ing idea of how they tick, qualitative biographical research will employ re-
constructive means which are likely to substantially augment or even correct
the person’s own assessment—if, indeed, any such underlying personal prin-
ciple has been explicitly volunteered at all (which is certainly not what a nar-
rative interview expects). Almost all social and psychological research asserts
the possibility—in fact the imperative probability—of significant differences
between the subjective and the analytic perspective, or to put it more pre-
cisely and in the terms used in biography studies: a difference between the
experienced life history of a person and their narrated life story (Rosenthal 1995;
2004). All these approaches abundantly corroborate the assumption that in-
tuitive human self-perception and awareness is generally too unreliable and
incomplete—as well as too ambivalent and conflicting—to secure accuracy
in evaluating anything as complex as the guiding interactive principles of any
person, let alone of oneself.
Hence an interviewee’s narrative will generally be less reliable and factual

than one might assume. And yet any information relating to the more elusive
life history and its principles will—in however unwitting and unconscious a
way—also be given by the subject themselves. Such implicit information will
be intrinsic to the narrative account, unless it has been subtly imposed by the
researcher—overwritten as it were, by the researcher’s own narrative—in an
unsuspecting and involuntary dynamic of co-narrative interference. Effective
methodological precautions must be taken to prevent this from happening.
Even without an intrusive research narrative, however, the interviewee
proper—the person functioning as narrator of their own life story (or of any
other personal, subjective experience)—cannot necessarily be viewed as the
absolute agent of their narrative in any consistent sense. For on some impor-
tant levels of the story the interviewee may—for whatever reasons of con-
flict, ambivalence etc.—convey key personal issues unwittingly, between the
lines of the explicit narrative. As a result, in conceptualizing the interviewee
as the object of qualitative research, it might be advisable to distinguish two
agents: the narrator and the narrating persona—or, more precisely, the actual
interview narrator and the narrative composition subject of the interview—
and to see these as co-narratively intertwined but operating on two different
levels of subjective awareness (Stein 2007, Jesch/Stein 2007). Qualitative
social and biographical research has not yet explicitly adopted this distinc-
tion, but the twin concepts of life history and life story implicitly reflect it.
Moreover, when Rosenthal repeatedly insists on the need for biography
studies to pay "particular attention […] to structural differences between
what is experienced and what is narrated” (Rosenthal 2004: 53), and when
she insists on “latent structures of meaning” (Rosenthal 2004: 55), she
touches upon phenomena which in psychodynamic approaches are con-
ceived of as being unconscious—i. e. as being situated in sectors of mental
activity outside the subject’s awareness—and which are, moreover, fre-
quently associated with conflict.
The same implication applies to the biography studies notion of a co-
present issue, i. e. of a biographical issue which is co-narratively and semi-
consciously associated with a given narrative sequence, while not being men-
tioned by the interviewee in any explicit manner. One still quite young area
of qualitative research, psychodynamic psychotherapy (whose methodologi-
cal importance to the field has not yet, perhaps, been fully recognized) is
firmly based on a concept of selfhood that assumes different more or less
unconscious sectors of the self—and, above all, differently situated vectors
of the self’s interactive principles. What is relevant to the present argument is
that this field studies the co-narrative processes in psychotherapy and how
they correlate with lasting changes in the subject’s state of mind (From-
mer/Rennie 2001; Boothe 1994; 2005; Jesch et al. 2006; Weilnböck 2006a;
2006b).
Hence, qualitative research has, it seems, intuitively developed analytic
methods which lend themselves to reconstructing how more or less uncon-
scious conflict-ridden or ambivalent vectors of experience and interaction
work in a person’s life, and the ways in which they show themselves in self-
expression. Crucial here are the points of divergence between what is nar-
rated today and what was experienced then, and what impact these vectors
have on the subject’s biography. To say that qualitative research has intui-
tively developed these insights is to suggest that it has done so without hav-
ing read much—and maybe even without having wanted to read much—
about psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, and clinical research (which, in fact,
constitutes an unexpected parallel between this field and literary studies).
All schools of literary studies would certainly agree that a text’s guiding
principles are not easily detectable. There is also widespread awareness of the
need to differentiate between various levels of agency in literary narratives.
In fact, the distinction between narrator and persona, i. e. the text’s narrative
voice and its author, is something literary scholars are acutely aware of (see
Jannidis 2004). Possibly, this awareness is even a bit too acute, since it usu-
ally correlates with the assumption that while the narrator, narrative voice or
implied author etc. (see Kindt/Müller 2006) may be a legitimate object of
literary study, the author as empirical person is not really of much interest
for the interpretation of literary texts. Conceptualizing a double narrative
agency might, therefore, also be advisable here. This would imply not only
making the distinction between the narrator and the composition subject of
the text but also viewing both narrative instances integratively and taking
them equally seriously in methodological respects. The need not only to dis-
tinguish the narrator from the author on the one hand and from the compo-
sition subject on the other, but also to take the author effectively into ac-
count, and thus make the theoretical distinctions fully operational in research
design and interpretation methodology, raises important issues both in quali-
tative research and in literary studies.
When qualitative research reconstructs the difference between the lived-
through, experienced life history and the narrated life story—and thus unwittingly
anticipates a conceptual distinction between persona or composition subject
and narrator—it not only touches upon phenomena that psychodynamic
approaches conceived of as unconscious and beset with conflict, it also quite
unexpectedly touches upon an element of the imaginary, almost of the ficti-
tious, in what is generally referred to as factual interview narrative, since
what someone in their subjective view holds to be their authentic life experi-
ence might not prove factual, and what they consider their main principles of
interaction might not prove accurate or complete at the analytic level; and
even some hard facts in a truthfully given and authentically felt account of
the self may prove incorrect. These incorrect, incomplete, or in other ways
partially erroneous or misleading parts of a factual narrative may, therefore,
in some sense be viewed as fictitious—unintentionally fictitious, as it were.
And surely, thinking about literary narration, one cannot be certain that fic-
tion writing, in turn, is not always also in some sequences and/or aspects, as
it were, unintentionally factual.
This, however, is not to say that many literary critics are really interested
in the interface of fictional and factual/biographical elements in a literary
narrative, or even consider this interface to be researchable by any standards
of philological scholarship (Weilnböck 2007). The only ones who would
support such an approach are psychoanalytically oriented scholars. They,
however, have never had much lasting impact on mainstream literary text
analysis, nor have they been able to provide the necessary methodological
rigor to claim the status of reconstructive empirical research (Weilnböck
2008a; Kansteiner/Weilnböck 2008)—which is what the LIR approach is
aiming at. Conceptualizing a twofold agency for literary narration as well,
and thus defining two different dimensions of a literary narrative—be they
labeled fictionally versus factually oriented, or manifest versus latent, or in
narratological terms: narrative perspective versus focalization (in the sense of
Jesch/Stein 2007)—is a characteristic feature of LIR and one of its basic
principles—one that might also be of help in enhancing literary narratology’s
interface with interdisciplinary research.
Consequently, one of the most—if not the most—important and chal-
lenging methodological tasks of narrative analysis today (be it in qualitative
social/interaction research or in literary studies) seems to be to reconstruct
the interplay of the fictional and the factual aspects of a narrative, whether
oral/factual or literary/fictional. In more precise terms this once again
means to reconstruct the interrelation and mental interaction between what
an individual has actually experienced in the past in their real life on the one
hand and what they give as storied account about these experiences in the
present before a listening interviewer on the other (or else what the individ-
ual as author of a fictional text may create as a personally inspiring story be-
fore a literary audience). In other words the basic task is to reconstruct the
interplay of the narrator and the persona (author/composition subject) of a
given narrative—in a psychologically informed sense of these terms.
It is the core objective of Literary and Media Interaction Research to
take on this challenging task and realize its inherent potential for interdisci-
plinary research, which first of all means to effectively integrate the two hith-
erto largely separated academic areas of studying the world of (fictional) texts on
the one hand and the world of so-called real-life and empirical persons on the other.
LIR thus encompasses two methodological dimensions: qualitative-

empirical interaction research with readers, formerly called ‘reader response
research’ (section 3.1), and interactive theoretical, reconstructive analysis of
fictional literary or media narratives (section 3.2). Eventually the rea-
der/author research case studies and the textual analyses will have to be in-
tegrated to reconstruct empirical variants of author-text-reader interaction—
or at least of reader-text interaction. The aims and benefits of this research,
which forms the core of the LIR program, will be outlined in the conclusion
of this paper (section 4).
3.1 Qualitative-Empirical Interaction Research
How does qualitative-empirical social research go about reconstructing an

individual’s guiding interactive principles, the factors that make that person
tick both in their real-life interactions and in those with literary and fictional
media? Using the methodology of biography studies as a springboard, LIR
employs state-of-the-art qualitative interviewing for data acquisition, and
narrative transcript analysis for data analysis. For specific procedural phases
of case study work, however, LIR has developed a substantial supplementary
methodology of its own, for the most part in two directions: first systemati-
cally integrating psychological knowledge—particularly from psychodynamic
resources, which lend themselves to better understanding how biographically
molded mental interaction, and in particular its psycho-affective dynamics,
functions (biography research itself has not yet tapped these resources in any
systematic way); and secondly, developing methods of qualitative interview-
ing suitable for reconstructing media experience and media interaction—
these are also not yet fully established in biography studies, and the meth-
odological questions related to them have not been satisfactorily solved by
qualitative media research.
3.1.1 Biographical-Narrative Interviewing
Biography research’s strict methodology for conducting narrative interviews

reflects the fact that there are many things that can be done wrong—or, put
positively, there are many technical rules which, if aptly observed, permit the
acquisition of interview materials containing the kind of narrative self-
expression that facilitates successful reconstructive case study analysis. But
biographical-narrative interviews substantially differ from natural conversa-
tions or journalistic interviews, so conducting them requires an expertise
which needs to be trained (a fact that isn’t always adequately accounted for
in qualitative research).
In essence, qualitative interviewing procedures follow one basic princi-

ple: that of maximum openness, providing conditions which secure the ut-
most freedom for interviewees to design and arrange their story-telling. Me-
thodological precautions are taken to ensure this openness and reduce as far
as possible any unwitting influence by the interviewer. The interview starts
with a general narrative question directed not to a specific topic or period of
life but to the person’s life history as a whole (and increasingly also to their
family history; Rosenthal 1995). Rosenthal (2004) herself tells how in the
course of her methodological development she came to realize that with al-
most any research question it is necessary (or at least desirable) to ask the
interviewee to give their whole life history and “avoid any thematic restric-
tion”, no matter what the particular topic and scope of the research project is
(ibid.: 51).
The interviewee may then begin to tell their life story, i. e. give their main
narration in an individual fashion. I have conducted interviews in which the
main narration took just two minutes and others in which the interviewee
took two hours and more. Whatever happens in this first phase of the inter-
view, it is essential with respect to the principle of openness that the “narra-
tion is at no time interrupted by questions from the interviewers” (ibid.: 52).
Instead, they should give nonverbal support by means of various paralinguis-
tic expressions and body language which signal personal interest, attentive-
ness, and empathy—and give encouragement when the interviewee pauses
(for instance by simply interjecting “and then what happened?”). Unaccus-
tomed as this self-restraint might feel at first, it is a technique that enables
the interviewee to arrange their narration in the richest possible way and to
tap into distant and estranged sources of personal memory. In this space the
narration will “start to flow” (Rosenthal 2004: 52), become increasingly de-
tailed, and unfold in ways which are sometimes unexpected and surprising
even for the interviewee—and which touch upon issues invested with per-
sonal emotion which are not easily attainable in an everyday conversational
situation.
Following the main narration, interviewers may begin to pose internal
follow-up questions on the basis of notes taken during the interview. These
questions aim at generating more detailed information about the inter-
viewee’s experience. Technically speaking this means avoiding both the sort
of factual questions frequently posed in conversation (“When was that?”
“Where was that?”), and drawing parallels to the interviewer’s own experi-
ence (“I felt that, too …”). Above all it means not asking about reasons, ad-
ducing arguments, or discussing opinions (“Why did you do that?”), because
such questions effectively thwart narration. During the main narration inter-
viewers will in any case have taken note of any such arguments and opinions,
just as they will of the interviewee’s detached reports and descriptions of
issues and contexts. In this follow-up phase they use the interviewee’s argu-
ments for further narrative questions aiming to tap into the personally ex-
perienced events that lie behind the interviewee’s account. So, if an inter-
viewee expresses the opinion that they don’t like foreigners, for example, the
follow-up question will not ask about reasons or discuss opinions, which
might well produce an abstract evaluation or argument, but simply remark:
“You mentioned that you don’t like foreigners. Tell me about a moment or
event in your life in which you clearly felt that you didn’t like foreigners.”
This will produce further narrative, to which the interviewer will respond
with the same attitude of attentiveness and empathy as before, and which
may be further expanded (“What happened before that?”, “What happened
later?”, “How did that happen?”).
Listening attentively in this way, interviewers will have noted many
points that seem promising for generating further narrative. And while there
are certain formalized rules for spotting such cues (for instance when argu-
ments, opinions, contradictions, lacunas occur in the narrative, see Rosenthal
2004; Lucius-Hoene/Deppermann 2002), there sometimes seems an instinc-
tive element in an interviewer’s choice, when it taps into a content-rich ex-
perience which the interviewee had not thought of mentioning.
This and other techniques of interviewing have proven effective in
stimulating an interviewee’s narrative to flow freely. People who have been
interviewed frequently report that they had not expected to come up with so
much personal history or to touch upon this or that issue, and often also not
to experience this or that feeling. In fact, interviewees have often gotten into
a quite elated mood, as if creatively inspired by the experience. And since a
biographical interview is usually conducted by two closely interacting inter-
viewers, and may take up to three hours, with a possible second appointment
to follow, the end product will often be a rich, complex artistic creation con-
taining both factually oriented and imaginative narrative vectors. For the in-
terviewee the experience will seem at times to resemble the state of creative
enthusiasm and aesthetic elevation which authors are sometimes reported to
have experienced during the writing process. Conversely, training and initial
experience in conducting narrative interviews frequently have an existential
impact on researchers, changing their interactive style even in everyday life
and resulting in a more open and perceptive attitude vis-à-vis their social en-
vironment. This too has sometimes been described as akin to the effect of
reading belletristic literature: an aesthetic as well as interactive enhancement
of sensibility.
After the internal follow-up questions are finished it is only in the last
phase of the interview that the principle of openness is suspended and ex-
ternal narrative follow-up questions may be posed. These confront the inter-
viewee with instances of narrative incoherence or conspicuous deviations
from a standard perception of reality; as well as involving external issues per-

taining to the specific focus of the study. In the LIR approach this is also the
place where a significant methodological innovation is introduced, with key
questions from psycho-diagnostic interview techniques being included if the
relevant issues have not already been sufficiently covered during the bio-
graphical interview (Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis: http://
www.opd-online.net). Finally the interviewee is asked to name a literary or
media production of high personal significance, which will then be used in
the second phase of LIR narrative interview (3.1.3).
3.1.2 Reconstructive Narrative Analysis
This high degree of methodological rigor which—aside from its creative

elements—characterizes the interview technique also holds true for data
analysis. Here a novel method of reconstructive interdisciplinary transcript
analysis (ITA) is employed, applying standard procedures of transcript analy-
sis as practiced in qualitative biography studies, and systematically integrating
the results with psychological resources.
In the first phase, transcript analysis as known from biography studies
follows a well laid-out path of methodical steps which, for reasons of brev-
ity, cannot be described here in detail (see Rosenthal 2004: 50). Suffice it to
say that the key analytic procedure is adductive (as opposed to deductive or
inductive) sequential hypothesis building, which means that every hypothesis
produced by the analytic team to explain a specific narrative sequence or
biographical fact is taken into account. It is only in the chronological course
of hypothesis building along the consecutive sequences of the interview
transcript that certain hypotheses are excluded and others retained. Methodi-
cally formalized, the five steps of transcript analysis are:
Extraction and interpretation of basic biographical data, including key
events and decisions. These are isolated in the interview transcript as
quasi-objective information (place and social milieu of birth, siblings,
education, illnesses, change of residence, historical events) and looked at
separately, abstracting as much as possible from the specific form and
subjective viewpoint of the narrative. Here the guiding question of se-
quential hypothesis building is: What are the probable turns of this life
history and the respective states of mind of the subject, given these bio-
graphical data? Or in other words, what consequences would be ex-
pected from each of these hypothetical turns if they were to occur? Ask-
ing which of the different hypotheses actually comes true in the next
biographical phase then leads to the construction of new and more re-
fined sets of hypotheses about what might possibly happen in the phases
that follow.
Text and thematic field analysis of the narrative by adductive verifica-

tion-falsification procedures. Here the structure and dynamics of the
subject’s self-presentation are analyzed chronologically in line with the
sequences of the transcript (which were drawn up according to thematic
shifts and changes in text type, such as description, argumentation, re-
port, and narrative). The guiding question of sequence-by-sequence text
analysis is: How does an interviewee view the world in terms of their
own life history and their personal agency in it? How do they choose to
portray themselves?
Reconstruction of experienced life history—aims at illuminating the
lived-through experience of the interviewee, independently of how it is
presented as a story.
Microanalysis of transcript segments—focuses on interview passages
that seem particularly pertinent to the life history and promise to further
“decipher [the transcripts’] latent structures of meaning” (Rosenthal
2004: 60).
Concluding contrastive comparison of experienced life history and nar-
rated life story—aims at finding explanations for the difference between
the two levels and how they impact the subject’s way of coping with life.
In its second phase LIR’s interdisciplinary transcript analysis (ITA) goes be-
yond these standard biography studies procedures and systematically taps
into the resources of clinical and psychodynamic psychology, with a view to
determining and formulating the subject’s principles of mental coping and
psychic defense. ITA begins with Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis
(OPD), a multi-axis diagnostic tool developed in Germany over the last fif-
teen years from various recent approaches in psychodynamics, psychoanaly-
sis, psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry with a view to expanding and
complementing the existing purely descriptive manuals of psychopathologi-
cal symptoms. OPD has added various psychodynamic criteria of classifica-
tion such as interpersonal relations, specific conflicts, and mental structure,
and has today become a widely and internationally acknowledged common
denominator in clinical diagnosis. It thus serves as a useful springboard for
trans-disciplinary collaboration. Beyond the OPD manual, ITA may refer to
further and more elaborate psychological resources such as qualitative psy-
cho-trauma studies (Fischer/Riedesser 1998; Hirsch 2004), as well as the ap-
proaches of narratological, relational and attachment psychology (Bollas
1984; Angus/McLeod 2004) and psychiatry (Kernberg et al. 2000), whenever
these appear promising for a better understanding of the case material in
hand.
In procedural terms this means that once the five steps of narrative se-
quence (or transcript) analysis have been completed, psychodynamic assess-
ment proceeds in reverse order, starting with step 5 and confronting the
conclusions with two questions: Are there any psychodynamic phenom-

ena—as defined by the OPD and other sources—that parallel the biographi-
cal phenomena reconstructed so far? Do these parallels produce additional
in-depth hypotheses? Phases one and two of ITA—biographical narrative
analysis and psychodynamic/developmental assessment—are conducted
consecutively and not simultaneously, because the first phase of reconstruc-
tion must not be methodologically compromised with premature psycho-
logical conclusions.
As a result, what biography research usually describes in generic terms as
the guiding principle(s) of a person’s life-history and development is now
also specified psychologically as that individual’s psychodynamic profile—a
specification of the particular challenges inherent in their personality devel-
opment. This psychodynamic profile profits from the inclusion in the last
phase of the biographical interview of key questions from the OPD diag-
nostic interview directly targeting relationship themes, interactive core con-
flicts, and/or core trauma compensatory patterns.
3.1.3 Media-Experience Interviewing

and Final LIR Case Study Reconstruction
Having reconstructed the interviewee’s biographical and psychodynamic pro-

file, researchers now turn to the second step in LIR data analysis, the narra-
tive media-experience interview (MEI). This was recently developed on my
initiative (Weilnböck 2008b; 2009a; 2009b) because, in the first place, stan-
dard modes of qualitative and/or biographical interviewing do not lend
themselves to understanding media experience, and secondly, what has
sometimes been called the ‘media biography interview’ neither sufficiently
grasps media experience itself nor really fathoms the biographical dimen-
sions of an individual—let alone the aspect of their life-long psychological
development (see Weilnböck 2003; 2009b).
The MEI is conducted after the interviewee has re-read or re-viewed the
text or film which they had identified at the end of the biographical interview
as being personally significant for them. The LIR team will also have read or
viewed the narrative and produced two sorts of memos in preparation for
the MEI: a sequence protocol for the interviewers’ immediate orientation, in
which plot-turns and characters are listed in the order in which they occur,
and the MEI hypotheses memo (see below). As in the biographical interview,
the interviewee is asked at the beginning of the MEI—by way of a maximally
open initial question—to talk about their recent re-reading/re-viewing and
the associations it had for them, as well as about the original media experi-
ence in the more distant past. The narrative response to this question then
becomes the focus of MEI internal follow-up questioning aimed in two
complementary directions. In this novel technique interviewees are first

prompted to elaborate narratively on the spontaneous perceptions, thoughts
and imaginations occasioned by the plot events and their causalities, as well
as on the characters’ possible motivations and biographical prehistories. Sec-
ondly, they are prompted to articulate associations and memories of their
own which resonate with their thoughts and imaginations about the plot and
characters. Passages from the media narrative may directly be brought in (re-
read/re-screened) depending on which aspects of the narrative become im-
portant in the interview (Weilnböck 2008b; 2009b). This process moves, as it
were, top-down into the media narrative world as it is subjectively perceived
by the interviewee, and then again bottom-up into the personal biographical
memories triggered by the media narrative.
In the final phase of MEI, external narrative follow-up questions are po-
sed on the basis of the MEI hypotheses memo. This consists of a collection
of hypotheses about how, and to which particular sections of the text or
plot-turns, the interviewee might respond, given the analysis of the bio-
graphical interview, which—given the LIR approach—itself includes hy-
potheses of a psychological and psycho-biographical nature. Furthermore,
by this stage of the LIR process, the narratological text analysis of the media
narrative has been drafted according to the NTA method (see 3.2 below) but
not yet fully worked out—for research-economic reasons. This draft con-
tains hypotheses about the narrative’s textual interaction potentials and may
be used as an optional source of hypotheses to assist interviewers in produc-
ing effective external follow-up questions. The transcript analysis of the me-
dia experience interview proceeds analogously to the analysis of the bio-
graphical-narrative interview (BNI). However, it is more complex due to the
fact that it deals with the biographical data both of the interviewee and of the
media narrative characters. It eventually integrates the results from the BNI
analysis and enters into the integrative case study reconstruction defining the
person’s psychodynamic principle(s) of media interaction vis-à-vis the par-
ticular challenges of their personality development. Here the steps are:
Extraction and interpretation of the fictional characters’ biographical
data in the order and choice in which they were referred to by the inter-
viewee, and their interpretation via sequential hypothesis building. This
latter technique gives rise to the questions: What biographical issues
might have arisen for a reader focusing on these narrative data? What
other data might they then plausibly also focus on? How might they be
expected to do so?
Text and thematic field analysis of the interviewee’s account of their sub-
jective reading of the media narrative, also implemented by sequential
hypothesis building; and from there, reconstruction of the narrated me-
dia plot.
Contrastive comparison with the media experience database.

Reconstruction of the experienced media plot and its contrastive com-
parison with the narrated media plot.
Search for correspondences with psychodynamic phenomena—as de-
fined by the OPD and other psychological resources (as above with the
NBI).
Formulation of the subject’s psychodynamic principle(s) of media inter-
action.
Search for thematic and structural correspondences with the results of
the BNI analysis, above all with the subject’s experienced life history and
general psychodynamic principle(s).
Conclusions about the subject’s media interaction in light of their per-
sonality development challenges (also from the BNI analysis).
Hence, in the first of its two basic methodological research dimensions—
qualitative-empirical research—LIR applies narratological analysis both to an
individual’s account of their life-story (BNI) and to their account of a key
media experience (MEI), and reconstructs from this an instance of psycho-
biographically driven developmental media interaction. The case study in its
entirety gives a picture of how the media narrative has been appropriated,
and whether and how it has (even unwittingly) been used as a tool for work-
ing on and further developing psychodynamic mechanisms for coping with
personal biographical challenges. This enables inferences to be drawn about
the subject’s general pattern of biographical and developmental interaction
with media. Working with several individuals from a particular social sector
or age group will eventually enable a certain number of personality types—
and types of real-world and media interaction—to be formulated in relation
to that specific segment of the population. For qualitative research, it must
be noted, does not build generalizations numerically or statistically, it works
typologically, defining the types that characterize the biographically molded
media interaction of a group, and how these types function in interactive
terms. The group in question may consist of people undergoing psychother-
apy, or young persons who are prone to violent behavior and politi-
cal/religious extremism (see below), or any other relevant category.
Hence, qualitative research while “reconstructing an individual case [is]
always aiming at [generalizable] statements” (Rosenthal 2004: 62). Its objec-
tive is to illuminate developmental types and the complex rules of the typical
genetic processes in specific sectors of society, rather than proposing one-off
cause-and-effect statements for individual cases. This kind of research is
about more thoroughly understanding the laws of social becoming, without
which scholarship may not be able to produce effective strategies of social
intervention and thus exercise its underlying responsibility to society.
3.2 Narratological Text Analysis of the Literary/Media Narrative
The second of LIR’s two basic methodological research dimensions is psy-

chologically informed narratological text analysis (NTA) of the literary
and/or media narratives selected by interviewees at the end of the biographi-
cal-narrative interview. NTA responds to LIR’s ambition to integrate empiri-
cal reader research and text analysis in a single theoretical approach. Thus
NTA derives from the phenomenon established in research that when peo-
ple talk about their experiences with fictional literary or media narratives and
about their personal life-history in a single interview, the fictional and the factual
on the one hand, and social/psychological research and literary scholarship
on the other, which have thus far been kept largely separate, eventually enter
into an inextricable mutual relation.
This is not to say, however, that there are not significant modal differ-
ences between a fictional text conveyed in a technical medium and a factual
narrative conveyed in a face-to-face interview. And with text analysis LIR’s
research questions turn from readers to media, from person to text, and from
factual oral to fictional textual narratives. Both types of narrative can be re-
garded as modes of personal self-expression, which is why they are not en-
tirely incommensurable or autonomous, as literary theory would sometimes
assume; and this is also why the LIR approach encompasses both in its con-
cept of mental media interaction. And yet, in methodological respects it ap-
pears inadvisable, as well as operationally impracticable—at least at this point
in time—to treat fictional texts in exactly the same way as narrative interview
transcripts.
The reasons for this methodological caution are that the interview seems
in a more immediate way embedded in a co-narrative situation of interper-
sonal interaction; and it also refers more directly to a concept of shared real-
ity experience. An aesthetic/fictional text, on the other hand, cast in a tech-
nical medium and directed at a larger impersonal audience, seems less ame-
nable to the concept of interaction between author and reader. Nevertheless,
the LIR approach—seeking to integrate empirical reader/author research
and narratological text analysis—does require a method of analyzing literary
and media narratives which is as interactively oriented as its empirical coun-
terpart. LIR suggests the following solution to this theoretical predicament:
Since analyzing a text cannot directly reconstruct interpersonal interaction
proper, what narratological text analysis can do instead is to identify the in-
teraction potentials inherent in the form and content of a particular narra-
tive, as well as in the socio-cultural context of the audience to which it ap-
peals (Weilnböck 2006a).
In this way NTA will reconstruct the psychological impact potential a
narrative may plausibly be expected to exert on its readers. In methodologi-
cal respects NTA thus builds on an approach which in its first phase draws
on the fields of linguistics, pragmatics and narratology, and in its second
phase on psychodynamic clinical psychology. Consistently with this lineage
NTA has recently been developed into a methodological interface between
literary and clinical research (Stein 2007; Jesch et al. 2006).
From text and discourse-linguistics and narratology NTA obtains meth-
odological guidelines which allow it to assess both the informational choice
and completeness of a narrative text and its incoherencies. The informational
choice and completeness with which the author (or composition subject) of
a fictional narrative arranges and depicts the characters and actions in their
story-world is straightforwardly assessed along the sequential phases of hu-
man action with regard to:
the subjectively perceived causal situation of the character (before ac-
tion),
the character’s build-up of personal motivation and specific intention to
act in response to the causal situation,
the implementation of this intention in the form of concrete action,
the effects of the action, both intended and unintended (Stein 2007).
It seems fair to assume that any reader striving to follow and understand an
account of events and actions in a story will spontaneously and unwittingly
look for the most complete information possible with regard to these four
phases, and will immediately attempt to reconstruct them according to their
personal and biographically molded perception of the information given in
the narrative.
Hence, any character’s action within a narrative can be systematically de-
scribed in the first place in terms of the completeness and choice with which
the elements of cause/intention/action/effects are represented. Secondly,
the text can be methodically scrutinized with regard to phenomena of narra-
tive incoherence, whereby incoherence is understood to represent a verifi-
able deviation from a predictable order of occurrences and actions within a
narrative—predictable and verifiable with reference to the internal as well as
external logic of the narrative. Instances of internal incoherence can be meth-
odologically identified in three distinct dimensions:
in the order of space and time in a narrative, along the linguistic relations
of first … then and there … also there,
in the order of correlations and conditions in the narrated world, along
the linguistic relation of if … then, and
in the order of cause and effect, of intention and result, as well as of fi-
nality, along the linguistic relations of because, in order to, with the result that.
Instances of external incoherence are identifiable with reference to the cul-
tural frames and patterns, and the general knowledge of the historical period
and socio-cultural sphere, in which author and reader operate. Here inco-
herencies and deviations are verifiable with reference to other widespread

cultural narratives (or representations of knowledge) of the time, which serve
as predictable frames of reference and which indicate a logic of occurrence
and action which may deviate significantly from the logic of the narrative to
hand.
The second phase of NTA, which follows the text-linguistic assessment,
serves to formulate hypotheses and draw conclusions about how the phe-
nomena of textual incoherence and/or incompleteness might impact the
reader—which to a certain extent implies the question how the reader might
be motivated by the compositional subject of the text (i. e. the author) in the
moment of text production.
On this—more challenging—second level of inquiry one needs to mus-
ter scientific assistance from those fields which are most knowledgeable
about issues of mental impact, as well as of mental causes and motivation:
clinical and psychodynamic psychology. Here too, the OPD psychodynamic
manual provides the main guidelines, followed by other more specific psy-
chological resources (see 3.1.3 above). Analogously, the leading questions
here are: Are there any psychodynamic phenomena—as defined by the OPD
manual and other sources—that parallel the textual phenomena recon-
structed thus far, and do such parallels produce further in-depth hypotheses
about the interactive dynamics of the story world, and of the narrative itself,
vis-à-vis the reader? As with transcript analysis, these interdisciplinary re-
sources should, however, only be introduced by way of a strictly adductive
(rather than deductive) mode of hypothesis-building. And they should only
be brought in late and in a separate methodological step of the reconstruc-
tion procedure, after the text-linguistic analysis has been completed. Finally,
they should be left uncompromised by any premature off-the-cuff psycho-
logical hypotheses. The end-product of NTA, then, is the reconstruction of
the (literary/media) narrative’s textual interaction potentials—in other
words, conclusions about what sort of impact the narrative may plausibly be
expected to have on readers in general, notwithstanding the subjectivity of
individual reading acts.
NTA studies narratives as products of mental and communicative pro-
cesses of interaction which—however consciously or unconsciously—aim to
relate to and impact on their readers. LIR takes a different position here
from that of the more radical proponents of reader-response theories in lit-
erary studies, who hold that a text’s impact is mostly a matter of the reader’s
subjective and even idiosyncratic views, and that it cannot therefore be dealt
with on the level of text. In keeping with cognitive and contextual narratolo-
gies, LIR deems it more appropriate and scientifically productive to assume,
that, while empirical readers may read in highly subjective manners, they are
always somehow in touch with the text, and their readings are not entirely
idiosyncratic. Moreover, the text can also be legitimately reconstructed as a

subjective intentional act, i. e. as the author’s act of writing.
The two-step analytic procedure is buttressed by sources both from text-
linguistics and from psychology—which defines its interdisciplinary position.
In this respect it is remarkable that the NTA method of analyzing fictional
(literary) narratives unwittingly responds to questions formulated in recent
empirical research about the co-narrative processes of psychotherapy as one
of that discipline’s “major challenges”: “to further develop methods for de-
scribing, exploring, and measuring narrative coherence and incoherence”
(Angus/McLeod 2004: 373).
4. Conclusion: The Integration of Reader and Text Analysis

within the LIR Project
The key to the LIR project is to eventually bring together reader and text
analysis.2 Such integration, however, must not compromise the specific mo-
dus operandi of the two elements (outlined in 3.1 and 3.2), as has sometimes
occurred when hypotheses on reader-response and observations about the
text were prematurely lumped together. For text analysis cannot fully antici-
pate the impact of the text on the individual reader any more than an indi-
vidual case study can fully explain how a text works interactively. LIR’s final
step toward integrating the two strands of its inquiry aims rather at recon-
structing the actual variant of reader-text interaction in the particular case. It
clarifies which of the narrative’s textual interaction potentials an individual
reader has actually responded to—and how. In other words, it draws conclu-
sions about the issues and processes of biographical and mental identity in
which both reader and text have been implicated.
In seeking to reconstruct empirical constellations and variants of aes-
thetic interaction, the LIR project contributes to the task of overcoming the
compartmentalization of literary and media studies—which are currently
split along the broad lines of text interpretation versus reader research. It can do
so most effectively if matching sets of author-text-reader interaction are stu-
died, in which a reader case study refers to a media narrative whose author
consents to take part in analogous author research. LIR actively encourages
inter-methodological synergies and feed-back options between reader- and
text-research. For instance, narratological text analysis (NTA)—i. e. the re-
construction of a media narrative’s textual interaction potentials—is likely to
prompt new kinds of hypothesis for sequential transcript analysis, as well as
2 The LIR approach’s methodology will soon be explicated at length (Weilnböck 2009b).
new and promising analytic questions which might not yet have arisen in
NTA.
LIR’s integration of reader- and text-research also facilitates new modes
of presenting cultural studies knowledge to the wider public. A novel form
of publishing is envisioned, in which the text analysis of a certain literary
and/or media narrative will be accompanied by and integrated with reader-
interaction analysis of two or more readings, and possibly also by the respec-
tive author-interaction case study. Thus, different empirical variants of men-
tal media interaction within the complex constellation of an author-text-
reader relationship will become available in a multi-focus perspective. Such a
publication may contribute to significantly expanding the modes of current
cultural discourse. It will, at any rate, help to avoid two problematic tradi-
tions in mainstream culture and literary studies: on the one hand the imposi-
tion of fixed, academically acclaimed interpretations of literary works, and on
the other the introduction of abstract descriptive techniques of text analysis
which remain largely detached from students’ own reading experience.
Abbreviations
LIR: Literary and Media Interaction Research

OPD: Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis
ITA: Interdisciplinary Transcript Analysis
MEI: Media Experience Interview
NTA: Narratological Text Analysis
BNI: Biographical-Narrative Interview
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Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research / edited

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Wuppertal, May 2009

Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer

SANDRA HEINEN, ROY SOMMER

Introduction: Narratology and Interdisciplinarity

1. Interdisciplinary Narrative Research as a

In his survey article, “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of

a consequence, despite the shared interest in narrative, common ground is

in empirical research (sociology, psychology) or computing (AI) normally

display a tendency to encourage exaggerated expectations. But narratology is

2. Controversies, Intermedial Applications of Narratology,

What exactly narratology is to do with this knowledge base, how and in

article “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”, Herman investigates how inter-

ratives. In conclusion, Hallet insists on the necessity of a transmodal narra-

Erll then introduces current concepts of memory and demonstrates how

bridges between the concepts of narrative in narratology on the one hand,

Narratology and Hermeneutics:

1. Narratology and Hermeneutics: Similarities and Contrasts

kind of lull in literary hermeneutics, that is, before Hans-Georg Gadamer

2. Forging the Link:

Since I aim to show that the attempt to approximate interpretive validity

include unconscious intentions and changes in intentions, and it seems that

ted a related contextual approach based on what he terms “old historicism”,

that is able to deal with narratology’s interpretive features and approximate

3. The Awakening as Test Case: Edna’s Final Swim

women do not understand men, as the male protagonist of At Fault even

whether Chopin was “indecisive” in penning it is more doubtful, as a careful

“suicide” (ibid.: 325) is “a triumph, not a failure” (ibid.: 325)—a common

4. Conclusion: A Kind of Link Forged

Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. “Hermeneutics”. In: Herman et al. 2005, p. 211-212.

Narratological Expansionism and Its Discontents*

1. Narratology and Literary Studies

Apart from some leftover structuralists, almost every narratologist in current

If one attempts to explicate what narratology is or should be, it seems

do not coincide with them; narratology, in contrast, has neither a conception

2. Narratology and the Humanities

As noted above, narratological expansionism is by no means restricted to

nomenon, so the advocates of this type of expansionism argue, narratology

However different these proposals may be in some respects, they unani-

ordinate or even no importance to the subject at hand. As Peter Lamarque

3. Towards a Classical Narratology

Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies:

1. “What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?”

In the title of an essay published in Poetics Today in 1990, Seymour Chatman

It may be worth mentioning in passing, however, that narratologists are

argue that in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research, narratology

2. Problems and Pitfalls of Programmatic Proposals

Anyone seriously interested in promoting the cause of a contextualist

and international ramifications of narratology. They also metonymically illus-

contrasting theoretical and methodological assumptions, are not as incom-

3. Surveying Contextualist Narratologies and their Main Concerns

In comparison to the main variants of structuralist or ‘classical’ narratology,

dialogic negotiation of meaning. Fourth, postclassical narratology tends to

Contextualist, Thematic, and Cultural Approaches:

 “Contextualist Narratology” (Seymour Chatman)

 ‘Marxist Narratology’ – Fredric Jameson, John Bender

analysis and interpretation of narratives, it is by no means the case that narra-

4. Premises and Concepts of Contextualist

To present the outlines of what I have provisionally called a contextualist

mode of scholarly writing. Moreover, a number of wide-ranging changes or

“Contextualist Narratology” (Seymour Chatman)

‘Marxist Narratology’ – Fredric Jameson, John Bender