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Limits of the Narrator’s Knowledge in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to a Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction
Klaus W. Hempfer
Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality)
Werner Wolf
Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction
Ansgar Nünning
Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology
Meet: Towards an Applied Cultural Narratology
Uri Margolin
Coda: The Next Generation
As a consequence of his observations on a curious ambiguity in the term “omniscience,” Wayne Booth, in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), stresses the need for a closer study of the varieties of narratorial privilege and the functions of its occasional limitations. The present essay, a concise rendering of its original German version of 1978, attempts to elucidate the basic structure of this field of problems by theoretical reflections on the rationale of the use of negated knowledge in fiction, followed by the analysis of pertinent examples from Fielding’s narrative practice. The major interdependencies between the narrator’s shift of techniques and his dual role as a satirist and a moralist are laid open. A further result of these observations is the general insight that the usual notions of narratorial omniscience are misleading rather than helpful.
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Roland Harweg, “Are Fielding’s Shamela
and Richardson’s Pamela One and the Same person? A Contribution to the
Problem of the Number of Fictive Worlds” / 290
In this article, the thesis is advanced that every fictional text has
its own fictive world. Fielding’s Shamela and Richardson’s Pamela being
two different fictional texts, one of which seems to refer to the other
and, thereby, to the same fictive world, are discussed as an only apparent,
not real counterexample to this thesis. A real exception to the one-to-one-relationship
of fictional text and fictive world seem to be certain series of texts,
but it is argued that they form a kind of higher textual unit, a serial
text instead of a series of texts.
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Klaus W. Hempfer, “Some Problems Concerning
a Theory of Fiction(ality)” / 302
Problems of theory are often problems of language. In the manifold
discussions concerning “fiction” and “fictionality” it is often the definition
of these key terms that determines positions and arguments. This essay
calls not for a single theory of fictionality but rather argues for a differentiated
approach to the issue, taking into account that the nature of fictionality
is based on a complex set of criteria. Rather than a purely comparative
or classificatory concept, fictionality might be discussed as a “type”
combining several traits. Here it is important to distinguish between “signals
of fiction” and “characteristics of fiction,” the former being located
within the communicative situation enable the audience to recognize fictional
text as such. “Characteristics of fictionality,” on the other hand, are
components of a theory that tries to reconstruct a historical understanding
of fiction. Only with equal reference to both categories it is therefore
possible to give a valid account of fictionality.
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Werner Wolf, “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect
of Fiction” / 325
Aesthetic illusion is one of the most attractive effects of literature
and other media. However, there is surprisingly little research on this
phenomenon in English. Focussing on narrative fiction, the article analyzes
aesthetic illusion as the impression of being recentered in a possible
world as if it were (a slice of) life. This impression is produced during
a process of reception and emerges as the product of a cooperation between
the recipient, the cultural context and, most importantly, the text as
the guiding “script” of the recipient’s illusion. Aesthetic illusion consists
in a dominant feeling of experiential immersion, but also--as opposed to
various states of “delusion”--in a latent awareness of fictionality. The
article moreover contains a discussion of typical features of illusionist
fiction and of basic textual factors (‘principles of illusion-making’)
that contribute to the emergence of aesthetic illusion. It concludes with
some remarks on the functions of aesthetic illusion, its derivate, the
breaking of illusion, and desiderata for further, in particular cognitive
research, which should complement the present, text-centered theory of
illusion.
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Ansgar Nünning, “Where Historiographic
Metafiction and Narratology Meet: Towards an Applied Cultural Narratology”
/ 352
As surveys of narratology have shown, recent developments in the field
of narrative studies have resulted in such a proliferation of new approaches
that structuralist narratology seems to have ramified into a plethora of
“narratologies” (David Herman). Using the ongoing debates about the problems
and possibilities of a cultural and contextualist reorientation of narratology’s
aims and a concomitant widening of its research domain as its point of
departure, this article explores the interface where narratology and historiographic
metafiction meet in order to demonstrate that an applied cultural narratology
can open up productive lines of research. Although many critics have investigated
historiographic metafiction and other new kinds of postmodernist historical
fiction in some depth and detail, the article contends that fresh insight
can be gained by approaching the subject from a narratological angle. The
second part outlines some of the premises and concepts of a cultural narratology
against the backdrop of the recent proliferation of ever more “new narratologies.”
Challenging Linda Hutcheon’s identification of postmodernism with historiographic
metafiction, part three fleshes out this conceptual skeleton by presenting
an outline of a typology and poetics of postmodernist historical fiction
based on narratological parameters. The final section argues that the cultural
narratological framework delineated promises to move narratology beyond
its notorious ahistoricity, opening it up to cultural history.
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Uri Margolin, “Coda: The Next Generation”
/ 376
As a supplement to the survey of German narratology provided in the
introduction to these special issues, this afterword discusses some of
the major work published since 2000 by German theorists of narrative, including
books by Hilary Dannenberg, Andrea Gutenberg, Fotis Jannidis, Carola Surkamp,
and Ralf Schneider, as well as a number of anthologies.
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