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In this interview, Eva von Contzen introduces her current research project on retellings of premodern texts in contemporary narrative fiction. In this connection, she talks about the potential of historical and diachronic narratologies as an interdisciplinary undertaking that not only investigates storytelling practices at certain points in time, but that also examines narratives from different cultures.

Emerging from a growing number of conflicts and catastrophes in the twenty-first century, contemporary refugee life narratives are marked by a multiple erosion of trust, and yet are intimately engaged in rebuilding trust. In the face of material and legal constraints for refugees to speak, their life stories are frequently facilitated by new networks of solidarity to protest hostile immigration regimes, involving activists, lawyers, go-between writers, and translators, among others. These networks offer a safe space for testimony and work towards restoring trust while mutually inscribing biographers and biographical subjects in a relational act of telling y(our) story: The refugee’s tale – ‘your’ story – encapsulates the collaborative and trust-building tale of its making – ‘our’ story. Outlining a narratology of trust in refugee life-writing, the paper assesses the intricate and innovative dynamics of ‘hospitable form’ in acts of fictional accommodation, in multiperspectival emic and etic narratives, and in the interplay of auto- and heterobiographical storytelling.

Rezension zu: Fritz Breithaupt: Das narrative Gehirn. Was unsere Neuronen erzählen. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2022. 368 S. EUR 28,-. ISBN 978-3-518-58778-2

Rezension zu: Kontrafaktik der Gegenwart. Politisches Schreiben als Realitätsvariation bei Christian Kracht, Kathrin Röggla, Juli Zeh und Leif Randt. Berlin / Boston, MA: De Gruyter 2022 (= Gegenwartsliteratur). 607 S. EUR 39,95. ISBN 978-3-11-076296-9

Review of:Alexandra Valint: Narrative Bonds. Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 2021 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 219 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1463-3

According to governmental recommendations and scholarship concerning crisis communication, which have emerged from the 1980s onwards, an important characteristic of successful disaster-related crisis communication is its capacity for developing or restoring trust. This article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of a tank farm explosion on 27 July 2021 in the waste incineration plant Chem-park in Leverkusen, the managing company, Currenta, engaged in crisis communication in a way that can indeed be interpreted as a form of ‘doing trust.’ By offering a discourse analysis of the statements published by Currenta on a newly created info page and its Twitter account, the paper explores the emergence of a specific crisis narrative connected to that aim. Our study shows how Currenta’s crisis narrative depicted the company as trustworthy by referring to its attempts at reflecting the values of integrity, transparency and (willingness to) dialogue. We situate these attempts in the context of competing narratives which, disseminated by other actors such as journalists, environmental activists and individual social media users, ‘revealed’ an alleged deceptiveness of the company and presented it as untrustworthy.

This article discusses two Indian English novels, Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege and Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight, first published in 2003 and 2005, respectively, both of which deal with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India at the turn of the millennium. The novels can be described as ‘crisis narratives’ in the sense that they represent in narrative form what the authors perceive as a serious political crisis in which trust is lost. Since both texts deal with the crisis not in retrospect, but at a moment when it is still unfolding, the texts can be regarded more specifically as instances of ‘threat communication,’ a communicative act that identifies a threat to an existing order. Although both novels negotiate the same social crisis, they speak from different vantage points and foreground distinctive aspects and perspectives. Thus, trust, its absence, and its contraposition, distrust, are shown to play different roles in the two narratives.

Introduction to the Special Issue by the Guest Editors.

Report on the Conference “Produktion des Erzählens, Varianten des Erzählten. Narratologische, editionswissenschaftliche und literarhistorische Perspektiven auf die Genese von Erzähltexten,” organized by Matthias Grüne and Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, November 17–19, 2022, University of Wuppertal (Germany)

This article argues that post-Celtic Tiger fiction reflects the current crisis of trust and offers a perfect laboratory for the intersubjective negotiation of social practices of trust. Drawing on received and recent philosophical discussions of trust, the article first introduces the main parameters of this social phenomenon. Based on a corpus of about a dozen austerity novels, but with Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart as the main reference text, it then proceeds to establish (1) the general relevance of matters of trust for post-Celtic Tiger Fiction, and (2) the defining features of the narrative representation of social structures and performances of trust. Finally, in order to take into account not only trust-related issues and structures recurring in contemporary Irish austerity fiction, but to also point up pronounced differences in narrative form and ideological orientation among individual post-Tiger novels, it complements the reading of The Spinning Heart with an analysis of the narrative dynamics of ‘doing trust’ in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011).

Report on the Workshop “Trust, Crisis, Catastrophe III: Practices”, organized by Nina Doejen, Gerald Hartung, Katharina Kalthoff, Florian Kappeler, and Cécile Stehrenberger, January 18–20, 2023, University of Wuppertal (Germany)

In this interview, Lars Bernaerts discusses narratology as a tool to analyze the form, functioning, and circulation of narrative, introduces his current research project on the novelistic cycle, and explains what we can learn from “narratological science fiction.”

Review of: Sandrine Sorlin: The Stylistics of “You”. Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022. 233 pp. GBP 85.00. ISBN 978-1-108-83302-8

Report on the Conference “Framing Narratives: New Perspectives on Premodern Textual Production in Arabic,” Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), November 18–19, 2021

Review of: Marco Caracciolo: Narrating the Mesh. Form and Story in the Anthropocene. Charlottesville, VA / London: University of Virginia Press, 2021 (= Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism). 240 pp. USD 34.50. ISBN 978-0-8139-4583-5

In this article I argue that the choice of language and specific cultural contexts play an important role for literary representations of mind-wandering. While this has been pointed out before in both mind-wandering research and Cog-nitive Literary Studies (CLS), I enhance this thesis in two directions, focusing on Ivan Turgenev’s short narrative Asya (1858). After a brief discussion of the role of linguistic contexts in CLS, I will first give a detailed account of the lin-guistic and cultural specificities that influence the representation of mind-wandering in Russian literary texts like Asya. As I will show, episodes of mind-wandering in this text rely on linguistic characteristics and cultural contexts of Russian language and literature that can hardly be conveyed in translation. Secondly, I suggest that the real challenge for culturally diverse CLS research lies in discerning the fine line between a language’s specific linguistic proper-ties and common features of literary representations of mind wandering, as Asya contains both specific Russian and more general features of mind-wandering.

Combining cognitive stylistics, cognitive narratology, and critical race theory, the paper establishes the concept of a ‘white attention economy’ as a tool for analysing systemic discrimination inscribed in (real world) attention patterns and its reflection in literary fiction. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) works with such a ‘white attention economy’, that is, selective narrative attention privileging a white perspective, which exploits and reinforces readers’ habitual attention patterns. Most strikingly, the novel’s character descriptions present white characters as default. However, the novel also breaks with key principles of a white attention economy and thus challenges it, encouraging readers to reflect upon their own attention patterns. This is mainly achieved through two different joint attention frames: (1) the representation of joint attention between characters, which (2) readers are invited to join cognitively.

The study investigates the content and triggers of mind-wandering (MW) in readers of fictional texts. It asks whether readers’ MW is productive (text-related) or unproductive (text-unrelated). Methodologically, it bridges the gap between narratological and data-driven approaches by utilising a sentence-by-sentence, self-paced reading paradigm combined with thought probes in the reading of an excerpt of A. L. Kennedy’s “Baby Blue”. Results show that the contents of MW can be linked to text properties. We validated the role of self-reference in MW and found prediction errors to be triggers of MW. Results also indicate that the content of MW often travels along the lines of the text at hand and can thus be viewed as productive and integral to interpretation.

In this article, we draw upon cognitive sciences, narratology, and media studies to investigate the interrelation between metafiction, attention, and mind-wandering in two works of German children’s and young adult metafiction: Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) from 1979 and Cornelia Funke’s Tintenherz (Inkheart) published in 2003. Both works are attention narratives in that they employ textual strategies such as foregrounding, metalepsis, narratorial commentary, or intermedial references to guide their readers’ attention and point them to aspects of their mediality. Moreover, we explore metafiction’s effects on mind-wandering, that is, moments in which our minds stray from the here and now to engage in introspective thought and imagination. We contend that metafiction, due to its high attentional demands, can reduce the overall frequency and duration of mind-wandering, but that it can also, on the other hand, facilitate text-related mind-wandering, as-sociated with productive, on-task reflections and meta-awareness.

The current debate on slowness and narrative offers an ideal opportunity to reconsider the structuralist aversion to pragmatics and context. The article argues that a well-constrained approach to context is possible if we revise the concept of narrative dynamics to include transtextual and transactional dimensions; this theo¬retical contribution to contextual poetics sheds new light on dialogical constellations in narrative fiction, e.g. the interdependencies between Karl Ove Knausgård’s ‘slow’ autofiction and the autobiographical novel October Child (2021) by Linda Boström Knausgård.

In this interview, Maria Mäkelä provides her personal definition of narrative research, introduces her current research projects, and speculates about the future of narrative research

Protests against the Corona policy have been widespread since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the causes and patterns as well as the structures and dynamics of this political protest remain unclear. From a political science perspective, this article focuses on the everyday narrative processes in protest and accentuates a specific field of intersection: the connection between narratives and ‘doing emotions’. With an interaction-oriented perspective on this ‘bottom-up’ protest politics, it reflects on the extent to which the protest community can be understood both as a narrative community and as an emotional regime. Emotional practices open up a new, productive perspective to look at the range of emotional facets from pride, courage, humour and pleasure to moralising indignation, disgust and hatred instead of merely individual strong basic emotions in their interaction. This is illustrated with a view to the narrative 1. (de)construction of the crisis, 2. legitimisation of the protest, and 3. patterns of protest participation. DIEGESIS. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research. ISSN 2195-2116. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de Jg. 11 (2022) H. 1, S. 25-29.

In this essay Michael Butter discusses the relation between conspiracy theories and conspiracy narratives.

In this interview, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen reports on current developments in the field of fictionality research and affords insight into his latest project on the relationship between storytelling, fictionality and sexuality.

The chapter reacts to this special issue’s leading question “Why narratology?” by reflecting on a narrative phenomenon that has been neglected by literary and cul¬tural criticism: that of ‘women writing men.’ A number of reasons for the seeming reluctance to approach this question, which suggests itself as a fruitful object of study for both narratologists and gender-oriented literary critics, are discussed. Arguing for an integration of narratological and gender-oriented approaches in the context of the ‘new formalist’ turn, the chapter charts narrative constructions of masculinity in recent novels by Irish women writers. This corpus is approached through a discourse- (rather than story-) oriented lens. Using the two currently dominant ways of ‘perspectivising’ fictional worlds, the chapter first concentrates on women writers’ novels that feature male first-person narrators and in doing so deconstruct and reconstruct prevalent masculinities (Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, and Caoilinn Hughes’ The Wild Laughter). It then goes on to analyse heterodiegetic novels that integrate male and female perspectives via multiple focalisation and mark their male protagonists’ views, emotions, and actions as decisive for any renegotiation of the concept of the Irish family (Anne Enright’s The Green Road, Helen Cullen’s The Dazzling Truth, and Ruth Gilligan’s The Butchers).

Over the course of the so-called narrative turn, narrative research has fundamentally expanded its scope and now also shows an interest in, among other things, the pragmatic context of narratives. As a result of the ‘cognitive turn’, narratologists have mainly explored the ways in which narratives are perceived and received. Yet every narrative also involves a production process, a crucial dynamic which should also be of narratological interest. This article draws attention to this particular gap in narrative research and tries to reduce it by examining an exemplary case as well as proposing some theoretical considerations towards a genetic narratology. Drawing on the formalist-structuralist model of ‘narrative constitution’ and the phenomenological concept of a ‘narrative hermeneutics,’ it intro- duces a new methodological approach which seeks to combine research questions and terminologies from the fields of edition philology and narrative theory. The approach will be illustrated with reference to the author Arthur Schnitzler, by investigating his working methods as well as the genesis of his narrative works over several decades. In this context the article particularly focuses on the ‘monologue novella’ Fräulein Else, which – albeit completed in the 1920’s and published in 1924 – probably traces back to a note from the 1890’s.

From Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) to Jim Shepard’s Phase Six (2021), contemporary pandemic fiction relies largely on narrative strategies of continuity and the familiar, including authenticity or “reality effects” (Roland Barthes), reliable narrators, focalizers with backgrounds in medicine or science, and a structural pattern of what Priscilla Wald has termed the “outbreak narrative.” This paper reads conventional narrative patterns of pandemic fiction figuratively as a form of “molecular mimicry,” akin to the biomedical strategy by which viruses override immune systems and gain access to the interior of cells. Like Trojan horses, I argue, frameworks of narrative reliability and authority tend to be more successful in wheeling in specific normative representations, which stabilize given hierarchies. By contrast, The Decameron Project (2020), a “collective narrative” of twenty-nine short stories written in response to the COVID-19 situation in 2020, exhibits a significant increase in narrative and cognitive uncertainty. My analysis of stories by David Mitchell, Liz Moore, Margaret Atwood, Charles Yu, and others traces various functions of unstable narration through multilayered realities, unreliability, intertextuality, and self-reflexiveness, ultimately uncovering what may be a literary analogy to mRNA vaccines. The Decameron Project, I argue, not only diagnoses a growing unease with discourses of tacit objectivity, but it marks an important contribution to the emerging cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic. DIEGESIS. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research. ISSN 2195-2116. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de Jg. 11 (2022) H. 1, S. 1-24.

Review of: Natalya Bekhta: We-Narratives. Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2020 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 203 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1421-4411 DIEGESIS. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research. ISSN 2195-2116. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de Jg. 11 (2022) H. 1, S. 80-86.

Review of: Erin James / Eric Morel (eds.): Environment and Narrative. New Directions in Econarratology. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2020 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 224 pp. USD 69.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1420-6 DIEGESIS. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research. ISSN 2195-2116. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de Jg. 11 (2022) H. 1, S. 87-93.

Rezension zu: Lukas Werner: Erzählte Zeiten im Roman der Frühen Neuzeit. Eine historische Narratologie der Zeit. Berlin / Boston, MA: de Gruyter 2018 (= Narratologia Bd. 62). 416 S. EUR 99,95. ISBN 978-3-11-056553-9

Review of: Brian Richardson: A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century. Theorizing Unruly Narratives. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press 2019 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series). 218 pp. USD 69.95. ISBN 978-0-8142- 1412-1

Comics journalism is a form of narrative journalism, but also plays a part in a much wider movement – the hybridization of cultural products – and the increasing blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. It presents itself as a way to inject new life into a profession currently in crisis by resurrecting reporter subjectivity. Based on a corpus from the magazine XXI, this article analyses how the alleged subjectivity is expressed in the comics journalism paratext and how it is translated into the cartoon itself – in both its graphic and its textual dimensions. One of the most interesting results is the contrast between the two parts of the analysis: while the paratext almost systematically emphasizes the authors’ personal involvement, the authors make their presence fully known in slightly fewer than half of the cartoons analysed.

Introduction to the Special Issue by the Guest Editors

An Interview with Frederick Luis Aldama.

The article deals with Nordic literature and discusses the question of whether the dystopian novel is an emblematic genre of the Anthropocene. Starting from an overview of the genre with regard to the Anthropocene narratives and aesthetics, it is argued that the dystopian novel seems at first glance to produce the metanarrative of the Anthropocene, which is supposed to explain the present as a zero point from which man either creates a better future or descends towards dystopia. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that, on the contrary, even early dystopias tend to critically reflect and transgress the anthropocentrism and normative temporality of the Anthropocene. Drawing on evidence from a classical dystopian novel from the first half of the twentieth century, Karin Boye’s Kallocain, and the works of two younger writers, Johanna Sinisalo and Johannes Anyuru, it will be shown how these tendencies become established and reinforced. By interweaving utopia / dystopia with the here and now, these novels become the expression of ‘heterotopian thinking and writing,’ which is to be understood as a practice of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and as an art of living on the damaged earth.

Marina Grishakova / Maria Poulaki (eds.): Narrative Complexity. Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2019 (= Frontiers of Narrative Series). 468 pp. USD 75.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-9686-2

Elizabeth Alsop: Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction. Columbus, OH 2019

Report on the Conference “Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism”, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen / International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), February 22-23, 2018

An Interview with Sylvie Patron

Der Comic-Zeichner Reinhard Kleist im Interview

Kai Mikkonen: The Narratology of Comic Art. New York / London 2017 (= Routledge Advances in Comics Studies Bd. 3). 312 S. GBP 110.00. ISBN 978-1-138-22155-0

Given that today’s world is preoccupied with climate change, it comes as no surprise that recent speculative narratives predominantly focus on the future of planet Earth. Yet such Anthropocene novels do not make up the entirety of contemporary speculative narratives. This essay first explores how the genre draws on current societal, political, economic, and ecological trends to create dystopian scenarios, and then goes on to investigate the ethical dimension of these models for the world. In the first step it takes John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), and Joanne Ramos’s The Farm (2019) as examples and shows how speculative narratives stage ideologies and negotiate human values on the level of both narrative content and narrative transmission. The second step, an investigation into the interplay of the ethics of the telling and the ethics of the told, then serves to illustrate the degree to which the aesthetic form of a narrative can determine the ethical implications of reading speculative fiction in the age of the Anthropocene.

Jan Horstmann: Theaternarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analyseverfahren für Theaterinszenierungen. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 2018 (= Narratologia Bd. 64). 275 S. EUR 89,95. ISBN 978-3-11-059500-0

Andrea Landvogt: Discours cités. Eine äußerungs- und erzähltheoretisch fundierte Typologie der Redewiedergabe am Beispiel von Gustave Flaubert. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2011 (= Studia Romanica Bd. 162). 352 S. EUR 45,-. ISBN 978-3-8253-5780-1 In der vorliegenden Dissertationsschrift verfolgt die Autorin eine gleich dreifache Forschungsabsicht: Unter Verknüpfung linguistischer mit literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen untersucht sie das Phänomen der Redewiedergabe im Französischen von sowohl äußerungstheoretischer als auch narratologischer Warte aus. Ihre Studie mündet in eine neue Typologisierung der discours cités, wobei die verschiedenen Verfahren insbesondere im Hinblick auf ihre graduelle Zitathaftigkeit funktionalisiert werden. Schließlich werden die herausge¬arbeiteten Wiedergabeverfahren im Detail an einem längeren Abschnitt aus Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary erprobt. Der Arbeit liegt die zentrale These zugrunde, dass Flauberts „vielzitierte[r] style indirect libre“ (S. 13) weder das einzige noch das zentrale Merkmal der für Romane im Allgemeinen und Madame Bovary im Speziellen konstatierten Bachtin’schen Vielstimmigkeit sei, da diese vielmehr über eine Vielzahl von Verfahren der Redewiedergabe und ein daraus resultierendes „Spiel von Annäherung und Distanzierung“ (S. 15) funktioniere. Entsprechend ihrem Ansatz erarbeitet die Autorin in Anlehnung an die von Oswald Ducrot entwickelte Differenzierung der Enunziation in einen Produzenten der Äußerung (sujet parlant), einen Urheber des Äußerungsakts (locuteur) und das Subjekt der Äußerung (énonciateur) ein Modell des Äußerungsakts, das ebendiese Unterscheidung auch für den Part des Empfängers der Rede vorschlägt (Kapitel 2). In einem weiteren Schritt überträgt sie dieses Modell und erweitert es für den spezifischen Fall narrativen Sprechens (Kapitel 4), so dass auf dieser Grundlage Kriterien zur Funktionalisierung von Redewiedergabe (vgl. Kapitel 3) zur Verfügung stehen. Die Studie postuliert, dass die unterschiedlichen Verfahren der zitierten Rede auf den Prinzipien des Erwähnens, Berichtens und Darstellens beruhen. Insgesamt werden drei Gruppen von Wiedergabeverfahren unterschieden: monofunktionale (Kapitel 6), polyfunktionale (Kapitel 7) und modifizierte (Kapitel 8).

Annotation in CATMA helps measure the eventfulness and tellability of narrative within a given corpus. To analyze the narrations that mention the name of Sinaloa, Mexico, across 25 years’ issues of a German newspaper, DIE ZEIT, I follow the annotation protocol established by Vauth et al. (2021). The protocol yields a numeric index of eventfulness that can be used for the comparison of narrative texts within the corpus. The distribution of event types throughout the texts can also be used in order to represent styles of narration as a graph. In addition to this, plot tellability qua literariness can be quantified through the kind and distribution of transtextual and plot-relevant metapoetic cues. This twofold model of assessing eventfulness and tellability may seem simplistic in comparison to state of the art artificial intelligence research on event narration and plot understanding; however, this is offset by the promising advantages of integrating hermeneutic annotation – as an adequate implementation of human reading habits – with linguistic categories that can be used in machine learning models.

Katrin Dennerlein: Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin: de Gruyter 2009. (= Narratologia Bd. 22). V, 247 S. Geb. EUR 99,95. ISBN 978-3-11-021991-3 Eine der Aufgaben der Narratologie beim Erfassen des Raums besteht darin, einen Raumbegriff zu entwickeln, mit dessen Hilfe so Unterschiedliches wie die „wohlverstopfte Kristallflasche“ und das Schwarze Tor in Dresden aus E.T.A. Hoffmanns Der goldene Topf eingefangen werden können. Katrin Den-nerlein diskutiert in ihrer Dissertation die bestehende literaturwissenschaftliche Forschungsliteratur zum Raum und unterbreitet den Vorschlag einer kogni¬tionswissenschaftlich gestützten Raumkonzeption. Sie setzt sich den „Entwurf eines Raumkonzepts“ zum Ziel; zudem widmet sie ihre Studie „der Beschrei¬bung der narrativen Erzeugung von Raum, der Beschreibung von Darstel¬lungstechniken und deskriptiven Ansätzen zum Umgang mit Rauminformatio¬nen“ (S. 7), die bislang allzu wenig systematisch untersucht seien – wenn überhaupt (die „Vernachlässigung“ des Raums in der Narratologie diskutiert Dennerlein im Rahmen ihres Forschungsüberblicks, insbesondere S. 3-5). Eine Diskussion des Raums gehört in gewissem Maße zum spatial turn, der auch an der Literaturwissenschaft nicht vorüber gegangen ist und dabei die Erzähltheorie und Narratologie mehr als nur gestreift hat. Für die Narratologie allerdings sei der spatial turn kulturwissenschaftlicher Prägung wenig anschluss¬fähig, so betont die Autorin zu Beginn ihrer interdisziplinär ausgerichteten Studie Narratologie des Raums. Ebenfalls zu Recht unterstreicht sie, wie hetero¬gen die Diskussion um den Raum innerhalb der Literaturwissenschaft verläuft, und wie vielfältige metaphorische Übertragungen sie durchziehen. Dabei sam¬melten sich unter dem Stichwort „Raum“ so unterschiedliche Phänomene wie „semantischen Inkongruenzen und Mehrdeutigkeiten, die Abwesenheit einer klaren zeitlichen Struktur, der Umfang der hermeneutischen Operationen, die sich an einen Text anschließen lassen oder derjenige Raum, den Buchstaben auf dem Papier einnehmen“ (S. 50). In klarer Absetzung dagegen begrenzt Dennerlein ihren Untersuchungsgegenstand auf den „konkreten Raum der erzählten Welt“ (S. 48)

Facing climate crisis and other environmental problems that might shape our future, narrative practices are being developed to build positive images and narratives of possible futures. These practices come from a variety of cultural and political areas and fields, as well as from actors in the sphere of communication on climate and related issues of sustainable development. This article focuses on those approaches which aim to create “realistic utopias.” Realistic utopia means that the utopian future is based on knowledge currently available, and formulated in a way that presents its realization as possible. The genres and forms used to communicate these utopian narratives range from literature, journalistic forms, theatre, film to radio. This article examines some prominent and most recent forms of utopian narration.

This essay addresses rhetorical narratology’s approach to widely disparate scales of time and space in narratives of emergence, in which microevents without centralized agents or clear causal relationships produce macroscale effects. It uses rhetorical narratology’s a posteriori approach to address the difficulty of narrating causality between these scales and resists systematizing relationships of scale. Rhetorical narratology worries less about conditions of scalar interaction that undermine narratability, focusing instead on contingencies that mediate these scalar engagements. In particular, it explores hybrid relationships between rhetorical modes of narrative and lyric that emphasize interrelationships between event causality and conditions of being that are key in narratives of emergent behavior. If truth value is determined by ways that narratives establish coherent relationships between narrator and narratee in terms of purpose, then a rhetorical approach to scale and emergence considers how individuals use available resources to describe and explore relationships between different scales to achieve certain purposes.

It is almost a trope in contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene to call for new narratives that are able to convey the scale of the ecological crisis. When does a narrative become new, however? In this article, I build on Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s theory of narrative in culture to develop a preliminary answer to that question. I first explore the field of Anthropocene discourse and chart the ways in which stories about the ecological crisis can depart from traditional narrative templates. Novelty, from that perspective, is a function of the complexity of narrative’s engagement with existing stories, genres, and motifs. To exemplify this approach, I focus on Nathaniel Rich’s nonfiction book Losing Earth (2019), which reconstructs the early days of the climate change debate in the 1980s. In my reading, Rich’s work fails to do justice to the complexity of the Anthropocene because it falls back on a conventional narrative structure – the tragic plot – and it makes use of an actantial structure that neatly separates heroes and villains. By discussing the shortcomings of Rich’s account, I emphasize the centrality of narrative form in negotiating the Anthropocene in both fiction and nonfictional discourse.