Author and Narrator

Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate

Dorothee Birke, Tilmann Köppe, Dorothee Birke, Tilmann Köppe

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110384000
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The distinction between author and narrator is one of the cornerstones of narrative theory. In the past two decades, however, scope, implications and consequences of this distinction have become the subjects of debate. This volume offers contributions to these debates from different vantage points: literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, and media studies. It thus manifests the status of narrative theory as a transdisciplinary project.

Index

Alward, Peter 1–2

Atkins, Stuart 1, 2

Bareis, J. Alexander 1

Barnes, H.G. 1, 2, 3

Beardsley, Monroe 1

Benjamin, Walter 1

Birgfeld, Johannes 1

Birke, Dorothee 1

Blackall, Eric 1, 2

Booth, Wayne C. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Borchmeyer, Dieter 1

Borkowski, Jan 1, 2

Brenzo, Richard 1, 2, 3-4, 5

Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter 1

Bruhns, Adrian 1

Chatman, Seymour 1, 2, 3, 4

Conter, Claude D. 1

Currie, Gregory 1, 2, 3, 4

Davidson, Donald 1

Dittmar, Jacob1

Eckardt, Regine 1

Feuerlich, Ignace 1

Fielding, Henry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1

Fludernik, Monika 1, 2

Friedemann, Käte 1, 2

Galbraith, Mary 1

Gaut, Berys 1

Genette, Gérard 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6

Grice, Herbert Paul 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Hamburger, Käte 1, 2

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8–9

Henkel, Arthur 1

Hillebrandt, Claudia 1

Hornschemeier, Paul 1, 2, 3, 4

Hühn, Peter 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6–7

Hume, David 1

Hutcheon, Linda 1

Jahn, Manfred 1

Jannidis, Fotis 1

Kania, Andrew 1

Kaplan, David 1, 2, 3

Kayser, Wolfgang 1, 2–3

Kindt, Tom 1, 2–3

Klauk, Tobias 1, 2

Klein, Gabriele 1, 2

Köppe, Tilmann 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6

Kracht, Christian 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6–7

Krupat, Arnold 1

Kuhn, Markus 1, 2, 3

Lamarque, Peter 1, 2

Lanser, Susan 1–2, 3

Larkin, Philip 1

Levine, Robert S. 1

Levinson, Jerrold 1, 2

Lewis, David 1, 2

Livingston, Paisley 1

Lorca, Federico García 1

Margolin, Uri 1, 2

Martínez, Matías 1–2

Müller, Hans-Harald 1–2

Murray, Les 1, 2, 3

Niefanger, Dirk 1, 2, 3

Nisbet, Hugh Barr 1

Nünning, Ansgar 1, 2, 3

Olsen, Stein Haugom 1, 2

Pascal, Roy 1, 2

Pieper, Vincenz 1

Prince, Gerald 1

Rajewsky, Irina O. 1

Reiss, Hans 1

Rühm, Gerhard 1

Ryan, Marie-Laure 1

Schings, Hans-Jürgen 1

Schmid, Wolf 1, 2

Schönert, Jörg 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6

Schröter, Julian 1, 2

Searle, John R. 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Spielhagen, Friedrich 1

Stalnaker, Robert 1, 2–3, 4

Stanzel, Franz K. 1, 2, 3

Stöcklein, Paul 1, 2

Stühring, Jan 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6

Thomasson, Amie 1, 2–3

Vaget, Hans Rudolf 1

Veits, Andreas 1

Walsh, Richard 1

Walton, Kendall L. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Weber, Dietrich 1

Wilson, George 1, 2

Wimsatt, William 1

Winko, Simone 1, 2

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1

Wolf, Werner 1

Woodard, David 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Wordsworth, William 1, 2

Zipfel, Frank 1

1

For works on the return of the author, see in particular Maurice Biriotti/Nicola Miller (eds.), What is an Author?, Manchester 1993; Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/Matías Martínez/Simone Winko (eds.), Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, Tübingen 1999; Peter Jaszi/Martha Woodmansee (eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, Durham 1994; Peter Lamarque, “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy”, in: British Journal of Aesthetics, 30/1990, pp. 319–331; Eugen Simion, The Return of the Author, Evanston, IL, 1996. A brief survey of the concept of the author in the context of narrative theory is provided by Jörg Schönert, “Author”, in: Peter Hühn/John Pier/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin 2009, pp. 1–13.

2

See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction: The Quest for Effective Communication, Malden, MA, 2004 [1961]. For rhetorical approaches to narrative and the author after 1990 see e.g. James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, Columbus 1996; Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus 2007.

3

Note that the seemingly simple act of bringing a work into existence entails all kinds of theoretical difficulties, see Peter Lamarque, Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art, Oxford 2010, pp. 33–55.

4

This aspect is important for the editor’s job of establishing the authoritative version of a work, which may have been handed down in different manuscripts. For some difficulties concerning the identity of works of art, see Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd Edition, Cambridge 1980; Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Lanham 2005, ch. 6.

5

For a book-length overview, see Carlos Spoerhase, Autorschaft und Interpretation: Methodische Grundlagen einer philologischen Hermeneutik, Berlin 2007.

6

For references, see note 1 above.

7

Peter Lamarque/Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective, Oxford 1994, pp. 45f. For a critique of some of these assumptions, see Tobias Klauk’s contribution to this volume.

8

For more details, see Adrian Bruhns’ contribution to this volume.

9

For a useful clarification of talk of ‘worlds of fiction,’ see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford 1980, esp. Part 3, and Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge/London 1990.

10

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York 1986, p. 1.

11

For elaboration, see Maria Elisabeth Reicher, “The Ontology of Fictional Characters”, in: Jens Eder/Fotis Jannidis/Ralf Schneider (eds.), Characters in Fictional Worlds, Berlin/New York 2010, pp. 111–133. It is important to note that by claiming that the narrator is part of the fiction one characterizes his or her ontological status. In particular, this claim must not be conflated with claims about the ‘diegetic level’ the narrator occupies within the fiction, or his or her relation to his or her story; for elaboration on these categories, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca/New York 1980, pp. 227–254.

12

See Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006.

13

The notion of a category mistake has been made prominent by Gilbert Ryle, see his The Concept of Mind, Chicago 2002, pp. 16–18.

14

Interestingly, though, as with any dogma, the present one had to be invented first, and it took some time for it to be generally accepted; see Monika Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, 3rd Edition, Darmstadt 2010, pp. 70f. See also Vincenz Pieper’s contribution to the present volume.

15

For the sake of brevity, and unless otherwise indicated, we will stick to the terminology prevalent in literary studies and take ‘narrator’ to mean fictional narrator throughout.

16

Note that claims for the ubiquity of narrators come in different varie...

Table of contents

• linguae & litterae
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author and Narrator: Problems in the Constitution and Interpretation of Fictional Narrative
• Against Pragmatic Arguments for Pan-Narrator Theories: The Case of Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
• Narratorless Narration? Some Reflections on the Arguments For and Against the Ubiquity of Narrators in Fictional Narration
• Author and Narrator: Observations on Die Wahlverwandtschaften
• Author, Authority, and ‘Authorial Narration’: The Eighteenth-Century English Novel as a Test Case
• Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-Fashioning, and Narrator: The Controversy Over Christian Kracht’s Novel Imperium
• Fictional Narrators and Creationism
• Speakers and Narrators
• Serious Speech Acts in Fictional Works
• Author and Narrator in Lyric Poetry
• Narrative Mediation in Comics: Narrative Instances and Narrative Levels in Pau lHornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes
• Narrator and Author: A Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index