Narrative in Culture

Astrid Erll, Roy Sommer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110646115
• eBook ISBN: 9783110652307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The collection showcases new research in the field of cultural and historical narratology. Starting from the premise of the 'semantisation of narrative forms' (A. Nünning), it explores the cultural situatedness and historical transformations of narrative, with contributors developing new perspectives on key concepts of cultural and historical narratology, such as unreliable narration and multiperspectivity. The volume introduces original approaches to the study of narrative in culture, highlighting its pivotal role for attention, memory, and resilience studies, and for the imagination of crises, the Anthropocene, and the Post-Apocalypse. Addressing both fictional and non-fictional narratives, individual essays analyze the narrative-making and unmaking of Europe, Brexit, and the Postcolonial. Finally, the collection features new research on narrative in media culture, looking at the narrative logic of graphic novels, picture books, and newsmedia.

Contributors

Michael Basseler is Academic Manager at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University of Giessen. His doctoral dissertation on cultural memory and trauma in the contemporary African American novel won the JLU dissertation prize in 2008. Among his research interests are narrative theories, the intersection of literary and cultural studies, and transdisciplinary perspectives in the study of culture. His second book (Habilitation) deals with the American short story from the perspective of ‘literature and knowledge’ (An Organon of Life Knowledge, Bielefeld 2019). His current project focuses on the literary and cultural dimensions of resilience-thinking.

Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart. Her research interests include Early Modern English literature and culture, the aesthetics of fascination, and literary attention. She was a member of the German Young Academy and taught at the universities of Warwick, Giessen, Stanford, Mainz, and Innsbruck. Her publications include monographs on Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008) and (co-)edited volumes on Regions of Culture – Regions of Identity (2010), A History of British Poetry (with Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, 2015), and Literature and Values (with Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning, 2009).

Hanne Birk is postdoc at the Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn. She studied English and German Literatures and Cultures as well as Philosophy in Germany and Canada. She wrote her dissertation on Indigenous literatures (AlterNative Memories: Kulturspezifische Inszenierungen von Erinnerung in zeitgenössischen Romanen indigener Autor/inn/en Australiens, Kanadas und Aotearoas/Neuseelands, 2008). Her interests led to extensive research stays in London (UK), Heraklion (Crete), Sydney (Australia) as well as in Auckland and Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand). Both her research and teaching focus on South Pacific Literatures and Cultures, Indigenous Studies and Narratologies.

Dorothee Birke is currently Visiting Professor at the English Department at the University of Innsbruck. She wrote her dissertation at the University of Giessen (Memory’s Fragile Power, publ. 2008), and completed her post-doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg (Writing the Reader, publ. 2016). Her work has appeared in journals such as Style, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Narrative (2013: ISSN award for best contribution, together with Birte Christ). She has held fellowships at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies and the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies. Her current research interests include chrononarratology, media-ecological perspectives on literature and political drama.

Stella Butter is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau. She received her PhD from the University of Gießen for a study on literature as a medium of cultural self-reflexivity (Literatur als Medium kultureller Selbstreflexion, 2007). Her post-doctoral thesis, awarded by the University of Mannheim in 2012, concentrated on literary representations of contingency and the cultural functions that these literary scenarios fulfil (Kontingenz und Literatur im Prozess der Modernisierung, 2013). An overarching interest in the way processes of modernization are depicted and shaped by literature and the media also informs her current research projects on constructions of home in contemporary British and American literature as well as on biopolitics and literature.

Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Her research interests include memory studies, media theory, cultural narratology and transcultural studies. She wrote her dissertation on memories of World War I in German and English novels (Gedächtnisromane, 2003). Her introduction to memory studies (Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen 2005, third ed. 2017) has been translated into English (Memory in Culture, 2011), Chinese, Spanish, and Polish. With Ansgar Nünning, she is general editor of the series Media and Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, since 2004) and co-editor of A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (2010).

Marion Gymnich is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bonn. She wrote her PhD thesis on notions of female identity in novels by twentieth-century women writers and completed her post-doctoral thesis (Habilitation) in the field of postcolonial literature at the University of Giessen. She is a principal investigator in the Cluster of Excellence “Beyond Slavery and Freedom” (funded by the German Research Foundation/DFG) and in the research project “La phraséologie du roman” (funded by the DFG and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche). Her research interests include feminist and postcolonial narratology, the interface between literature and linguistics, and genre theory.

Janine Hauthal is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014–2021). Her dissertation (Metadrama und Theatralität, 2009) received the bi-annual award of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. Her research focusses on metareference across media and genres, postdramatic theatre (texts), British ‘fictions of Europe’, and cultural and transgeneric narratology. Her work has been published in Modern Drama, Journal for Postcolonial Writing, and English Text Construction as well as with Brill, de Gruyter, and Routledge. Her most recent FWO-funded project is entitled “Europe in the Anglophone Settler Imagination since 1989”.

Sandra Heinen is Professor of English Literature and Media Studies at the University of Wuppertal. She received her PhD at the University of Giessen with a dissertation on authorial self-fashioning during the Romantic period (Literarische Inszenierung von Autorschaft, 2006) and completed her post-doctoral thesis (Habilitation) at Goethe-University Frankfurt with a thesis on contemporary Indian English Fiction. Her other research interests include gender studies, transmedial narrative research, and adaptation studies.

Guido Isekenmeier is Assistant Professor of English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart. His dissertation dealt with television news coverage of the 2003 Iraq War (‘The Medium is the Witness’, 2009). He coordinated the research network ‘Literary Visuality Studies’ funded by the German Research Foundation (Literary Visualities, 2017, co-edited with Ronja Bodola) and is a founding member of the German John Fowles Society (Recollecting John Fowles, 2018, co-edited with Gerd Bayer). His research focuses on literary description, visual culture, and intertextuality/inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Tale of Two Concepts: Ansgar Nünning at Sixty
• Stories of Dangerous Life in the Post-Trauma Age: Toward a Cultural Narratology of Resilience
• Mind the Narratives: Towards a Cultural Narratology of Attention
• The End of the World (as We Know It)? – Cultural Ways of Worldmaking in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Narratives
• Plumbing Distant Spatiotemporal Scales: Towards an Econarratology of Planetary Memory in Narratives of the Global South
• Narrative Forms in the Age of the Anthropocene: Negotiating Human-Nonhuman Relations in Global South Novels
• Fact, Fiction, and Everything in-between: Strategies of Reader Activation in Postcolonial Graphic Narratives
• ‘It’s Not Our Opinion, It’s the Opinion of Our Roles’ – Fremdverstehen Revisited or: Where Foreign Language Education and Narratology Can Meet
• Narrative and Visual Resources of Culture in Contemporary Indigenous Children’s Books from Australia
• Troubling Justice: Narratives of Revenge
• Erin Burnett in Mali: Bardic Television and the Genealogy of Cultural Narratology
• New Media Narratives: Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy and Identity in the Digital Age
• The ‘Death’ of the Unreliable Narrator: Toward a Functional History of Narrative Unreliability
• Odyssean Travels: The Migration of Narrative Form (Homer – Lamb – Joyce)
• A European Storyteller? Collective Narration in John Berger’s Into Their Labours
• Brexit as Cultural Performance: Towards a Narratology of Social Drama
• Contributors