Compitum

Simon Grund, Robert Kirstein et Julian Wagner (éd.), Ambiguity and Narratology. Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Diachronic Case Studies, Berlin-Boston, 2024.

Éditeur : De Gruyter
Collection : Narratologia, 92
276 pages
ISBN : 9783111495835
129,00 €

As a well-known phenomenon in everyday communication, ambiguity has increasingly become the subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. However, within this context, it has been observed that words or expressions situated within the artistic framework of storytelling have not yet been at the centre of research interest. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the phenomenon of ambiguity from the perspective of narratology – understood as a general theory of narration and narrative communication.

The volume pursues two goals: Firstly, it seeks to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, cultural history and narratology enriches the field of literary studies significantly. This focus not only highlights how narrative techniques often rely on everyday language conventions, but also explores how various textual features, narrative devices, or even entire storylines can be affected by phenomena (or lead to experiences) of ambiguity. These ambiguities often serve as poetic strategies that are deliberately set in the communicative process of text and reader to achieve certain narrative goals. Secondly, ambiguity – as a characteristic of (narrative) communication – seves as a linking element across different fictional (and factual) text types and genres throughout time and cultures.
The collected essays cover a wide range of narrative texts, from Roman comedy to funerary reliefs, from historiographical writings to utopian tales, from Goethe's novels to contemporary fantasy literature. In its broad approach, the volume thus contributes to the project of diachronic narratology, which, like the research on ambiguity in literary and cultural studies, has recently gained increasing momentum.
The combined consideration of ambiguity and narratology not only raises awareness of phenomena of ambiguity in narrative texts but also encourage reflection on the theoretical foundations of narrative, particularly on the methods and devices used to describe these ambiguous structures. Overall, the volume represents an exploration of a relatively unexplored interdisciplinary field, aiming to stimulate further research.


Contents

Editors' Preface

I Introduction
Robert Kirstein
Foreword – Why Ambiguity and Narratology?
Simon Grund
Ambiguous Narration – Narrative Ambiguity: Theoretical Reflections on Terms and Concepts

II ‘Text' and ‘Text'-Producers
Julian Wagner
Beyond the Text: The Performative Mediality of Ovid's Metamorphoses
Anna Mareike Weimer, Hanna Varachkina, Luisa Gödeke, Benjamin Gittel
The Author's Speech: Empirical Perspectives on Speaker Attribution in Narrative Fiction

III ‘Story' and Narrative Devices
Dominik Wabersich
Time and Ambiguity: Aesthetic Temporalities and the Ambiguity of Event in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden
Gerjanne van den Berg
Poisonous Rumours: Creating Ambiguity in Death-Scenes in Tacitus' Annals

IV ‘Fabula' and the Narrative Content of Fictional Worlds
Burkhard Emme
Visual Narration and Ambiguity: Two Case Studies
Jacob Langeloh
It Might Be Not Impossible: Negation, Ambiguity and the Role of the Narrator in Early-Modern Utopian Narrations
Jonas Kellermann
Facing The Other: Ambiguous Story Worlds in the Fiction of Susanna Clarke

V Narration and Communication
Edoardo Galfré
Ipse Dixit: (Dis)Ambiguating Quotations in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars
Simon Grund, Robert Kirstein
‘If Anyone Among this People …': Ambiguity and Multiple Addressing in Latin Literature (Plautus, Catullus, Ovid, Thomas Morus)

List of Authors
Index

Source : De Gruyter