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Im Jahr 2006 brachte Saul Friedländer seine weithin beachtete Gesamtdarstellung „Nazi Germany and the Jews“ mit dem zweiten Band „The Years of Extermination“ zum Abschluss. Das Buch lese sich wie ein Roman, so und ähnlich urteilten Rezensenten über dessen literarische Qualitäten. Auf erzählerische Stärken verweisen auch Kommentare zu Christopher Brownings jüngster Studie „Remembering Survival“ (2010). Das Erzählen in der Geschichtswissenschaft ist seit längerem wieder Gegenstand der Diskussion: Forscherinnen und Forscher auf einem Symposium auf dem Alten Schloss Dornburg bei Jena gingen im Juni 2011 dieser Frage speziell für den Bereich der Holocaust-Historiographie nach.
In works of Maghrebi authors like Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), the body is the central medium that generates and constitutes the narration. The authors stand in the tradition of oral folk literature, which increasingly has been displaced by French written literature. Hence there is a tendency in postcolonial Maghrebi texts to reintegrate the performative act of narrating via the body into the literary structures of the novels. This becomes manifest in poly-phonic and poly-perspectival narrative experiments in which, with recourse to the halqa (the typical oral narrative situation), a re-territorialization (Deleuze/Guattari) of the body is performed.
In this context the body in literature plays a central role on the level of the metadiegesis: it is presented as the medium of narration. Using as an example Tahar Ben Jellouns novel L’enfant de sable (1985), the aim of this essay is to show how halqa elements and narrative influences from The Arabian Nights structure the text, which becomes a hybrid between medium and embodiment (Fischer-Lichte) by simulating eventfulness.
On the level of the diegesis, the body plays likewise a decisive role as subject of the storyline, becoming the most important medium for the expression of emotions, thoughts or attitudes. Body language is deliberately utilized by the authors to discuss ways of dealing with traditions, the negotiation of social relations and the (de-)construction of identity. Social order, power structures, hierarchies, existing values and norms are communicated and constituted via body language.
Es ist eine alte Debatte. Auf der einen Seite steht die althergebrachte Maxime, alles, was wert ist, gesagt zu werden, müsse in jeder Sprache gesagt werden können - umso mehr dann, wenn es sich um die Wissenschaft handelt, die den Anspruch erhebt, universelle Wahrheiten zu erfassen. Demgegenüber steht ein immer wieder anzutreffender Gedanke, dessen wohl inspirierteste Formulierung von Wilhelm von Humboldt stammt, nämlich, dass die Verschiedenheit der Sprachen nicht nur eine von „Schällen und Zeichen“, sondern eine der „Weltansichten selbst“ sei. Thema dieses Vortrags ist die Frage, wo die Wahrheit zwischen diesen scheinbaren Gegensätzen liegt.
Is there something like a 'scientific' approach to the reading or interpretation of literary texts as is suggested by the German term 'Literaturwissenschaft'? This essay argues that genuinely scientific criteria such as the intersubjective verifiability of a given reading do not apply to the reading of literary texts. The reason is that such texts enable a quasi infinite range of different readings the preconceptions of which are contingent upon the individual readers, their previous experiences, literary as well as non-literary, and their expectations. — What, then, are the tasks of a scholarly reading of literary texts? Firstly, the theoretical reflection upon the status of such texts in comparison to pragmatic texts; secondly, the attempt at reconstructing their historical context (in terms of discursive history), and thirdly, a reading with regard to present-day problems. The 'quality' of a scholarly reading of a literary text would thus be dependent not on its 'objectivity', but rather on its capacity to produce resonances amongst other present-day readers, scholarly and non-scholarly.