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Bild und Leidenschaft
(2010)
This experience, listening to the radio version of "The Green Hills of Earth" was the first form in which I encountered a problem that in the following years continued to haunt much of the work I have done ever since. This problem has a double aspect, since it involves both 'the visibility of the invisible' and, inseparably linked to it, that of the 'invisibility of the visible'. Far from excluding each other, as opposites are commonly expected to do, 'visibility' and 'invisibility' seem here to be inextricably linked, although not simply the same. The prominence, in the story, of repetition and recurrence, indeed of doubling, suggests that another term should be introduced to describe this curious relationship of non-exclusive opposition, that of 'divisibility'. Visibility divides itself into what is visible and what is invisible. And given the fact that this is also a question of life and death, of living and dying, the process of divisibility can be said to produce not just appearances, but 'apparitions' (which in English, unlike its 'false friend' in French, signifies 'ghosts' and not just appearances). Listening to the radio in that darkened bedroom, I think what I experienced was something like the apparition of such divisibility, by which the invisible seemed to become visible, but only by making the visible invisible. Much later I learned that this was a phenomenon - if one can call it that - quite familiar to philosophers and aestheticians who generally tried to interpret it with the use of words such as "fantasy" and "imagination": what Kant, for example, in 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' calls "productive" as distinct from "reproductive imagination", which does not merely reproduce what one sees but which produces representations of things that were never seen (and perhaps could never be seen). But I never felt that such concepts were capable of accounting for the strange capacity of those invisible 'images' to produce feelings whose intensity seemed in direct proportion to their indistinct and relatively indeterminate - non-objective - quality.
These […] stories are chosen from anthologies with texts called 'urban legends' (sometimes they are also referred to as 'contemporary legends', or 'urban myths'). Bearing this name in mind, we tend to read these texts as 'Iegendary' narratives that relate ficticious stories of events which never happened. But what if somebody told you these stories as factual accounts of events that really happened to the friend of a friend: wouldn't you believe them to be true – or at least consider seriously the possibility of their truthfulness? Before entering in a discussion of this question, I want to introduce in more detail the kind of narrative I am seeking to analyze.
In this contribution we try to probe the generic chronotope of realism, which, judging from its astonishing productivity in the nineteenth century and the profound impact it has had on literary evolution and theory ever since, can be designated nothing less than a hallmark in the general history of narrative. Although we are primarily concerned with the description of the principles of construction underlying the realistic, “documentary”, chronotope, we would also like to touch upon some of its rather evident, but still somewhat under-discussed similarities with the genre of historiography. For, despite an abundance of what could be called “touches of realism” in a plethora of literary texts and genres (both narrative and poetic) since the very beginnings of literary history itself, the direct germs of realism as it developed into a particular narrative genre or generic chronotope during the nineteenth century may well be situated in “prescientific” historiographical works such as those of Gibbon or Michelet.
Bakhtin argues that each literary genre codifies a particular world-view which is defined, in part, by its chronotope. That is, the spatial and temporal configurations of each genre determine in large part the kinds of action a fictional character may undertake in that given world (without being iconoclastic, a realist hero cannot slay mythical beasts, and a questing knight cannot philosophize over drinks in a café). Recent extensions of Bakhtin’s theory have sought to define the chronotopes of new and emergent genres such as the road movie, the graphic novel, and hypertext fiction. Others have challenged Bakhtin’s characterization of certain chronotopes, such as those of epic and lyric poetry, arguing that these genres (and their chronotopes) are far more dynamic and dialogic than Bakhtin’s analysis seems at first glance to allow. Rather than taking issue with Bakhtin’s characterization of particular genres here, however, I wish to argue that we should pay closer attention to the heterochrony, or interplay of different chronotopes, in individual texts and their genres. As Bakhtin’s own essay demonstrates, what makes any literary chronotope dynamic is its conflict and interplay with alternative chronotopes and world-views. Heterochrony (raznovremennost) is the spatiotemporal equivalent of linguistic heteroglossia, and if we examine any of Bakhtin’s readings of particular chronotopes closely enough, we will find evidence of heterochronic conflict. This clash of spatiotemporal configurations within a text, or family of texts, provides the ground for the dialogic inter-illumination of opposing world-views.
This paper forms part of a larger, ongoing project, to investigate how certain narrative possibilities that seem to have crystallized for the first time in the ancient Greek novel have proved persistent and productive over time, undergoing subtle transformations during formative later periods in the history of the genre, notably the twelfth century (simultaneously in Old French and in Byzantine Greek) and the eighteenth (the time when, according to a narrower definition, the novel is said to originate). For the present, my more limited aim is to revisit the two main essays in which Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (and of the “historical poetics” of the novel) are developed, and to extrapolate what seem to me to the most significant and productive lines of his approach, both in general, and with specific reference to the ancient Greek novel. I will then attempt simultaneously to apply and to modify Bakhtin’s model, in the light of a reading of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and with reference to previous critiques. The final part of the paper examines how this approach can be productive for a reading of a much later text, often regarded as “foundational” for the modern development of the genre, especially in English, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
One of the most fundamental problems of systemic approaches to literature is the question of how systemic principles might be translated into a manageable methodological framework. This contribution proposes that a combination of functionalistsystemic theories (in casu Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory – especially the textually oriented versions – and the prototypical genre approach proposed by Dirk De Geest and Hendrik Van Gorp 1999) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory shows great promise in this respect. Since I am primarily interested in literary genres, the prototypical genre approach assumes a central position in my theoretical framework. My main argument is that Bakhtin’s chronotope concept offers interesting perspectives as a heuristic tool within a functionalist-systemic approach to genre studies, enabling the study not only of the constitutive elements of genre systems, but also of their mutual relations. Bakhtin’s own vague definitions of the concept somewhat hamper the process of putting it into practice for this purpose, but with the aid of the distinction between generic and motivic chronotopes, that problem can be solved. A detailed, comprehensive account of the theoretical premises underlying my proposal can be found in Bemong (under review); here I restrict myself to the basics.
Law and literature: that is a sufficiently broad subject to warrant reference to the Fontane character Effy Briest’s "wide field." Indeed, the sites where law and literature encounter each other, where they border on each other, merge, converge, overlap, or where they relate as opposites, even finding themselves as rivals or enemies seem legion. In contrast to the intentions of Effy Briest in that famous novel, my reference to this line is not intended to abort further inquiries; instead I want to chart the field in question with the aim of developing a preliminary typology of the ways in which law and literature have been engaged and have engaged one another. Against the background of this overview, I want to turn to a much smaller field. This small field - a plot of long fallow farmland, to be exact, located between two adjacent, perfectly maintained wheat fields in a fictive Swiss village - will serve as an example or test site for "law and literature" as they emerge in Gottfried Keller’s narrative 'Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe', from his mid-nineteenth century collection of novellas 'Die Leute von Seldwyla'. Whether and how the case study of that small field at the centre of Keller’s story can make a case for the larger field of "law and literature" remains to be seen.
In his book "Fiction and Diction", Gerard Genette bemoans a contradiction between the pretense and the practice of narratological research. Instead of studying all kind of narratives, for Genette, narratological research concentrates de facto on the techniques of fictional narrative. Correspondingly, Genette speaks of a "fictional narratology" in the pejorative sense of a discipline that sets arbitrary limits on its area of study. In his objection, the narratology that literary scholars practice considers fictional narrative to be at least the standard case of any narrative. In other words, what is merely a special case, within a wide field of narratives, is here elevated to narrative par excellence. According to Genette, narratology does not omit the domain of non-fictional narratives from its investigations with any justification, but rather annexes it without addressing its specific elements.
What are possible ways in which this perspective, which Genette criticizes as truncated, can be set right? Can the problem, as outlined, simply be solved by expanding the area of study in narratological research? Or are there not, perhaps, important differences between fictional and nonfictional narratives which seem to encourage narratological research, understood as a fundamental discipline of literary study, under the heading of "fictional narratology"?
In order to come to an answer here, we will first discuss the problem of differentiating between fictional and non-fictional narratives, as well as the possibility of a connection between narrative and fictionality theory. Second, we will expand our considerations to encompass pragmatic and historical aspects of narratives in order to delineate the scope of our proposal.
In folk theories of art reception, readers and cinema audiences are said to experience fictional worlds vicariously 'through' characters, i.e. they 'identify' themselves with them, they partake in their experiences 'empathetically'. In the first section of my essay, I will argue that it is not character but focalization (point of view) which, on a fundamental level, guides our fictional experience, and I will exemplify several ways that characters (or similar ideas) can then in addition come into play. In the next two sections, I will discuss possible cognitive correlates of both the textual device of focalization and textual clues indicating ›persons‹. The aim is to show that what I call ›psycho-poetic effects‹ (that is, the mental representation of anthropomorphic instances) are best described as byproducts of various cognitive programs involved in the reception of narrative fiction. 'Empathy', as it is understood in the above mentioned folk theory of art reception, can then be analysed into individual algorithms of social cognition. And it can be differentiated, as is done in the last section, from other phenomena often confused with it, like emotional experience proper and emotional contagion. Also, I refer to the idea that mirror neurons provide the means to empathize with others, literary characters included. My general proposition is to revise and refine those concepts with the help of evolutionary theory and, thus, to hypothesize as cognitive correlates for textual features only programs specific enough to be correlated with a specific adaptive function which they may have performed in the process of human evolution.
Slovenian partisan film is a term which denotes films glorifying Slovenian communist-led guerrilla fighters (so-called 'partisans'), who resisted the German and Italian occupying forces during WW II. These films were made during the decades of communist rule in post-war Yugoslavia and were an important part of the official ideological propaganda. Since the fall of communism in 1989 and Slovenia's secession from former Yugoslavia two years later, however, partisan films have fallen into complete neglect. This is regrettable since they not only represent an important (and not necessarily unattractive) part of Slovenian film history but also allow unique insights into the complexities of the official ideology during the decades of communist rule in the country (1945−89). Namely, the existing ideology was not as simple as might have seemed from the outside: while the Slovenian Communist party had no problems with class issues (class inequalities were regarded according to the Marxist agenda as bad and everything was actually done to eliminate them), there were many important areas of social life that were neglected or dealt with in ideologically relatively ambivalent terms.