form and context an essay in the history of narratology3

Form and Context: An Essay in the History of NarratologyDarby, David, 1956-

Poetics Today, Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2001, pp. 829-852 (Article)

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Form and Context:An Essay in the History of Narratology

David DarbyModern Languages and Literatures, Western Ontario

Abstract This essay compares two distinct traditions of narrative theory: on the onehand, that of structuralist narratology as it emerged in the !"#$s and in its varioussubsequent manifestations; on the other, that of German-language Erzähltheorie ascodified in the !"%$s, with a prehistory dating back to German classicism. Havingmapped the connections between these traditions, this essay then concentrates on ex-ploring how narratology, unlike German narrative theory, has come to broaden itsproject exponentially since its first critical incarnation as a strictly formalist poetics.While the German tradition has concentrated on rhetoric and voice (with receptiontheory constituting a largely separate area of inquiry), narratology, which frames thetext within a symmetry of real, implied, and fictional intelligences, has always hadthe potential to pose questions about how narrative functions in relation to a sur-rounding world of ideas. Of the two only narratology can therefore theorize bothauthorship and reading. In specific terms, this essay argues that the controversial nar-ratological abstraction of implied authorship represents the only point at which anegotiation between textual and contextual worlds can logically take place. Evidenceof how crucial such theorization has been in the development of contextualist narra-tology is sought in the examination of a test case, namely the much-disputed projectof feminist narratology.

French structuralist narrative theory has a well-known history, the moment

This essay was written with the assistance of a visiting fellowship in the Institute for theHumanities at the University of Manitoba.

Poetics Today &&:' (Winter &$$!). Copyright © &$$! by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.

830 Poetics Today 22:4

of its genesis usually recognized as identical with the !"## publication inParis of the seminal eighth issue ofCommunications containing a collection ofessays bymembers of the Poétique group. Along withGérardGenette’s moreanalytically comprehensive codification of narrative forms in his !"(& bookFigures III, this work constitutes the immediate ancestry of the formalist tra-dition that established itself in North America around !")$ under the ambi-tiously scientific name of narratology.The catechism of narratology’s moreremote prehistory is equally well rehearsed, with its reverential acknowl-edgment of the contributions and influences of Russian Formalism, struc-turalist anthropology and linguistics, French structuralist literary theory,and so on.But while this tradition in its various phases has commended itself tostudents of narrative literature in and beyond France and North America,those versed in the history and practice of literary scholarship in Germanwill be familiar with a di*erent and historically quite separate tradition ofnarrative theory.This datesmost immediately from !"%%, the year EberhardLämmert and Franz Stanzel both published extended studies of narrativeform, and thus antedates the famous issue of Communications by over a de-cade. Despite their priority and the important positions they have assumedin the canon of postwar German-language Erzähltheorie, Lämmert’s andStanzel’s books have not enjoyed anything like the popularity and influenceof their French-language counterparts among scholars writing in English.Indeed judging by the frequency of references to it in English-languagetheory and criticism, Lämmert’s Bauformen des Erzählens, which has neverbeen translated into English, is largely unknown in North America, at leastoutside communities of Germanists.1 Stanzel, on the other hand, has madesomewhat more of an international impression. Although his first book,Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman [Narrative Situations in the Novel], wastranslated into English in !"(!, thus prior to the publication of Genette’sFigures III, it attracted relatively little attention.2 However, his third book

!. While Lämmert’s title translates as ‘‘structural forms of narrative,’’ it should be noted thatthe German title implies no association with any structuralist endeavor.&. In its overall structure Stanzel’s !"%% book presents a comprehensive typology of narratorsbased on the following three categories of novel: ‘‘auktorial’’ (authorial), for which he refers toHenry Fielding’s Tom Jones (!('"); ‘‘Ich-Roman’’ (first person), as in Herman Melville’s MobyDick (!)%!); and ‘‘personal’’ (figural), as in Henry James’sThe Ambassadors (!"$+). A fourth sec-tion on James Joyce’sUlysses (!"&&) discusses the possibilities for combining the three types ofnarrative in one text. The typology of narrative situations that emerges is shown by Stanzelin a rudimentary graphic wherein the three forms are arranged as points on a circular con-tinuum, implying the possibility of intermediate forms.This circle, representing the situationspossible in epic literature, is set within a larger circle on which three points—the epic, thedramatic, and the lyric—are marked. Correspondences are established between the figuralnarrative situation and the dramatic as well as between the first-person situation and the lyric.

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of narrative theory,Theorie des Erzählens (!"("), in which he substantially re-vises a number of aspects of his conceptual framework, is relatively wellknown to English-language narratologists and narratological critics in its!")' translation entitled A Theory of Narrative. Stanzel of course also enjoysan international reputation as a scholar who has published in both Englishand German on British, American, and Canadian fiction.Between them, Lämmert’s and Stanzel’s studies point ahead with vary-ing degrees of precision toward certain of the broader analytic concernsbasic to the so-called ‘‘classical,’’ low-structuralist narratology of Genetteand his disciples, such as Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, ShlomithRimmon-Kenan (albeit with an important reservation I will discuss later),and Mieke Bal, whose work has appeared in English. This is partially trueof Lämmert’s work on the temporal organization of narrative, which ad-dresses among its areas of focus (a) the sequencing of narrated events and (b)the relationship between narrative time and narrated time. Regarding theformer, Lämmert’s detailed analysis of di*erent kinds of analepis (‘‘Rück-wendung’’) shares certain interests with Genette’s work, whereas his dis-cussion of narrative foreshadowing techniques (‘‘Vorausdeutung’’) has rela-tively little in common with Genette’s analysis of narrative prolepsis. Thelatter shares certain concerns with Genette’s work on duration (‘‘durée’’).The thematic connections with structuralist narratology are less problem-atic in the case of Stanzel’s work over the last forty or more years on thepresentation of consciousness in narrative fiction and his development ofa highly sophisticated typology of narrators. He is concerned most espe-cially with the phenomenon of mixed forms incorporating aspects of bothfigural and authorial narration, and in this he shares important interestswith theorists working in the structuralist tradition.Lurking behind these !"%% texts is a relatively long tradition in Germanphilology, a prehistory that is entirely di*erent from that of the structural-ist project. It derives its basic categories and lines of inquiry from classicalpoetics, and this derivation manifests itself in the fact that the canonicaltexts of German narrative theory often have as their context the study ofthe relationship between the epic and the other genres. The tradition’s di-rect origins are found in the poetics of German classicism, in particularin two brief essays by Goethe. His !("( collaboration with Schiller, ‘‘Über

In his laterTheorie des Erzählens (!"(") Stanzel includes a far more sophisticated graphic repre-sentation of his typology of narrators in epic literature. This representation again is circularin form, but now the general system of categorizations is more fully developed, and a greatdeal more of the circumference is filled with examples of pure and hybrid narrative situationsdrawn from the canon of Western narrative literature. For insightful commentaries on andreactions to Stanzel’s work see especially Cohn !")!, Diengott !")(, and Fludernik !""#.


epische und dramatische Dichtung’’ [‘‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry’’] (seeGoethe and Schiller !"'" [!("(] and !")#), distinguishes between mimeticand rhapsodic discourse by focusing on the temporal distance that sepa-rates the represented events from their recapitulation in the performance ofthe rhapsodist.That essay also anticipates the later awareness of the processof manipulation of chronology in narrative. The second essay in question,‘‘Naturformen der Dichtung’’ [Natural forms of poetry], was published in!)!" in the collection of notes and commentaries pertaining to the West-östlicher Divan [West-Eastern Divan]. This essay is also concerned with thebasic di*erences between genres, and hereGoethe (!"'" [!)!"]: !)(–)") dis-cusses hybrid phenomena that draw on the textual forms of both dramaticand epic literature. His suggestion that the three poetic natural forms—epic, lyric, and dramatic—could be illustrated by means of a circle accom-modating both pure and hybrid forms clearly prefigures Stanzel’s famousgraphic endeavors.Having here indicated, albeit with extreme concision, the radical di*er-ences between the intellectual origins of these twomodern traditions of nar-rative theory, I will progress now to the central comparative project of myessay.3 This project concentrates on what I see as two crucial though rela-tively unexplored aspects of the relationship between theGerman-languageand the French-American traditions. The first of these is historical, and itsexamination requires mapping the extent and the sites of those few prac-tical and theoretical engagements that have taken place between the twotraditions over the last two decades.The second centers on fundamental dif-ferences in conception and function between these two historically distinctanalytic traditions, and in addressing this aspect I will explore possible rea-sons why, unlike its German-language counterpart, the French-American

+. A history of the intervening years would be organized around such texts as: FriedrichSpielhagen, Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans [Essays on the theory and technique ofthe novel] (!))+); Otto Ludwig, ‘‘Formen der Erzählung’’ [Forms of narrative] (!)"!); KäteFriedemann,Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik [The role of the narrator in epic literature] (!"!$);Emil Ermatinger, Das dichterische Kunstwerk [The literary work of art] (!"&!); Ernst Hirt, DasFormgesetz der epischen, dramatischen und lyrischen Dichtung [The formal laws of epic, dramatic,and lyric literature] (!"&&); Oskar Walzel, Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk des Dichters [Mean-ing and form in the poetic work of art] (!"&+) and Das Wortkunstwerk [The verbal work of art](!"&#); Roman Ingarden,Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work of Art] (!"+! [!"(+b]) and,later, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks [The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art] (!"#) inGerman, first published in Polish in !"+( [!"(+a]); Robert Petsch,Wesen und Formen der Erzähl-kunst [The nature and forms of narrative art] (!"+'); Günther Müller, Die Bedeutung der Zeit inder Erzählkunst [The significance of time in narrative art] (!"'() and ‘‘Erzählzeit und erzählteZeit’’ [Narrative time and narrated time] (!"')); Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk[The linguistic work of art] (!"')) and Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans [The genesisand crisis of the modern novel] (!"%%); and Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung [The Logicof Literature] (!"%( [!"(+]).


tradition has demonstrated a powerful capacity to develop far beyond aninitial concentration on a typology of narrative forms. In doing so, as is wellknown, it has come to accommodate itself to the literary-critical paradigmsthat have developed from and subsumed the purely formalist concerns oflow structuralism and have become dominant in the contemporary studyof narrative as practiced in North America. This second aspect will neces-sarily involve an examination of the way authorship, particularly impliedauthorship, is theorized in the structuralist tradition, a topic not without itsunresolved controversies. As a test case of that theoretical question, I havechosen the highly dynamic and at times controversial project of a feministpoetics of narrative. My argument thus aims to range over some breadth ofterritory. Its first steps will be, however, relatively small ones.

A Tale of Two Formalisms

As I noted earlier, Stanzel’s and Lämmert’s work is central to the canonof postwar narrative theory in the German-speaking countries. Not only isGenette aware of both Stanzel and Lämmert, but he seems to attach con-siderable importance to their work in his Figures III. In stark contrast, how-ever, the German-language theorists are cited only relatively infrequentlyand are discussed very rarely in subsequent English-language theory andcriticism.4 But those exceptions that do exist are significant in that they sug-gest the work of North American Germanists to have been the principalmeeting place at which the comparative discussion of these two distincttheoretical traditions has proven productive in terms of the formalist in-sights it has engendered.5 Preeminent here of course is the work of the Ger-

'. To give an admittedly crude illustration of the status of Lämmert’s and Stanzel’s workin studies of ‘‘classical’’ narratology, a quick survey reveals that in the three special issues ofPoetics Today on narratology in !")$ and !")! Stanzel is cited by only three authors: Stanzelhimself (!")!), Dorrit Cohn (!")!) writing about Stanzel, and Brian McHale (!")!) writingabout Cohn. Lämmert is cited only by Cohn. In the three special narratology issues of PoeticsToday ten years later, during which time Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens had been published inGerman and in English translation, still only six essays refer to Stanzel (including those byStanzel himself [!""$] and Cohn [!""$]) and none to Lämmert. Furthermore of the theoristsconcerned with the adoption and refinement of Genette’s structural(ist) paradigm, SeymourChatman makes no mention of their work in Story and Discourse (!"()), and he refers to Stan-zel only once, and then only in a list of names, in Coming to Terms (!""$a: !!)); Mieke Balmerely includes them in the bibliography to her !")% Narratolo! (translated from the Dutch);and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan lists them in the bibliography to her !")+ Narrative Fiction,mentioning each just once in passing in the corpus of her text (%', (!).%. In the German-speaking world the dominant trend in the formal study of narrative hasbeen a continuation of work in the postwar tradition, whose boundaries and interests weremapped by Stanzel and Lämmert in !"%%, with an emphasis on the analysis of individualliterary texts.While the general field hasmeanwhile not been completely immune to the intel-


manist and narrative theorist Dorrit Cohn, which has engaged extensivelywith Stanzel’s theoretical project for a number of years. But other signifi-cant exceptions exist, such as the !""& anthology Neverending Stories: Towarda Critical Narratolo!, which is edited by three Germanists, Ann Fehn, Inge-borg Hoesterey, andMariaTatar, and includes a number of essays that em-brace this German-Austrian tradition, or the !""# studyTowards a ‘‘Natural’’Narratolo! by Monika Fludernik, a professor of English at a university inGermany.Cohn’s Transparent Minds (!"()), published the year before the appear-ance of the Theorie des Erzählens, operates with an explicit knowledge ofStanzel’s conceptual framework, especially of the aspects of the Austrian’swork dealing with the three types of narrative situation and how they per-tain to her own subject, the presentation of consciousness in fiction. Cohn’s!")! review essay of Stanzel’s third book in Poetics Today, entitled ‘‘The En-circlement of Narrative,’’ is described by Hoesterey (!""&: ') in NeverendingStories as ‘‘a mise en abîme of the international debate’’ between traditions oftheory in which Cohn ‘‘puts the various structural approaches to the sys-tematic study of narrative into historical perspective for the first time, draw-ing a striking parallel between narrative theory as developed by the Poétiquegroup in Paris and by Stanzel in his early work.’’ Cohn (!")!: !%)) more thananyone else has succeeded not just in outlining the points of similarity anddi*erence between Stanzel’s and Genette’s typologies but also in achiev-ing her stated aim of ‘‘bring[ing] Stanzel more fully into the internationalmain stream.’’ By this Cohn clearly refers to her aims in more than just hercomparative commentary on two European traditions of narrative theory:indeed, the originality of her own book Transparent Minds results to a con-siderable degree from her ability to e*ect themeeting of Genette’s ‘‘analyti-cal’’ approach (ibid.: !%") with Stanzel’s encompassing ‘‘grand synthesis’’(ibid.: !#!).In her introduction to the anthology Neverending Stories, a rather nostal-gic Hoesterey (!""&: %) sees the debate between the two traditions, span-ning two or three years either side of !")$, as characterized by ‘‘theoretical

lectual thrust of structuralist criticism, one can for the most part describe the relationshipbetween the two traditions at best in terms only of a distanced contemporaneity. As for thebroader picture of literary-critical scholarship inGerman, PatrickO’Neill (!""#: !&) describeshow ‘‘neither structuralist- nor poststructuralist-inspired criticism in a semiotic vein madeanything like the impact in German-language criticism that it made in criticism written inFrench and English.’’ What O’Neill calls ‘‘semiotic formalism’’ (as opposed to ‘‘aesthetic for-malism’’) is seen as ‘‘something of a ‘lost generation’ in German literary history—preventedfrom establishing itself by the prestige of historical scholarship in the first place, and essen-tially leapfrogged, overtaken before it had a chance to happen, by the growing hegemony ofa new generation of sociocritically oriented cultural studies’’ (ibid.).


refinement at an all-time high, with intense dialogue marking di*erenceseven as it e*aces them by conveying the sense of common narratologicalenterprise.’’ According to Hoesterey (ibid.), the ‘‘fundamental and livelycontroversy’’ that arises around !")$ in connection with the grammaticalconcept of ‘‘person’’ aligns Stanzel and Cohn on one side andGenette, Bal,Rimmon-Kenan (and presumably Chatman, Prince, andWayne Booth) onthe other. And this debate, with the same general constellation of partici-pants, has flourished intermittently ever since and with particular vigoraround the technical di*erentiations and terminological complications thatlitter the general area of free indirect discourse (or style), or erlebte Rede.Among its main contestants one finds Cohn (!")+), Genette (!")+), Cohnand Genette in their energetic correspondence (in French !")%, in En-glish !""&), Nilli Diengott (!")(), and most recently Stanzel himself (!")),!""$, !""&).

Questions of Context and the Theorization of Authorship

For all its sustained liveliness and its noteworthy degree of conceptual re-finement, this debate has also been quite remarkable for the narrowness ofits scope. Considered in a broader context, it seems astonishing that it hasevidently been conducted quite independently of and virtually untouchedby the profound and far-reaching redefinition of English-language narra-tology that began during the !")$s. This regenerative process has seen thestudy of narrative take steps away from a relatively pure formalism andtowardmore contextually driven concerns, and its first retrospective criticalassessments are in several essays in the !""$/!""! narratology issues of Poet-ics Today. Given the productive potential of this reconceptualization withinthe anglophone tradition, it seems both obvious and important to ask whythe formalist debate initiated by Cohn and centering on the accommoda-tion of Stanzel’s work has proven so remarkably impervious to the changesthat have taken place in most other areas of narratological enterprise. Andbehind that question lies the larger question of the general resistance ofGer-man Erzähltheorie to the issues of narrative context and function that are be-coming increasingly important in the development of its English-languagecounterpart.First and most bluntly, the postwar urge in writing and publishing circlesin West Germany and Austria to retrieve literature and the scholarship ofaesthetics from their subordination to any kind of overtly ideological valuesystem provides a historical context. The study of genre and of narrativeform has a long and relatively untainted history with strong roots in Ger-man classicism. I write here ‘‘relatively untainted’’ since it is important to


note that this tradition had proven by nomeans intrinsically immune to thee*ects of ideological appropriation. In !"%% both Lämmert and Stanzel citewith some frequency the work of Robert Petsch, whose bookWesen und For-men der Erzählkunst [The nature and forms of the art of narrative] was pub-lished in Germany in !"+' and then revised and extended in !"'&.6 Petsch’swork, particularly his designation of basic epic forms, at times seems to an-ticipate some of Stanzel’s categories, but its insights into narrative typologyare overshadowed by its theory of the evolution of literary genres.This is in-formedby essentially racist notions of theGermanpeople as privilegedwiththemental equipment appropriate to the production of the purest andmostrigorously objective, long narrative forms. It is these ideal forms, suppos-edly realized in such works of German classicism asGoethe’sWilhelm Meist-ers Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship] (!("%–!("#) that Petsch viewsas the most highly evolved types of literature. Given these circumstances itis hardly surprising that, despite their reference to other aspects of Petsch’swork, both Lämmert and Stanzel are clearly keen in !"%% and (in Stanzel’scase) beyond to distance themselves from anything even superficially re-sembling this kind of scholarship in either theoretical word or critical deed.The power of such extrinsic historical factors should by no means beunderestimated. Nevertheless, however strong their influence on scholar-ship in German may have been in the !"%$s, it would be utterly wrong tosuggest that German literary scholarship in general has in recent decadesfailed to engage either with the realm of ideas (and ideologies) or with thecatastrophes of history. Therefore another explanation must exist for theresistance to any extratextual interests that has characterized both the sub-sequent work of Stanzel into the !""$s and the scholarship in English on therelationship between his work and the narratological tradition. I proposethat the explanation is to be found in a factor intrinsic to the conception ofnarrative underlying the tradition in which Stanzel is working, namely thatsimply no site exists in German Erzähltheorie, with its intense concentrationon the activity of the fictional narrator, where the kind of development thathas occurred in North American narratology logically could take place.Unlike theGerman-language tradition, anglophone narratology postulatesthe familiar structuralist paradigm of a narrative communication situation,with the text at the center of an, albeit still somewhat contested, symme-try of ‘‘real,’’ implied, and fictional intelligences. The importance of thissymmetry lies, of course, in the tradition’s essential capacity to theorizeboth authorship and reading. The paradigm that informs the German tra-

#. For a discussion of Petsch’s work in the context of German-language narrative theory seeLeech !")%: !++–"%.


dition lacks any such symmetry. Since Goethe the literary text has tendedto be implicitly understood by Erzähltheoretiker as an organically structuredentity, the product of a single, historically determined authorial subject. Itis only since the work of Roman Ingarden, to which Stanzel (!")': !%&–%+)acknowledges a certain connection in his own work, and of the develop-ment of critical methodologies derived therefrom that narrative theory inGerman has moved at all toward the inclusion of the activity of readingin its understanding of how narrative functions. Nevertheless, the undis-puted presence at center stage in the German formalist tradition remainsthat of the narrator, and the simultaneous theorization of both writing andreading essential to anglophone narratology plays either no role inGermanErzähltheorie or just that of a latecomer. In German thought the study ofthe act of reading has found its place of privilege and has achieved promi-nence in a historically largely separate field of endeavor: namely, that ofhermeneutics.Ingarden’s subject matter does, however, represent a significant area ofshared interest between the French-American and the German-languagetraditions, and the influence of his work is seen, albeit with a variety ofconsequences, not just on Stanzel’s theoretical work but on that of theo-rists and critics working within the structuralist tradition. This representsthen a further significant point of intersection between the two traditions.Ingarden’s theoretical work on the phenomenology of reading lies behindthe body of work in the area of literary hermeneutics and reception theory,work that is associated most commonly with the names of Hans RobertJauss and Wolfgang Iser, colleagues at the University of Konstanz. Jauss’smagnum opus Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (!"((, !")&b),while known thanks to its translation into English (Jauss !")&a, !")") as awork on literary hermeneutics, has remained on the periphery of the anglo-phone narratological consciousness.7 By contrast, Iser’s work—in particu-lar his essay ‘‘The Reading Process’’ (in English, !"(&b; in German, !"(%)and his book-length studies Der implizite Leser ([!"(&a]; The Implied Reader[!"(']) andDer Akt des Lesens ([!"(#];The Act of Reading [!"()])—has exerteda considerable influence on the ways reading is theorized in anglophonenarratology. But even while Iser’s theoretical work became a powerful forcein both German- and English-language literary scholarship, and while ithas indeed permitted a crossover of ideas and perspectives between tradi-tions of narrative theory, it serves nonetheless also to draw attention to a sig-

(. Jauss’s study is in two parts. The first appeared in !"(( (English translation !")&a), anda volume containing both parts was published five years later (Jauss !")&b). A selection ofessays from the second part appeared in English translation in !")".


nificant di*erence in the disciplinary organization of literary theory withinand outside the German-speaking world. This di*erence in turn has rootsin the deeper, theoretical di*erence that the present essay addresses. Forwhile the structuralist-narratologist paradigm of a narrative communica-tive system has provided an opportunity to incorporate Iser’s and, by moreor less conscious or explicit osmosis, Ingarden’s ideas into a more broadlyconceived narrative theory, theGerman-language tradition ofErzähltheorie,with its concentration on narrative form and technique per se, shows a farless integrated relationship with the theoretical and critical study of recep-tion aesthetics and hermeneutics. By way of an illustration of this sepa-ration, the terms in which Stanzel (!")': !%&–%+) notes the importance ofIngarden’s concept of ‘‘areas of indeterminacy’’ suggest that this point ofcoincidence between his own work in narrative theory and Iser’s work inreader-response theory is, while worth noting in passing, of no particularexplanatory significance.To state that the German-language and anglophone traditions share aninterest in the theorization of reading is by no means to suggest that thesame holds true for the theorization of authorship. On the contrary, thetheorization of authorship is manifested in anglophone formalist narra-tology in the more or less acknowledged participation of an implied authorin the narrative communication situation, but this theorization is absentfrom and, for the reason discussed above, quite irrelevant to the German-language tradition.My proposition is that this implied intelligence occupiesprecisely the point in the process of narrative communication that admitsan interaction between contextual considerations and formalist analysis.Viewed from this perspective, it is quite logical that the arch-formalist ofFrench structuralism, Genette, in his Nouveau discours du récit (!")+), attacksthis theorization as superfluous and so carries out, to quote Cohn’s !")' let-ter to Genette, the ‘‘dazzling execution of the implied author’’ (Cohn andGenette !""&: &%)). It is, perhaps, equally unsurprising that Cohn’s disputewith Genette’s Nouveau discours avoids any confrontation on this very point,the question of the inclusion of the implied author in the structural para-digm, which she designates a matter ‘‘of mutual, but not mutually contro-versial, concern’’ (ibid.: &%)).8The passage by Genette to which Cohn responds here is itself a responsetoRimmon-Kenan’s (!")+: )(–))) unambiguous redefinition of the impliedauthor as a depersonified ‘‘construct inferred and assembled by the reader’’rather than as an anthropomorphic entity, an author’s second self, as the

). Cohn’s letter to Genette, from which these two quotations are drawn, was first publishedin French translation (Cohn and Genette !")%: !$!).


implied author was originally conceived by Booth (Booth !"#!: ($–(!).9 Ifone identifies this textual intelligence as a ‘‘set of implicit norms’’ (Rimmon-Kenan !")+: ))) rather than as an author’s deliberate projection, a defini-tion over which Chatman’s (!"(): !')–'") Story and Discourse equivocates,one can make it function as more than just a formalist index, what O’Neill(!""': #() refers to as ‘‘a narrative gold standard,’’ against which the reli-ability of an individual narrator can be measured. Rather, the norms andvalues it comes to represent can be considered to include those of the largercultural discourses that have come to represent the concerns of contempo-rary narratology.Thus an abstracted intelligence, such as an implied authorthat is itself the product of negotiations between intratextual and extratex-tual realms, can be argued to be the only kind of intelligence capable ofnegotiating between, on the one hand, the formal characteristics of indi-vidual narratives and, on the other, those critical concerns of narrativetheory that have increasingly concentrated on ‘‘the narrative level of tex-tuality, extratextual discourse, that level for which the narratology of thesixties [not to mention of course the work of Stanzel and Lämmert] had noplace in its conceptual repertoire’’ (ibid.: !%").

Toward a Functionalist Narratology

An interesting illustration of the possibilities of a more broadly conceivedtheory and practice is found in Fludernik’s radical reconceptualization ofnarratological thought in the !""# studyTowards a ‘‘Natural’’ Narratolo!. Flu-dernik, like Cohn and the editors of Neverending Stories, works to some extentin the space between the German and French-American traditions. Herstudy defines itself primarily in relation to Stanzel’s work. Fludernik (!""#:&(–&), ++$) acknowledges a substantial and perhaps primary intellectualdebt to Stanzel, and she characterizes the relationship of her own theory,which is explicitly capable of accommodating context-driven concerns, todi*erent parts of Stanzel’s project as a series of acts of integration, subsump-tion, supersession, and radical opposition. Also indicated in her work is asecondary and far less sympathetic relationship with the low-structuralisttradition exemplified by Genette, which is suggested at least to have gener-ated some ‘‘useful conceptual tools’’ (ibid.: ++$).In fact while Fludernik proceeds from an explicit a,liation with Stan-zel’s work, a further major component of her study, on the one hand, makes

". Prince (!")(: '&), elsewhere little concerned with authorial subjects, deftly avoids the dis-tinction in hisDictionary of Narratolo! (though at the price of confusing Booth’s and Rimmon-Kenan’s definitions), where he refers to the ‘‘author’s second self, mask, or persona as recon-structed from the text.’’


her work especially interesting in the present context and, on the other,further complicates the history of the crisp and clean division of narra-tive poetics into two separate traditions. Implicit in Fludernik’s ‘‘ ‘natural’narratology’’ is her association with a tradition of poetics, narrative andotherwise, whose roots are found in yet another geographical location,TelAviv. An essential and dynamically productive aspect of the work carriedout there since the !"#$s and published in considerable part (at least dur-ing the last two decades since its launch) in Poetics Today lies in the con-scious elusion of the binary distinction between formalist and nonformal-ist (or contextualist) poetics. In doing so it has, even during the heydayof the systematization of formalist narratological terminology in English,provided a place for the generation of a synthesis between the sometimesmicroscopic study of form, characterized by a blindness to thematic con-text, and the broad interpretative sweep of a historicist criticism with littleinterest in the particulars of the rhetoric of narrative.10 This work is mani-fested in the project of a mature narratology that, to cite the editor of PoeticsToday, ‘‘o*ers a principled alternative-and-corrective to both extremes—theatomistic and the reductionist—so that, once developed, the theorist couldreview their achievements and turn them to the best account within an inte-grated framework’’ (Sternberg !""&: %$%). This narratology is informed byan understanding of itself as ‘‘functionalist’’ (ibid.: %&"), whereby what nar-rative (fictional and otherwise) is in formal terms and what narrative does interms of its communicative function are seen as indivisible from each other,except at the expense of falling victim to either of the extreme (and dead-end) consequences indicated above. It is just such an understanding thatMarkCurrie (!""): #, )) refers to when hewrites (echoing Sternberg’smeta-phor) of narratology’s having undergone ‘‘a very positive transition awayfrom some of the limits and excesses of its youth,’’ of its having escaped‘‘the absurdity of a debate which casts formalism as the polar opposite ofhistoricism when the two camps have [during the !")$s and !""$s] clearlyforged a more cooperative relationship.’’ Indeed Currie sees this debate ashaving fundamentally misrepresented developments in critical theory andpractice that are clearly visible in retrospect. He writes:

Whatever revolutionary moment structuralist narratology may have inhabitedin its heyday in the !"#$s, the impact of narratological method was certainlygreater in literary studies at large in the !")$s, when it was operating alongsidenew critical developments from deconstruction and various new historicisms.Rather than a model of linear displacement, it would be more realistic to see the

!$. Hoesterey (!""&: ') likewise notes the importance of work done in Tel Aviv in helping‘‘move narrative theory into a truly intercultural stage in the !")$s.’’


new criticisms of the !")$s and !""$s as approaches that were enabled and re-sourced by narratology—as the products and not the successors of narratology.(ibid.: !$)

In eluding the formalist-nonformalist debate, Fludernik’s study, likeCur-rie’s case for a ‘‘cultural narratology’’ ("#), can indeed be read as driven bythe kind of programmatic position made explicit in Sternberg’s (!""&: %++)argument that ‘‘we badly need detailed studies of how and why the genre’suniversals interact with everything else in narrative practice: texts, authors,periods, canons, subgenres, media, audiences, competences, and sociocul-tural frameworks. . . . They [i.e., such studies] would also constitute thebest argument for the two-way tra,c between poetics and hermeneutics,theory and history, text and context, narrative and other forms or genres,the literary and the extraliterary, verbal and nonverbal representation: allpairs whose artificial divorce has not done much for either side, least of allin narratology.’’ Two things need here to be emphasized. First, it shouldbe absolutely clear that there is an essential di*erence between this kindof functionalist understanding of narrative, whereby a given text’s commu-nicative dimensionmay be informedby ideologicallymotivated concerns ofone kind or another, and the ideological presuppositions on which Petsch’sevolutionary theory of narrative forms is founded. The critical distinctionis not between a set of ideas that one finds abhorrent and another set thatone may embrace. Rather, it is between, on the one hand, the subordina-tion of the analysis of rhetoric to a fixed ranking of literary forms servinga predetermined end and, on the other hand, a view of narrative as drivenby a functional interaction of textual rhetoric with ideas (including ideo-logical systems) that may be negotiated between the subject positions ofauthors and readers in and beyond the text. Second, it needs to be statedthat such an understanding of the interrelatedness between form and func-tion was asserted (if not always put into practice) by the broader traditionin anthropology and linguistics with which structuralist narratology nomi-nally associated itself. Seen in that context, French-American narratology’sfirst popularization as a narrowly conceived formalist project produced, tocite this journal’s editor again, something of a logical perversion: a kind of‘‘structuralism at variance with the idea of structure’’ (Sternberg !""$: "$().In contrast to this lopsided perversion, it is the recognition of the vital im-portance of the connection between formal manifestation and communica-tive process (preserved in the Tel Aviv tradition) that Fludernik’s project,deriving and diverging as it does from the formalist categories of Stanzel’swork, brings to bear in the development of a ‘‘ ‘natural’ narratology.’’Unlike Cohn’s work or the anthology Neverending Stories, Fludernik’s


project is concerned primarily neither with the synthesis nor with the com-parison of the German-language and French-American traditions of narra-tive theory but rather (!""#: ++&) with the development of a narratology thatextends the diachronic scope of existing analyticalmodels, expands the cor-pus of literary texts and genres studied, and applies itself to a broader diver-sity ofmedia. Furthermore the capacity to incorporate questions of culturalor social context is by no means crucial or even central to her argument.That capacity is, nevertheless, decidedly a factor in the functional, com-municative dimension of Fludernik’s ‘‘natural’’ narratology, and her studymakes an explicit case for its inclusion (ibid.: +%)–(!).11 What makes thiscapacity possible in a model defined primarily in relation to Stanzel’s ty-pology of narrative situations (and thus what makes Fludernik’s work espe-cially interesting in the present context) is, I propose, the expansion of thetheoretical paradigm to include the idea and function of implied author-ship.Not that Fludernik is particularly comfortable with either the term orthe concept. Indeed, implied authors seem to promote among theorists ofnarrative a tendency to hedge, however essential the presence of such in-telligences may be to their argument. So on the one hand Fludernik seemscompelled to define the term almost as often as she uses it: as the site of‘‘the entire novel’s frame of values’’ (!)+), as ‘‘the frame of the text’s valuesas a whole’’ (&$+), as the source of ‘‘non-attributable features of discourse’’(&!)), as ‘‘an abbreviation for the narrative’s overall meaning structure’’ (+)!n. +$), and lastly as the site of ‘‘the world view that the reader constructs forthe text as a whole’’ (+"% n. (). On the other hand her own discourse hintsat a distanced undermining of her own certainty of the validity of the con-cept: apart from referring to the intelligence it identifies no less than threeseparate times as ‘‘notorious’’ ('(, &!+, +#!), she occasionally italicizes theterm, places it in inverted commas, or shores up her own repeated defini-tions by reference to a generally accepted usage of the term. It is obviousthat Fludernik’s understanding of implied authorship has much more todo with Rimmon-Kenan’s !")+ redefinition, which I discussed above, thanwith the concept as originally defined by Booth. Apropos Rimmon-Kenan,it is important at this point to qualify her characterization earlier in thisessay and elsewhere as a ‘‘disciple’’ of Genette’s (cf. Sternberg !""$: "$"n. +). Her work in !")+ di*ers significantly from that of other formalist nar-

!!. Cf. Currie’s (!""): "#) two arguments for a ‘‘cultural narratology’’: ‘‘The first is the ideathat narrative is ubiquitous in the contemporary world, in fact so commonplace that it wouldbe di,cult to think about ideological issues and cultural forms without encountering it.Thesecond is that culture not only contains narratives but is contained by narrative in the sensethat the idea of culture, either in general or in particular, is a narrative.’’


ratologists in the importance she attaches to incorporating the contestedidea of implied authorship into a predominantly formalist paradigm. As inFludernik’s work, it is again possible to sense in this di*erence an e*ect ofthe Tel Aviv connection. Rimmon-Kenan, whose intellectual roots are intheTel Aviv tradition, stands out among the codifiers of narratology around!")$ for her concern to preserve the space in which the functional dimen-sion of narrative can be theorized, the space where ideas are negotiated andcommunicated between writing and reading subjects.For all Fludernik’s discomfort, in a sense it matters little whether oneactually calls this abstraction the implied author, and indeed the baggagethat accompanies Booth’s term is considerable. It is important, however,that contextualist critics and theorists of narrative often seem to rely im-plicitly on such an intelligence as necessary to their project. A particularlyvivid example is Sally Robinson’s study of contemporary women’s fictionEngendering the Subject (!""!). Robinson (!""!: !&) sees these negotiations interms of ‘‘encounters . . . between conflicting subject-positions,’’ but her de-scription of what she understands by this must be immediately familiar toanyone versed in the literature on implied authorship as a necessary posi-tion within the narrative communication system. She writes:

I believe, along with Diana Fuss, that the ‘‘notion of subject-positions reintro-duces the author into literary criticism without reactivating the intentional fal-lacy.’’ The woman writing always writes from some position, but this position isnever singularly and authoritatively inscribed in her text. Rather, the positionsoccupied by the speaking subject (its author and/or narrator) are multiple andcontingent, as are the positions occupied by the subjects spoken in the text (itscharacters), and the positions occupied by the subjects of the text’s address (itsreaders). These positions are not guaranteed or consolidated by the gender ofwriters and readers, prior to the text’s reading; the (gendered) subjectivities ofwriters, readers, and even texts themselves, should not be reified or essential-ized.These subjectivities are not products, but rather, e*ects that emerge in theprocess of reading. (ibid.: !&–!+; citing Fuss !")": +%) 12

In citing Robinson’s study I have deliberately invoked a gender-orientedperspective on this question, since of all the areas in which the study of theinterrelation of context and narrative form has been pursued it is in relationto questions of gender that the debate has been both most energetic and

!&. Robinson’s formulation echoes that inTeresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t (!")'), which sug-gests the problem with ‘‘classical’’ narratology is that ‘‘the very work of narrativity is theengagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire’’; thus it fails ‘‘toenvisage a materially, historically, and experientially constituted [implied?] subject, a sub-ject engendered, we might say, precisely by the process of its engagement in the narrativegenres’’ (!$#).


most fruitful. Among the numerous scholars of narrative literature whosework has contributed to the many-sided project of a feminist narratology,Susan Sniader Lanser andRobynWarhol have argued the theoretical issuesmost explicitly in defense of the logical feasibility of such scholarship.Thisoccasionally heated debate is crucial to the paradigm shift that has takenplace within narratology, and it helps shed light on the reasons one modelof the functioning of narrative has undergone this shift and one model hasnot. Since the development of a feminist narratology stands in the presentcontext as an example of a more general phenomenon, I would at the out-set draw attention to Warhol’s observation on the omission of gender as afactor influencing the models described in the standard texts of formalistnarratology. In Gendered Interventions (!")") she writes that this ‘‘oversight isnot a sexist one: not only gender, but all variables of context remain outsideof classical narratology’s realm’’ (Warhol !")": '). The discussion that fol-lows stands therefore as an illustrative test case for contextualist narratologyin its full variety of manifestations.

The Case of Feminist Narratology

In Fictions of Authority Lanser (!""&: %) argues that ‘‘both narrative structureand women’s writing are determined not by essential properties or isolatedaesthetic imperatives, but by complex and changing conventions that arethemselves produced in and by the relations of power that implicate writer,reader, and text.’’ In this context Lanser at no point discusses any such intel-ligence as an implied author, but in fact her argument, though far less ex-plicitly than that of Robinson (and Fuss as cited by Robinson), has to dowith the logically necessary negotiation between textual and extratextualworlds. Lanser declines to discuss the nature of the intelligence that con-ducts this negotiation.13 If, however, one reads either Robinson’s or Lanser’sargument next to Chatman’s ‘‘Defense of the Implied Author’’ in Comingto Terms as the focal point of an agglomeration of ‘‘codes and conventions’’(Chatman !""$a: (%), one gets the clear impression that all three—Robin-son and Lanser, who are working from a specifically feminist perspective,and Chatman, who (no longer the formalist) is here exploring the gen-eral functional dimension of narrative—are writing about closely relatedif not identical entities.14 Chatman (ibid.) describes the implied author as

!+. In The Narrative Act Lanser (!")!: %$) is actually sceptical about the conceptual validityof such an intelligence as an implied author. She notes: ‘‘At a crucial moment in literary his-tory . . . the word ‘implied’ did provide a respectable prefix with which the mention of theauthor became permissible.’’!'. Given the characterization of Chatman as a disciple of Genette earlier in this essay, his


‘‘the source of the narrative text’s whole structure of meaning—not onlyof its assertion and denotation but also of its implication, connotation, andideological nexus.’’ I propose that this general line of argument in the theo-rization of authorship bridges a logical gap and permits the satisfactory ac-commodation of such established and important concerns of feminist nar-ratology as voice, forms of narratorial address, and especially the genderingof plots within the ‘‘classical’’ structuralist narrative communication situa-tion.When Lanser (!")#: +'!) first argues for the recognition of a ‘‘feministnarratology,’’ she suggests that she might be seen as ‘‘trying to force anintersection of two lines drawn on di*erent planes.’’ 15 Although few narra-tologists—beyondChatman,O’Neill, to a lesser extent Fludernik, and nowme—devotemuch attention nowadays to the implied author, I would arguethat this structuralist abstraction in the sense discussed above is the onlypoint where these lines can logically intersect.Without such a point of nego-tiation, Lanser’s synthetic proposal is vulnerable to the kind of counter-attack launched by Diengott in her uncompromising !")) response, whichsees Lanser’s project as an unnecessary, disorderly, and logically perverseintrusion onto narratology’s well-cultivated turf. Diengott (!")): '"–%$)states in her conclusion that ‘‘there is no need, indeed, no possibility ofreconciling feminism with narratology.Whereas narratology is quite clearabout its premises and methods, feminist critics seem not to be very clearabout their object of inquiry. Furthermore, if I may take Lanser as exem-plifying an attitude of some feminists, it seems that they feel compelled toappropriate fields of studywhich rely on totally di*erent premises and ques-tions to their own enterprise. I am not claiming that Lanser is not discussingimportant issues in her analysis.What she does has its value and its legiti-

inclusion here may seem surprising. Although his position here is not a feminist one, hisunderstanding of the overall project of narratology has broadened exponentially sincehis Story and Discourse in !"() (see Chatman !""$b).!%. Despite Lanser’s title, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Narratology,’’ her combination of terms is notoriginal. In The Heroine’s Text Nancy K. Miller (!")$: x–xi) writes of organizing her study of‘‘the ideological subscript of literary femininity’’ on ‘‘the supervising grid of a feminist narra-tology.’’ Here again the possibility of seeing a negotiated implied intelligence as the authorof that subscript suggests itself. Significantly, some hesitation continues about juxtaposingfeminism and narratology in a simple phrase. Thus Joanne S. Frye (!")#: !(–!), &") writesof ‘‘a feminist poetics of the novel,’’ later, however, warning that ‘‘the development of tax-onomies and morphologies of narrative and the structuralist analysis of codes or literaryconventions . . . necessarily threatens the feminist concern with changing women’s lives orreinterpreting the lived experience of gender.’’ Margaret Homans (!""': %) writes of a consen-sus ‘‘among feminist critics who consider themselves to be doing narrative theory.’’ Warholfaces this head-on in Gendered Interventions. In the introduction she asks, ‘‘Why Don’t Femi-nists ‘Do’ Narratology?’’ and she subsequently writes consistently of ‘‘feminist narratology’’(!")": +).


macy, but it has nothing to do with narratology.’’ 16 In seizing on this lineof argument (and here one is reminded also of Cohn’s decision not to dis-agree with Genette on the question of the usefulness of the implied author)Diengott explicitly invokes Genette’s position on context and authorship asidentical with her own.Warhol (!")": %) argues in Gendered Interventions that ‘‘narratology typi-cally regards context as a component of story, rather than of discourse. Inother words, context has been a factor in narratological analysis of what fic-tion depicts, but not in discussions of how fiction’s contents get rendered intolanguage.’’ She then continues with the proposal that narrative discourse beconsidered ‘‘within its historical or ideological context’’ (ibid.). Describingthis in practical terms, Warhol’s later argument that ‘‘[g]ender in writingstrategies arises . . . from the writer’s making a series of rhetorical choices,whether or not those choices are consciously intentional’’ (ibid.: !") suggeststhe necessity of just the kind of implied authorial intelligence that Chat-man posits.This intelligence, whose identity is negotiated in this case in themode of reading advocated byWarhol, can be identified as the author of animplicit subscript, composed out of the codes and conventions of a specifichistorical context, that informs the rhetorical choices made by the writerand that constitute narrative discourse. This intelligence thus becomes thepoint of intersection between formal rhetoric and context.When Prince (!""%: (") subsequently takes up the argument againstLanser’s work in terms rather more conciliatory than those invoked byDiengott, he agrees that ‘‘narratological models should include—alongwith a syntactic, a semantic, and a discursive component—a pragmaticone.’’ But the precise terms of how Prince (ibid.: )&) understands this ele-ment remain undefined beyond the suggestion of the need to ‘‘strive formore self-awareness, flexibility, and attention to the concrete,’’ while hecriticizes Lanser’s work for ‘‘yielding to the interpretative temptation’’ andthus for ‘‘conflating criticism and poetics.’’ Prince here seems to argue intwo opposite directions at once, since his insistence in this context on a strictdefinition of narratology as a poetics, with no space for the theorization ofauthorship or of the extratextual, leaves him no room (and no clear ideaof how) to incorporate ‘‘the role of context’’ to which, he agrees, narra-tive poetics ought to be ‘‘more sensitive’’ (ibid.: ()).17Having admitted, not!#. Even Prince (!""#: !%"), hardly a champion of Lanser’s work, writes of Lanser’s being‘‘vehemently taken to task’’ by Diengott.!(. Elsewhere Prince (!""#: !#') writes, similarly nebulously, in response to Lanser’s project:‘‘In short, without yielding to the interpretive temptation and without renouncing the idealof a description of narrative and its possibilities that would be explicit, systematic, and uni-versal, narratology should and can take into account calls for more self-awareness, flexibility,and attention to the concrete.’’


surprisingly, to being ‘‘perplexed’’ by Prince’s argument, Lanser concludesher response by drawing attention to what has already been happening inthe study of narrative for over a decade. When she suggests that ‘‘narra-tologists and (narratological) critics—including Prince himself—are in factproducing ‘feminist narratology’ both theoretical and praxeological,’’ she isarguing that the narratological model has already productively incorpo-rated contextual concerns, in this case specifically those of gender, in a waythat would be conceptually impossible within the bounds of any strictlyconceived formalist poetics that is blind to the theoretical consideration ofauthorship (Lanser !""%: "+).

This brings us finally full circle to the kind of specifically formalist agendathat characterized Stanzel’s and Lämmert’s theoretical projects. Thosethinkers, like Cohn in !")%, Diengott in !")), and Prince (in part at least)in !""% and !""#, would surely have concurred with Genette’s position onimplied authorship in !")+ in the Nouveau discours du récit for the very reasonthat their respective theoretical models share with Genette’s a fundamentalincapacity to theorize the context of authorship. But whereas by the mid-!")$s, as Currie has noted, theoretical and critical developments were al-ready beginning to interact with and to subsume the exclusively formalistconcerns of early structuralist narratology, Stanzel’s ingeniously complexand versatile typology of narrators has remained, despite its later refine-ments, simply an ingeniously complex and versatile typology of narrators.A consideration of this di*erence in conception and potential applicationis, as I observed earlier, absent from the debate comparing the German-language and the French-American traditions, and this is astonishing giventhe far-reaching implications of recent developments in narratology. Byconcentrating its energy exclusively on various technical details and termi-nological di*erences concerning certain types of narrator as identified bytwo distinct formalist typologies, this debate has somehow remained oblivi-ous to the larger and more fundamental di*erence between the theoreticalmodels that support the two traditions’ contrasting understandings of nar-rative as either communicative process or intellectual product. One tradi-tion has proven inherently capable of theorizing context and authorship,of contributing to the constitution of, to coin Chatman’s (!""$b: +$") term,contextualist narratology; the other, for all its virtues, simply has not.That Stanzel, and by implication the tradition he represents, has re-mained utterly untouched by the paradigm shift in narratology is illustratednowhere more clearly than in the three !""$/!""! special issues of PoeticsToday on ‘‘Narratology Revisited.’’ The general tone of these issues is setby Christine Brooke-Rose’s title question, ‘‘Whatever Happened to Nar-


ratology?’’ (!""$). At least two major figures of classical structuralist nar-ratology o*er answers that represent significant shifts away from the posi-tions on which their reputations were originally built. Chatman answerstentatively with the title question ‘‘What CanWe Learn fromContextualistNarratology?’’ (!""$b), and Mieke Bal’s (!""$) essay, tracing the develop-ment of her own work away from formalist analysis toward the study ofthe relationship between form and context, argues rather more forcefullythat narratology’s only ‘‘point’’ has manifested itself in this development.18In stark contrast with this kind of discussion is Stanzel’s (!""$) remarkablydefensive essay, in this context something of a sore thumb sticking out awk-wardly at the back of one of these issues. Its concern is to respond to threeearlier commentaries by Cohn, Diengott, and Chatman on his own Theoriedes Erzählens, and its focus is limited to a discussion of typological details ofthe system developed in that book. In the context of the Poetics Today discus-sion of the dynamic process of amajor paradigm shift, Stanzel’s essaymakesa peculiar impression whereby his work in the !""$s comes to read like aseries of rather tired footnotes to a brilliant earlier project that has been un-able to respond to the radically changed—and still changing—concerns ofthe study of narrative. In contrast, the other Poetics Today essays in !""$/!""!clearly suggest the versatility and flexibility of the emerging functionalistmodel of a complex narrative communication situation, a versatility andflexibility that have always been logically alien to German Erzähltheorie.

References

Bal, Mieke!")% Narratolo!: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, translated by Christine van Boheemen(Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

!""$ ‘‘The Point of Narratology,’’ Poetics Today !!: (&(–%+.Booth,Wayne C.!"#! The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Brooke-Rose, Christine!""$ ‘‘Whatever Happened to Narratology?’’ Poetics Today !!: &)+–"+.Chatman, Seymour!"() Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-sity Press).

!")" ‘‘The ‘Rhetoric’ ‘of ’ ‘Fiction,’ ’’ in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideolo!, edited byJames Phelan, '$–%# (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).

!). Elsewhere Chatman (!")": %&) writes of his two personalities in terms of ‘‘the old-timeformalist in me’’ and ‘‘the rejuvenated radical who bubbles up as I read the latest generationof literary theorists.’’ In the same context he argues, likeWarhol, for recognition both of thecontextual dimension of rhetoric and of ‘‘the responsibility of looking as squarely as we can atthe complex interface between a fiction and ideas bombarding it from the real world’’ (ibid.).


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!")# ‘‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,’’ in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Essays on Art and


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form and context an essay in the history of narratology3

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