Käte Hamburger's Logik der Dichtung in Contemporary Narrative Theory

The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a renewed interest in narrative theory that seeks to go beyond the conceptual limits of structuralism and its narratological findings of the 1960's and 1970's. Within this context, it is especially intriguing to revisit Käte Hamburger's seminal work Logik der Dichtung. Both Hamburger and her work continue to spark debates, which stem partly from her biographical background: a female German-Jewish academic, whose career was stalled by WWII and who faced an uphill battle to establish herself as a serious scholar after her return to Germany in the post-war academic environment. Contrary to Hannah Arendt, who had a background similar to Hamburger's, the latter succeeded academically in Germany to become one of the most highly systematic and philosophically erudite German literary theorist of the twentieth century. Even though she is often read through a biographical lens, her literary and theoretical analyses constitute a substantial contribution to German Studies and narrative theory in their own right.

First written in 1957, and substantially revised for the 1968 edition, Logik der Dichtung competed intellectually with the findings of structuralist narrative theory. Moreover, Hamburger's dedication of Logik der Dichtung to Thomas Mann positions her in a certain tradition of narrative theory in which creative writers are also their own theorists, such as Henry James, Thomas Mann, and Hamburger herself.¹ The alignment with novelists who were interested in theoretical components of fiction suggests more than simple admiration for fiction writers on Hamburger's part: rather, it suggests that she is interested in linking theory to practice and that the concerns she raises are important and pertinent to fiction and novelists: namely, what fictional narration is and how it works. The theoretical-philosophical angle from which she scrutinizes fictional narration to explore its mechanisms is phenomenological. In Hamburger, narrative theory and phenomenology converge forcefully on the topic of the governing consciousness, which she takes as a key element for defining fiction in Hamburger.

Yet current narrative theory draws from the structuralist foundations set in the 1960s, and builds on its paradigms and strict models by using them as springboards for conceiving open, non-binary narrative systems. Today, narratives are no longer considered ahistorical and undated material. The cultural codes Roland Barthes detected in the grammar of narratives have now spilled over into "reality." Narratives are seen as expressions and products of a specific culture of a specific place and time that are in a dialogue with other texts and readers. Two related impacts on the evaluation of structural-formal characteristics of narrative stem from this contextualization. Different modes of historicizing (such as ethnic, political, or gendered) are the grid within which narratives are placed and according to which the structural and semantic features of narrative are sifted. This external gesture of drawing context into the narrative is supplemented by an internal one that sounds out the internal structure of a narrative along a specific cultural and historical interest. This internal analysis subsequently highlights certain structural traits of narrative as dominant to that specific interest. Both movements result in a complication and dilution of the assessment and labeling of narratives to fit established literary genres.

As part of her project to illuminate what she calls the logic of literature, that is to say the linguistic, grammatical, and epistemological features proper to fictional narration, Hamburger, too, participates in rethinking genre. Hamburger's specific interest in fictional narratives lies in how the language of fiction can be distinguished from ordinary language discourse and identified unmistakably as fictional language. Hamburger's new typology of genre is thereby based on and determined by the fictionality of literary works. The logical and grammatical determinations of fiction allow fiction to suggest the semblance of life, from which she develops a classification of genre that consists only of two categories distinguished by their mimetic qualities, which are lyric poetry (which is not mimetic) and fiction, which in her definition encompasses both prose works (albeit only prose in the third person) and drama. Drama is included in fiction, because it creates the semblance...