What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, and: Elemente der Narratologie (review)

What is Narratology? is of interest not just based on the rich material it offers the reader. It is also the inaugural volume of the de Gruyter series Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory/Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie, for which Fotis Jannidis, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid (all three also represented in this volume) serve as series editors. So far, 11 volumes have appeared; volume 8 is discussed below.

The series is a significant contribution to the flourishing scholarship in the area of narrative studies. As one would expect with de Gruyter, the volumes are handsome, the paper quality, typeface, and layout pleasant and reader-friendly, even though with the first volume, the editorial and production process seems to have included minor snags. In order to not only represent, but also foster international exchange, contributions not originally in English have been translated.

The aim of this volume is not just to assemble useful contributions to the field, but to ask guiding questions and to sketch possible roadmaps for the future of the discipline—a challenge that the majority of the authors take up. The individual interventions are directed at widely divergent aspects, areas, and indeed conceptual levels of the overall narratological project.

A brief preface by the editors offers a thumbnail sketch of a yet-to-be-written history of narratology in three phases and outlines the rationale for the volume (it goes back to the first international symposium of the Narratology Research Group in Hamburg, founded in 2001, whose members have actively and productively contributed to the field of narratology since) and its topic posed in question form. As they phrase it: "The problem lies not in a lack of plausible answers to the question, but precisely in the abundance of such answers" (v). 14 contributions by individual or co-authors—about half of them members of the Hamburg group at the time of the symposium—follow, varying in length between 16 and 38 pages and arranged in no discernible order or system. On the whole, they invite, and would merit, extensive engagement rather than the following capsule assessments.

Contributions range from the specific to the general. Both general and brief, the opening "Survey" of narratology by Gerald Prince offers a highly compressed overview. Prince's role in the field is affirmed by the frequency with which his name occurs in the volume, and his contribution is evidence of comprehensive familiarity with the research—stopping short in most cases, however, of actual engagement with the material in favor of offering repeated lists and catalogues of positions, questions, and answers. It is followed by Wolf Schmid's foray into "eventfulness" or Ereignishaftigkeit, with its very specific focus on this feature of a narratological approach that focuses on what is being narrated rather than the form of its mediation. Schmidt elucidates the category of "event" and then proceeds to define five parameters of "eventfulness" (a more awkward term than either the German or the Russian, as he concedes [30]), with examples drawn mainly from Chekhov. (Not surprisingly, Schmid's contribution, sans the brief concluding section, has also found its way into his monograph, published two years later and reviewed below.)

John Pier's patient and detailed engagement with the problems that have plagued attempts to equate or correlate the concepts of "story" and "discourse" with the conceptual pair of "fabula" and "sjushet" takes readers through three phases of use (pre-structuralist, structuralist, semiotic) in an illuminating acknowledgment of the terminological foundations of narrative studies and the processes of semantic shift and accretion that have taken place. He points out that...