Reden und Erzählen. Figurenrede in Wolframs Parzival und titurel (review)

In recent years, communication has become a focal point of medieval German studies. Groundbreaking works have approached the topic from different perspectives, including Gerd Althoff's exploration of the importance of rituals to public communication in Spielregeln der Politik (1997) and Albrecht Classen's sociological analysis of language communities in Verzweiflung und Hoffnung (2002). In this dissertation from 2006, Martin Schuhmann also analyzes communication, not from a historical or sociological perspective, but with a functionalist approach that approximates an older type of literary scholarship that eschews any theoretical framework. At the heart of Schuhmann's study is the function of Figurenrede, "character's speech," to Wolfram's narratives, as mediated through individual characters or the narrator, with the overarching goal of understanding the complicated organization of Wolfram's texts better (p. 13). This is not to say that Schuhmann's search for function entirely disregards theory. A theoretical issue important to today's scholarship does inform his approach: the effects of the performative nature of medieval texts upon reader response. Unfortunately, Schuhmann never fully realizes the importance of performance to his analysis. Instead, he repeatedly invokes performance to assert more open and varied readings of a character's speech without ever exploring these possibilities. Whereas Schuhmann's study falls short theoretically, there is no doubt that it offers close readings of speech situations in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of this work is Schuhmann's analytical ability. For this reason alone, Wolfram scholars interested in narratology will find this work useful.

After an introductory chapter that provides an overview of past scholarship and correctly establishes the complexity of the concept of Figurenrede because of its dialogic nature between characters and the reader, Schuhmann divides his work into five parts: part one explores how the characterization of figures in Parzival occurs through speech; part two investigates how characters' speech contributes to plot development; part three analyzes how speech informs text-internal and text-external perspectives on important themes; part four compares characters' speech in Wolfram and Chrétien; and part five explores the function of the narrator's voice. The work ends with a brief conclusion and contains a fourteen-page bibliography that consists primarily of German secondary sources.

Part one deals with image making. Here Schuhmann succeeds at showing how Wolfram uses a character's speech to create an image of any given character in the mind of the reader. In analyzing the different formal elements and rhetorical devices such as meter, rhyme, enjambment, and anacoluthia that Wolfram uses in Parzival, the author demonstrates that these devices have an instrumental function. With these rhetorical tools, Wolfram directs the audience's attention to particular character traits, emotions, and central issues of the text like loyalty, honor, minne, and courtliness. Schuhmann explores these themes through the speech of the two main protagonists, Parzival and Gawain. It is here that Schuhmann's analysis is at its strongest, tracing the development of the character's sense of self and social status through the forms of speech he uses. The image of the characters that emerges from Schuhmann's analysis, however, is one that has long been established by Wolfram scholarship: Parzival and Gawain are contrasting figures, with the young and inexperienced Parzival insecure about his social status and honor and Gawain confident about his social status and honor. The problem is not that Schuhmann's approach in this chapter is not useful. His focus on Parzival's changing use of speech and courtly vocabulary at different stages of the work, for example, does provide a fuller image of Parzival's development into a courtly knight and shows that Wolfram uses Parzival's speech to explore the pitfalls of not mastering the nuances of courtly life. The problem with Schuhmann's analysis is that it does not produce new results.

In part two, Schuhmann analyzes Sigune's speech in Parzival and Titurel. By comparing these two works...