Von sich selbst erzählen: Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens ed. by Sonja Glauch and Katharina Philipowski (review)

This collection of essays, part of Winter's series Studien zur historischen Poetik, stems from a conference of the same name, which took place in Fall 2013. The main goal of the conference and its resultant publication is to orient premodern manifestations of first person narration within the theoretical landscape of narratology and raise their visibility within the larger field of literary studies. It is the editors' contention that the medieval has not received enough attention from scholars who are interested in tracing the origins of modern genres, such as autobiography and the novel, and the postmodern autofiction (pp. 1–2) and, thus, such genres are not often placed within an appropriately broad historical context. Most of the contributions deal with German-language texts dating from the High to Late Middle Ages, though, the editors note, the questions they pose and analyses they offer will be of interest to scholars working beyond this cultural sphere. The book is divided into four sections, the first of which contains two essays meant to serve as an overview of "premodern first person narration." The six essays that comprise Section II examine first-person narration in lyrical texts. Section III's three essays also focus on first-person expressions of courtly love, though conveyed in works that cannot always be strictly classified as poetry, as is the case in the subgenre of the Minnerede (love discourse). Finally the essays in Section IV analyze the first-person narrator in "sacred contexts."

The essays of Section I, "Vorarbeiten zur Literaturgeschichte und Systematik vor-moderenen Ich-Erzählens," by Sonja Glauch and Katharina Philipowski, and "Wer bin 'Ich' und wenn ja, wie viele? Narrative Inszenierungen des Ichs in England und Schottland," by Eva von Contzen, constitute an eminently suitable starting point, not just for this volume, but for anyone who is interested in investigating how the first-person voice shapes medieval narratives. Unlike the subsequent essays, in which analysis is more tightly focused on individual expressions of first-person narration in a text or set of texts, the volume's first two contributions view the phenomenon through a wide-angle lens. That is, they are interested in developing a broad narratological framework for the first-person narrator that is attested in premodern texts. Motivating this effort is the methodological premise that current notions of first-person narration are based on post-Enlightenment texts and are not helpful when applied to earlier texts. Thus, a new framework is required. To this end, Glauch and Philipowski first look to identify all of the different types of medieval texts that tend to feature first-person narrators (e.g., Traumerzählungen [dream narratives] and the aforementioned Minnerede [love discourse]) and outline a set of features that can be used to describe and distinguish these types (e.g., Allegorizität [allegoricity] and Diskursivität/Narrativität und Erfahrungshaftigkeit [discursitivity/narrativity and experientiality]). Von Contzen concentrates on one of the distinguishing features outlined in Glauch and Philipowski, namely, the range of the first-person narrator as a figure that exists somewhere between experiencing and narrating the story.

It is more an observation than a piece of negative criticism to mention that, though the volume often refers to premodern first-person narration, all of the textual particulars, save one—Historia Francorum, the focus of Gert Hübner's essay—stem from the High and Late Middle Ages. Hübner's essay stands out in that it analyzes a work that originates from a different historical and cultural context. First-person narrators are, of course, present in the Old High German and Old English corpora, but the early medieval is absent from the volume's presentation of a theory of first-person narration in "medieval" texts (see p. 10). More explicit acknowledgement of this narrower theoretical...