Räume erzählen–erzählende Räume. Raumdarstellung als Poetik. Mit einer examplarischen Analyse des Nibelungenliedes by Franziska Hammer (review)

A revision of a 2016 dissertation from the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Räume erzählen consists of five chapters, although chapters two and three, the theoretical background and framework and an applied study on the Nibelungenlied, comprise the bulk of the volume (274/315 pages). A brief introduction outlines the study’s operational interpretative frameworks of space, from the primary observation that space is a self-legitimizing signifier within the wider meaning of the text and not merely a function of the narrative, to the current state of the spatial turn in Medieval Studies. The aim is to provide a semantic analysis of space as a dynamic and relative conceptual area according to literary-theoretical positions and juxtapose this view with various traditional conceptions of locus/topos in the study of the medieval German epic.

In the second chapter, aesthetic, fictional, literary spaces are categorized and contextualized for the present study from phenomenological, structural, narratological, and linguistic analytical approaches (p. 13), as well as within Medieval Studies past and present. The first division of chapter two concentrates on a “micro-” and “macrohistory” of Raum, that is, a diachronic Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte (p. 14) and synchronic comparison of the semantic field rûm/rûmen around 1200. The diachronic discussion begins with Proto-Germanic and ends with bipartite semantic developments in line with the French and English cognates from Latin, parallel spectra of meaning designating, on the one hand, a territorial, settlement-focused practice and, on the other, a bounded location within which phenomena and objects are found or interact. The synchronic portion notes the collocative dimensions of the transitive and intransitive verbal forms, namely usage in both natural and architectonic domains, alongside idiomatic/phraseological combinations; for the substantive forms, verbal and adjective collocations likewise show a range of primary and secondary meanings – Hammer argues that it is only on the polylexical level that the lexeme can be understood in its synchronic context. Standard lexicographical resources inform these sections, which, while nevertheless useful and argumentatively sound, would be profitably augmented by corpus data from, for example, the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank.

Turning to Foucauldian discursive domains that transgress disciplinary boundaries, Hammer situates a historical overview of space from antiquity to the modern world in the cosmological/physical-empirical, theological, cartographic, symbolic, phenomenological, and sociological spheres, recounting the main theoretical developments from Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews onwards. Related conceptual approaches, such as borders and liminality, center/periphery, and space in exegetical contexts, appear alongside these divisions, further complicating the discursive status of space; appropriately, the author notes that different discursive regimes rule at different times, and that the semantic and semiotic division of space into relative and absolute spheres is too simplistic to capture its lexical biography as evidenced in texts. The spatial turn in narratology, or “the spatialization of narratology” (pp. 80–81), bridges the prior theoretical gap between Bakhtin and contemporary developments on the one hand, and the modern and premodern periods on the other, bringing both recent studies in germanistische Mediävistik and a broader state of the field survey to bear in schematizing the primary discursive divisions in current and historical approaches to space in medieval (German) literature, namely theology, cartography, phenomenology, sociology, and virtuality (p. 121). Proceeding from previous conceptions of types of space in literature, Hammer focuses on geographical, topographic, and communicative spaces, respectively “die räumliche Makrostruktur” (the spatial macrostructure), “die Schauplätze der Handlung” (settings of the plot), and “nicht konkret begehbar[e]” (not concretely accessible) spaces of communication, which both require and generate specific types of space and spatial semiotics (p. 128). The goal is to expose “das Wechselspiel zwischen vertikaler, räumlicher Konfiguration und horizontaler Ereignisstruktur und deren gegenseitiger Modellierung im narrative Verlauf” (p. 130, the interplay between the vertical, spatial configuration and horizontal event structure...