Acts of Narrative: Textual Strategies in Modern German Fiction by Patrick O'Neill (review)

276 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 that these three movements parallel Lonergan's intellectual conversion, moral conversion, and religious conversion. Further, he suggests that the same three movements are the necessary links between Fowler's third, conventional , and fourth, individuative, stages, the fourth and fifth, conjunctive, stages, and the fifth and sixth, universalizing, stages of faith development. Those who are approaching or have reached Fowler's 'universalizing' stage 6 offaith development, who have moved, in Lonergan's language, to 'religious conversion/ who live out 'meaningful action for the sake of friendship' in Macmurray's terms, are those who are the catalysts for community. The convergence they must bring about if we are to survive as a species is towards local and world conununity which is ecozoic - that is, primarily concerned with the well being of the whole Earth. In Guides for the Journey David Creamer has produced a rare book in its clarity and its passion. It is rare in that it provides the general reader and introductory student with excellent briefings on the three scholars presented while at the same time proposing a deeply felt synthesis which engages the more sophisticated reader. Itserves many purposes successfully , therefore, and is recommendable especiallyfor the essay on Macmurray. (BRIAN RUTTAN) Patrick O'Neill. Acts ofNarrative: Textual Strategies in Modern German Fiction University of Toronto Press. x, 206. $45.00 Acts of Narrative is the third volume in a trilogy of modern criticism, the first two of which are The Comedy of Entropy and Fictions of Discourse. A trilogy, though, not in the sense of Paul Ricceur's Temps et recit but in the sense of the ancient doctrina and exempla tradition. The author acknowledges in the introduction the help of modern semiotics and narratology in his attempt to analyse twentieth-century German texts, and he defines his task as the exploration of the role of the reader in the narrative transaction. Luckily the author does not use his eight case studies as examples for purely narratological theses; he does not so much rehearse theoretical paradigms as, rather, use leitmotifs from his narratological framework as the guiding principles for his analysis. Thus, his collection becomes not only readable but also enjoyable. Those readers who might expect a rigorous theoretical treatment will be disappointed, but the reader generally interested in modern German literature, especially undergraduates and graduate students, will gladly tum to Acts of Narrative for its elegant style and lucid critical discussion. Q/Neill's list of texts ranges from Thomas MatUl's Death in Venice, Franz Kafka's The Trial, and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolfto Elias Canetti's Auto dafe, Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum, Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety, and Thomas Bernhard's The Lime Works. This list looks very much like the HUMANITIES 277 course offerings of an introductory seminar (with the possible exception of Uwe Johnson's Two Views, arguably one of his weaker works). Engaging as G'Neill's critical interpretations are to read, they will also serve as excellent starters for anyone who is going to research these texts outside the classroom . Compiling such a list of the greatest hits of modern German literature might run the danger of unnecessarily repeating dated insights and belabouringthe obvious. Acts ofNarrative does not fall into this trap for one second. The narratological problem that serves as a guiding principle for analysis is clearly described and always captures one of the main interpretative perspectives. O'Neill keeps close to the textand applies his narratological categories only after he has extracted their significance from the text. In this he excels in giving lucid descriptions of analytical problems that he ties in with the results of earlier investigations, so that each of his chapters not only offers the spark of a new insight but also presents the most pertinent findings of earlier research, incorporated into his own analytical perspective. Thus, O'Neill accounts for the ambiguities in Kafka1s Trial by analysing the strategies of narrator-vs-character focalization, and similarly he utilizes the distinction between story and discourse to re-evaluate the irony in Hesse's Steppenwolj. Other chapters deal with questions of unreliability and description as a narrative tool. This...