Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative PDF
Preview Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative
Albrecht Koschorke Fact and Fiction Paradigms Literature and the Human Sciences Edited by Rüdiger Campe ‧ Paul Fleming Editorial Board Eva Geulen ‧ Rüdiger Görner ‧ Barbara Hahn Daniel Heller-Roazen ‧ Helmut Müller-Sievers William Rasch ‧ Joseph Vogl ‧ Elisabeth Weber Volume 6 Albrecht Koschorke Fact and Fiction Elements of a General Theory of Narrative Translated by Joel Golb ISBN 978-3-11-034708-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034968-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038412-3 ISSN 2195-2205 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934504 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. Originally published as “Wahrheit und Erfindung. Grundzüge einer Allgemeinen Erzähltheorie” © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2012. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Cover image: The semiotic field. (See fig. 3 in this volume) Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgment This study, however incomplete it may be, emerged from a decade’s reflection. In the context of the demands of an engaged academic life, it could not have been written without a great deal more than the usually available free time and space. In that respect, I would like to warmly thank the German Research Foun- dation for awarding me a Leibniz Prize in 2003, thereby offering me seven years of privileged working conditions. Two research years at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Konstanz (2009/2010) and at the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg (2010/2011) made completion of the manuscript possible. Alongside such insti- tutional benefits, I was fortunate enough to participate in an encouraging and fruitful scholarly milieu. Focus on social fictions extends back to the inception of the project-group on “poetology of corporations” at the Center for Literary Research in Berlin. The book’s horizon was enormously expanded through sug- gestions and comments offered in the course of wonderful collegial cooperation at the “Cultural Foundations of Integration” Center of Excellence at the University of Konstanz, which also offered financial support for this translation. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to friends and co-fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg, and to many other interlocutors in the USA and Europe. Manuela Gerlof, Rüdiger Campe and Paul Fleming made it possible for this book to appear in English. Joel Golb not only took on the formidable task of translating my very German academic prose into hopefully somewhat more readable English, but was also an extremely helpful dialog partner; some of his critical observations pointing to the dilem- mas of my narrative model are included in notes. Finally, my deepest gratitude to Julian for the days in Munich, to Eva for her loving skepticism, and to Janis for introducing me in his own way to the first principles of narration. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110349689-201 Contents 1 The Universality of Narration 1 Homo narrans 1 Homo ludens 4 Ontological indifference 7 Narrative in the mirror of the scholarship 10 2 Elementary Operations 15 Reduction 15 Forming schemas 17 Redundancy and variation 24 Generating proximity, gaining distance 24 Psychological, communicative, and systemic redundancy 28 Diversification 35 Sequence formation and framing 43 Beginning and ending 43 Narrative problem-processing 48 Narrative, image, and scene 52 Motivation 55 Tentative causality 55 Ascription of agency 59 Positioning of narrative authority 64 Who is seeing? Who is speaking? Who is in the know? 64 Graded forms of participation 68 We/they 73 Stimulation and binding of emotions 77 Modeling of social dynamics 77 Narration as a source of pleasure 82 3 Cultural Fields 86 Concepts of space 86 The cultural semiotics of Yuri Lotman 90 Centers and peripheries; cold zones and hot 100 Feedback loops in the sign system 105 Loose ends 108 Inconsistency of the culturally representable world 108 Incomplete formalization of informality 112 VIII Contents Sense and non-sense 117 Meaning as a problem of energy 117 “Sense” in sociology 120 Legitimation experts and the need for justification 125 Disarticulation and dissociation 127 Semiotic infrastructures 128 Terms and concepts: range, migration, transfer 131 Lexical, spatial, and social mobility 134 Terms and concepts 2: levels of abstraction and communication 137 Social dissemination and semantic gradation 137 The cultural functioning of terminological hierarchies 140 Frequencies; incommunicable elements 147 Code ambiguity and code switching 147 Narratives as belief systems 150 Truth programs (Paul Veyne) 152 Management of cognitive dissonance 155 4 The Modeling of Social Time 160 Manifold temporalities, operative times 160 Narratives in cultural memory 166 Inhabited and uninhabited memory (Aleida Assmann) 169 Activation of different pasts 173 Power struggle: future vs. past 178 Present time as a collecting point 178 Futural fictions 183 Narratives of conflict 189 How do differences become politically virulent? 191 Opposing models of conflict 194 Temporal units, expiration dates 199 The myth of the spiritual fatherland 199 The tenacity of narratives 202 Tempi, phrasing curves 206 The narrative of secularization 207 Aspects of the modernity narrative 209 Terms and concepts 3: confluences 213 The narrative of Enlightenment 216 Styles of canonization 224 Contents IX 5 Narratives and Institutions 232 Autonomization of goals 232 Incomplete knowledge 237 Competition, cooperation, and trust 244 Structurally conforming and irregular processes 253 Contested zones of narrative; magic 256 An institutional shadow economy 258 Fictional armor, idées directrices 263 6 Epistemic Narratives 268 Knowledge and narration: the cultural organization of external reference 268 Self-reference and external reference 270 Narrative theory as epistemology 273 Objective dimension vs. social dimension 277 Roy Bhaskar’s “central paradox of science” 277 Inference, object reference, and social reference 279 Weakened referential connection as a “negotiation basis” 284 Nature and culture 287 Asymmetrical distinctions 290 Boundary relays in the epistemic field 295 Double conditioning 299 The coexistence of conflicting normative pairs: religious paradoxes 301 Paradoxes of the political sphere 305 Referential nostalgia. Stories of the “thing in itself” 311 Constructivism vs. realism 313 Kant’s dilemma 314 The problem of two beginnings 321 Bibliography 325 Author Index 341 Subject Index 347
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