Acts of narrative
Subtitle: textual strategies in modern German fiction
By: Patrick O'Neill.
Series: Theory/culture; Theory/culture series.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 205
Subjects: German fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century.
Description: Because German literary criticism tends to be strongly historicist in character, modern and postmodern German narrative has remained relatively unexplored by poststructuralist critics. In the eight individual analyses of twentieth-century German texts that make up this book, Patrick O'Neill deviates from the theoretical mainstream.

O'Neill applies the principles of structuralist and poststructuralist narratology to a selection of narratives from both modernist and postmodernist German authors: Mann, Kafka, and Hesse, and Canetti, Johnson, Handke, and Bernhard.

O'Neill's approach rests on three assumptions: first, that all stories are stories told in particular ways; second, that these particular ways of telling stories are interesting objects of study in and for themselves; and third, that modern German fiction includes a number of narratives that allow us to indulge that interest in ways that are themselves compelling.

The relationship of story and discourse is central to Acts of Narrative; in particular, each of the texts under analysis continually foregrounds the active role of the reader, which O'Neill sees as an inescapable feature of modern and postmodern narrative as a semiotic structure. The volume might be described as an exercise in semiotic narratology, exploring a variety of aspects of the semiotics of narrative as a discursive system.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-199) and index.