Title: Acts of narrative
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: German fiction, History and criticism, Narration (Rhetoric), History, German fiction, history and criticism, Criticism, textual
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PT772 .O54 1996