Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 132 Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology. Approaches and Analyses. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Birgit Neumann During the last decade or so narratology has undergone a major paradigm shift: a range of new approaches has emerged and classical narratology (presuming there ever was something like a unified classical enterprise), with its interest in general characteristics of narratives, has gradually evolved into a plurality of new critical approaches. What once looked like a more or less unified structuralist enterprise has thus branched out into different directions, yielding an array of innovative, mainly context-sensitive approaches. These innovative approaches are frequently subsumed under the label ‘postclassical’ - a term that was first introduced in David Herman’s influential study Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). While the term is by now firmly established in narrative scholarship, the question of what exactly it designates is still an open issue. The recent explosion of narrative research reflects the field’s conceptual and methodological richness, but also its fragmentation. The volume at hand, edited by Freiburg-based scholars Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, takes up the challenge of coming to grips with narratology’s recent postclassical ramifications. Proceeding from the premise that postclassical narratology has reached a new phase of “consolidation despite continuing diversification” (5), an international group of narratologists sets out to explore new perspectives on narratives, addressing potential overlaps and interrelations between different postclassical approaches. In their introduction, Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik provide an overview of some of the most relevant directions pursued by postclassical approaches to narrative, focusing on the differences between the classical structuralist paradigm and the new postclassical research programme. Drawing on Ansgar Nünning’s survey “Narratology or Narratologies” (2003), they maintain that postclassical narratologies “move toward a grand contextual, historical, pragmatic and reader-oriented effort” (6). Whereas structuralism was primarily concerned with a general theory of narrative, postclassical approaches focus on contextual factors and individual reading strategies that potentially make every act of interpretation different. Much more interesting than this well-known juxtaposition of classical and postclassical narratology are the four major lines of new ‘postclassical’ developments, which Alber and Fludernik identify: first, postclassical narratology “extends the classical paradigm intradisciplinarily” (3) by tackling its conceptual blind spots. Second, postclassical narratology proposes a number of methodological extensions, producing, for example, deconstructive narratology or narratological speech act theory. Third, postclassical narratology integrates new thematic concerns and concepts, giving rise to innovative versions of narratology such as feminist, queer or postcolonial approaches. And fourth, postclassical narratology Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 133 extends narratological analysis to various media, the performative arts and non-literary narrative. The editors are right to point out that post-classical narratology is still a highly diversified field of research. While some scholars continue to work within the classical paradigm, attempting to rejuvenate it by adding new analytical concepts, others more or less radically break with the structuralist tradition by questioning and ultimately discarding standard concepts and typologies. The differences between, say, deconstructive narratology and those approaches that mainly complement classical narratology by refining its categories are indeed huge. Regrettably, the editors do not attempt to define the relations and tensions that exist between these different, and to some extent incompatible, branches of postclassical narratology in a more systematic manner. Rather, these differences are mainly used at an abstract level to organize and subdivide the volume. Accordingly, the first part of the volume contains contributions which propose various extensions and reconfigurations of classical narratology whereas the second part, entitled “Transdisciplinarities”, consists of a number of essays which propose innovative combinations of narratological categories with medial, gender-related, psycho-analytical and non-fictional contexts. Most of the essays make relevant contributions to the still burgeoning field of narratology, with varying degrees of innovation. In the shorter first part, Werner Wolf and Alan Palmer propose to complement classical narratology by focussing on hitherto neglected phenomena, namely mise en cadre and intermental units respectively. Wolf conceives of mise en cadre as a complement to mise en abyme and hence as a form of textual self-referentiality. Drawing on the theory of intermediality and frame theory, his essay illustrates the potentials of classical narratology, i.e. the study of what he terms “‘textual’ generalities” (78). In another fine essay, Alan Palmer introduces the concept of intermental thought and outlines its importance with regard to fictional narrative, arguing that “a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and breakdown of […] intermental systems” (83), i.e. socially distributed cognition. Richard Walsh questions basic axioms of classical narratology, criticizing the concept of narrative voice from the perspective of a rhetorical model of fictive representation. By drawing on a rhetorical approach to voice, Walsh suggests inverting the hierarchical relationship between structure and act, thus understanding narrative representation as a performative act itself, “the performance of a real-world communicative gesture” (35). The first section is rounded off by Monika Fludernik’s essay, which provides a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between Stanzel’s concept of mediacy (as the defining feature of narrative), processes of narrative mediation (or transmission) and focalization. In this important contribution, Fludernik illustrates that the concepts of mediacy and mediation rely on different definitions of narrativity and at least partially incompatible notions of discourse. Scrutinizing the connections between mediacy, mediation and focalization in classical narratology, she also revisits the fundamental story/ discourse dichotomy and discusses the potentials of no-narrator and no-mediation theories. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 134 David Herman opens the second part of the volume by examining potential overlaps between different postclassical approaches. Analyzing William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree”, Herman is particularly concerned with “the structure and dynamics of story-telling practices”, the various semiotic systems in which narrative practices are realized and “the mind-relevant dimensions of the practices themselves” (139). Refining Fludernik’s concept of experientiality, narrative, according to Herman, is essentially about qualia, namely the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or something to have specific experiences. Narrative, for Herman, is particularly suited to explore the world from the perspective of an experiencing mind, i.e. of capturing the “what-it’slike dimension of conscious awareness itself” (157). In the next essay, Jan Alber scrutinizes the interfaces between transmedial narratology, rhetorical approaches to narrative and unnatural narratology, reconsidering cinematic narration from the vantage point of ‘hypothetical intentionalism’. The replacement of the filmic narrator and the implied filmmaker with the concept of the ‘hypothetical filmmaker’, Alber argues, offers a means of integrating the viewer’s speculations about possible motivations for the making of the film into narratological analysis. One of the aims of this redefinition is to do “justice to the folk-psychological reasoning viewers typically use to make sense of films” (181). Although I find Alber’s interpretation of David Lynch’s film Lost Highway intriguing, it remains debatable whether narratology (even if ‘postclassical’) should primarily aim at accounting for “folk-psychological reasoning” - in particular, if this means doing away with distinctions between internal and external levels of narrative communication. In the following articles, Susan Lanser, Amit Marcus, Jarmila Mildorf, Martin Löschnigg and Henrik Skov Nielsen reconsider the model of classical narratology by linking it to new conceptual paradigms and extending it to cover new genres and media. Pursuing a diachronic and formalist purpose, Susan Lanser explores how the cultural topos of female same-sex desire can be tied to historically variable narrative forms and, consequently, argues for “both a more consciously historicized narratology and a more consciously narratological history of sexuality” (188). Amit Marcus combines narratology with psychoanalysis by drawing on René Girard’s concept of triangular desire and correlating the mediation of desire to the story/ discourse distinction. In another stimulating essay, Jarmila Mildorf, taking up David Herman’s (1999) suggestion to develop a ‘socio-narratology’, links sociolinguistic narrative analysis with narratological terms and by so doing provides insights into the specificities of oral narratives. Focusing on concepts such as identity, social positioning, in-group and out-group relations, the essay identifies points of convergence between narratology and social science brands of narrative research and shows that postclassical narratology does indeed open up many perspectives for interdisciplinary research. Martin Löschnigg merges cognitive narratology and theories of autobiography, and examines representations of experientiality (sensu Fludernik) in autobiography. The volume ends with a contribution by Henrik Skov Nielsen and a discussion of hybrid texts that cut across the fiction/ non-fiction distinction. By establishing a link between un- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 135 natural narratives and - what he terms - “natural authors”, he makes the case for revising the classical paradigms of narratology. There is no doubt that the volume makes a highly readable, timely and pertinent contribution to the field of narratology. Most of the suggestions of revising, extending or discarding the paradigms of classical narratology are convincing and certainly warrant more critical attention. But, of course, the volume also begs a number of questions, most importantly concerning the term ‘postclassical’ itself. What is the heuristic value of the term, if applied to both a frame-abiding and a frame-shattering engagement with the structuralist paradigm? Even though the editors do not envisage “one overarching model”, their project is based upon the premise that “considerable consolidation despite continuing diversity is called for at this moment” (5). However, there are substantial conceptual, methodological and ideological differences between approaches that scrutinize narrative elements against the foil of power structures and gender differences (see e.g. Lanser) and approaches that are mainly interested in textual generalities. These disparities strike me as being too huge to be subsumed under the umbrella-term ‘postclassical’. In this respect, Werner Wolf’s suggestion to term approaches that mainly complement classical narratology by postclassical elements (leaving classical premises intact) “neo-classical” (59) seems indeed enticing. So, yes, this is an excellent contribution to narrative scholarship - but perhaps not under the single heading of ‘postclassical narratology’. Birgit Neumann Anglistik/ Cultural Studies Universität Passau Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Gender and Creation. Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority and Authorship. (Regensburger Beiträge zur Gender-Forschung 4). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Sabine Schülting In her seminal article on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Barbara Johnson reads both the novel and Shelley’s introduction to the third edition of 1831 as “the description of a primal scene of creation” (Johnson 1996: 248) that closely links biological parenting and literary authorship. In Johnson’s account, Shelley is concerned with the monsters, the “hideous progeny” (Shelley 1996: 173), produced by men who desire to give birth and by women who desire to write (Johnson 1996: 248). The ways in which biological procreation, intel-