The Complicity of Literary Form: The Theory and Practice of Critical Discursive Narratology

(with Bielefeld Study Group for Critical Discursive Narratology). Presentation given at Complicity and the Politics of Representation, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, 16–18 Jun 2017. While structuralist narratology used to taxonomically identify patterns and rules for how narrative works internally, post-classical, or contextualist, narratologies have attempted to broaden the scope of the analysis and interpretation of narrative texts in terms of their relevance for social, cultural and political issues. We believe, however, that the postclassical phase in narratology has not yet given enough room to the basic conviction of critical theory that social reality is discursively constructed. In particular, we argue that text – or more specifically, narrative – is ideologically complicit in the construction of reality, arguing with Fredric Jameson that form is not innocent, but just as ideologically charged as is content. On a meta-theoretical level, we therefore stipulate that analyses of form are never objective and free from power relations, either: The narratological toolkit is always already ideologically charged by inherent praxeological processes of privileging and marginalization, foregrounding and backgrounding. In this presentation we wish to sketch an approach to narrative that intends to move beyond specific concerns of post-classical narratologies for, e.g., gender or race/ethnicity, and that we would like to term Critical Discursive Narratology. Through exemplary readings, we will inquire into the ideology of concrete narrative strategies, their privileging and exclusion strategies within (British) prose fiction. Starting from the premise that no heuristic (structuralist narratology, in this case) is ever neutral, innocent, merely descriptive or unrelated to its results, we will also inquire into the ideological premises on which narratology as a science and specific narratological categories are based, asking in particular how both are complicit in the production and naturalization of those premises.