Monika Fludernik
Biographic Data
| ID | 749385 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Monika Fludernik |
| GIVEN NAMES | Monika |
| FAMILY NAME | Fludernik |
| SIGNATURE | FLUDERNIK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Freiburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2408-702X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Diachronicity: An issue shared between linguistics and literary studies
Both linguists and literary scholars deal with change over time. This special issue approaches the question of diachronic development from a comparative perspective, contrasting the ways in which analysis of changes observable in literary texts over the centuries is handled in the realm of literary studies and how linguists discuss language-specific (dis)continuities from one period to the other. For instance, as is well known, generic modificati…
The Penal System
This chapter discusses Defoe’s involvement with the law and the penal system, focusing on his brushes with the censorship laws, resulting in his experience of prison, as well as his business failures and imprisonment for debt. The second half treats Defoe’s representation of the law and prison in his fiction. The chapter outlines the British judicial and penal system at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, under…
We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction
Natalya Bekhta's monograph on first-person plural narrative is the first book-length account of this innovative form of writing. The study is based on Bekhta's (2016) PhD thesis at the University of Giessen. She has published a series of essays on the topic (Bekhta 2017a, 2017b) and a special issue of Style (Bekhta 2020). In her essays, Bekhta takes exception to earlier work on we-narratives, claiming that only texts with a communal we-voice can …
Semantiken der Muße aus interdisziplinären Perspektiven
Das deutsche Wort Muße ist nicht ohne weiteres übersetzbar. Umso schwieriger gestaltet sich die Erforschung der Muße in anderen kulturellen Kontexten. Der Sammelband illustriert die semantischen Probleme des Mußebegriffs innerhalb der gegebenen Wortfelder im Deutschen, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Englischen, Spanischen, Französischen und Tschechischen sowie in Bangla und Urdu. Die hier versammelten Aufsätze sind hauptsächlich von Literaturwissens…
Narrating Otium—A Narratology of Leisure
Narrating Otium—A Narratology of Leisure? Monika Fludernik (bio) For several years, the University of Freiburg has had an interdisciplinary research consortium on the subject of otium, a Latin borrowing in English that can be translated as idleness, leisure or otiose leisure.1 Though much of the research has focused on the semantics of otium (especially on the challenges posed by the untranslatability of the German word Muße) and on the social an…
The Politics of We-Narration: The One vs. the Many
Focusing on the dynamics of the relationship between groups and individuals within these groups or communities, the article outlines several possible types of attitudes and modes of treatment of individuals within the group. Using two short stories by Yiyun Li and Donald Barthelme's “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” a range of relationships between the individual and his fellow members of the group or community are analyzed. In …
Symmetry, Proportion and Seriality: The Semantics of Mirroring and Repetition in Science and the Arts. Introduction to Special Issue
In May 2016 an Academia Europaea symposium with the title ‘Symmetry, Proportion and Seriality: The Semantics of Mirroring and Repetition in Science and the Arts’ was organized at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Its major aim was to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on symmetry and related concepts, comparing humanities approaches with those current in the material sciences
Medieval Fictionality from a Narratological Perspective
Having published an essay taking exception to Catherine Gallagher's thesis regarding the rise of fictionality-an essay that appeared too late for the two authors to whose contributions I am here responding-my remarks will first discuss the assumptions on which their arguments are based and then turn to methodological questions.1
Narrative Factuality: A Handbook
The study of narrative--the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology--has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe's Fiktionalität : Ein interdisziplinäres Ha…
Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy
Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy focuses on a historical survey of our imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors that occur in great numbers in texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present but are also used to describe many non-penal situations as confining or restrictive. These imaginings are argued to coalesce into a ‘carceral imaginary’ that determines the way we think about prisons…
Nostalgia for Otiose Leisure: Laying Claim to an Indian Tradition of Otium
Focusing on the representation of leisure or otium, the article discusses recent South Asian fiction and its idealization of states of otiose leisure that existed in the past and are now nostalgically dwelled on in contrast to current conditions of stress exacerbated by global capitalism. After explaining the origin of this approach to South Asian fiction in an interdisciplinary research cluster on otium, the main thesis of the article is laid ou…
The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality
Catherine Gallagher’s arguments for a rise of fictionality in the eighteenth century, reinventing the rise of the novel as a rise in fictionality, provides a starting point for the article. It will compare Gallagher’s thesis to other proposals about the rise of fictionality at earlier (Wolfgang Rösler, Walter Haug, William Nelson) and later (Nicholas Paige) points in time. The article provides a survey of recent work on fiction(ality) and then di…
The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative
Starting out with the observation that collective storytelling has only recently received sufficient narratological attention, this article outlines the pervasiveness of plural subjects in factual narratives and their comparative lack of salience in fictional texts. Discussing the collective on the levels of agency, mind, and narration, the article examines the alternation between plural and singular referents, using crowd scenes as illustrative …
Panopticisms: From Fantasy to Metaphor to Reality
Since Foucault’s popularisation of Bentham’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish, panopticism has become a master trope in literary criticism and inspired novelists to adopt panoptic scenarios in their work. This article follows the trajectory of the panopticon metaphor in criticism and fiction and demonstrates how the merely metaphoric model has become a reality in current penal contexts. In particular, it will be shown how literary criticism an…
Introduction: Beyond New Historicism
This special issue arose from questions of whether or not the NewHistoricist paradigm in early modern studies has been superseded by newer theoretical approaches and, if so, whether these have entirely broken with New Historicist tenets (“after”) or are in constructive dialogue with them (“beyond”). This introduction and the following essays lay out a number of considerations that argue for the existence of newer approaches; at the same time, the…
Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental Thought and Group Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative
Taking its inspiration from cognitive narratology and particularly the work of Alan Palmer on the Victorian novel, this essay examines to what extent collective minds can be traced in early modern narratives. One of the typical sites of intermental thought is the representation of crowds. The essay discusses how collectivity and intermentality are textualized in depictions of riots. It first analyzes Sir Philip Sidney's The Old Arcadia (1580) as …
An Introduction to Narratology
An Introduction to Narratology is an accessible, practical guide to narratological theory and terminology and its application to literature. In this book, Monika Fludernik outlines: the key concepts of style, metaphor and metonymy, and the history of narrative forms narratological approaches to interpretation and the linguistic aspects of texts, including new cognitive developments in the field how students can use narratological theory to work w…
Letters as narrative: Narrative patterns and episode structure in early letters, 1400 to 1650
The Metaphorics and Metonymics of Carcerality: Reflections on Imprisonment as Source and Target Domain in Literary Texts
The cartoon shown in Figure 1, from the New Yorker Collection, was used by Jim Swan in a recent essay in Style's special issue “Cognitive Approaches to Figurative Language”1. As Jim Swan demonstrat
Threatening the University--The Liberal Arts and the Economization of Culture
In response to Geoffrey Harpham's plea for a greater effort to explain the humanities to the public in order to secure funding for them, Fludernik argues that, useful as that proposal is, it emphasizes the distinctness of the humanities vis a vis the sciences too much. She herself insists that all disciplines, scientific and otherwise, share a common ground in servicing human curiosity about the word and humanity, and that therefore public relati…
The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction
Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction.Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present.Fludernik's model subsumes e…
History of Narratology: A Rejoinder
The comment takes issue with David Darby's presentation of German narratology, arguing that German contributions to the field of narrative studies are much broader and more varied than argued by Darby in his article in Poetics Today, vol. 22, no. 4 (2001
Towards a 'Natural' Narratology
In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of n…
Towards a 'Natural' Narratology
Narrative Voices--Ephemera or Bodied Beings
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative
Starting out with the observation that collective storytelling has only recently received sufficient narratological attention, this article outlines the pervasiveness of plural subjects in factual narratives and their comparative lack of salience in fictional texts. Discussing the collective on the levels of agency, mind, and narration, the article examines the alternation between plural and singular referents, using crowd scenes as illustrative …
New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization and New Writing
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental Thought and Group Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative
Taking its inspiration from cognitive narratology and particularly the work of Alan Palmer on the Victorian novel, this essay examines to what extent collective minds can be traced in early modern narratives. One of the typical sites of intermental thought is the representation of crowds. The essay discusses how collectivity and intermentality are textualized in depictions of riots. It first analyzes Sir Philip Sidney's The Old Arcadia (1580) as …
The Metaphorics and Metonymics of Carcerality: Reflections on Imprisonment as Source and Target Domain in Literary Texts
The cartoon shown in Figure 1, from the New Yorker Collection, was used by Jim Swan in a recent essay in Style's special issue “Cognitive Approaches to Figurative Language”1. As Jim Swan demonstrat
The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality
Catherine Gallagher’s arguments for a rise of fictionality in the eighteenth century, reinventing the rise of the novel as a rise in fictionality, provides a starting point for the article. It will compare Gallagher’s thesis to other proposals about the rise of fictionality at earlier (Wolfgang Rösler, Walter Haug, William Nelson) and later (Nicholas Paige) points in time. The article provides a survey of recent work on fiction(ality) and then di…
Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime
New Literary History - Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 1999
Narratology in Context
History of Narratology: A Rejoinder
The comment takes issue with David Darby's presentation of German narratology, arguing that German contributions to the field of narrative studies are much broader and more varied than argued by Darby in his article in Poetics Today, vol. 22, no. 4 (2001
Narrative Voices--Ephemera or Bodied Beings
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
Linguistics and literature: Prospects and horizons in the study of prose
Shifters and deixis: Some reflections on Jakobson, Jespersen, and reference
Zeitgeistin Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy
Narratology in Context
The Linguistic Illusion of Alterity: The Free Indirect as Paradigm of Discourse Representation
In the winter 1991 issue of Diacritics, the two leading articles trace the reverberations of a long-standing debate between the adherents of a formalist and, as they claim, truly linguistic approach to language and the proponents of a pragmatic, antiformalist conception of language. Oswald Ducrot's contribution discusses the importance of Charles Bally as an unrecognized precursor of latter-day pragmatics, particularly speech-act theory; Ann Banf…
Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology
In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of n…
Linguistics and literature: Prospects and horizons in the study of prose
Literature and Cognition
“When the Self Is an Other”: Vergleichende Erzähltheoretische Und Postkoloniale Überlegungen Zur Identitäts(de)konstruktion in Der (Exil)indischen Gegenwartsliteratur
Article “WHEN THE SELF IS AN OTHER”: VERGLEICHENDE ERZÄHLTHEORETISCHE UND POSTKOLONIALE ÜBERLEGUNGEN ZUR IDENTITÄTS(DE)KONSTRUKTION IN DER (EXIL)INDISCHEN GEGENWARTSLITERATUR was published on January 1, 1999 in the journal Anglia (volume 117, issue 1).
Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime
New Literary History - Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 1999
Narrative Discourse Markers in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur
On the basis of the model of narrative structure proposed in Fludernik (1996b) this paper presents the results of an investigation of discourse markers in Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, with a complete line-by-line analysis of The Tale of King Arthur, Books I to III (“Merlin”; “Balin”; “Torre and Pellinor”), A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake, and The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones (Book XIV: “Launcelot and Elaine”). The paper argues that the…
Towards a 'Natural' Narratology
Narrative Voices--Ephemera or Bodied Beings
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization and New Writing
New Literary History - Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001
Towards a 'Natural' Narratology
In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of n…
Towards a 'Natural' Narratology
The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction
Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction.Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present.Fludernik's model subsumes e…
History of Narratology: A Rejoinder
The comment takes issue with David Darby's presentation of German narratology, arguing that German contributions to the field of narrative studies are much broader and more varied than argued by Darby in his article in Poetics Today, vol. 22, no. 4 (2001
The Metaphorics and Metonymics of Carcerality: Reflections on Imprisonment as Source and Target Domain in Literary Texts
The cartoon shown in Figure 1, from the New Yorker Collection, was used by Jim Swan in a recent essay in Style's special issue “Cognitive Approaches to Figurative Language”1. As Jim Swan demonstrat
Threatening the University--The Liberal Arts and the Economization of Culture
In response to Geoffrey Harpham's plea for a greater effort to explain the humanities to the public in order to secure funding for them, Fludernik argues that, useful as that proposal is, it emphasizes the distinctness of the humanities vis a vis the sciences too much. She herself insists that all disciplines, scientific and otherwise, share a common ground in servicing human curiosity about the word and humanity, and that therefore public relati…
Letters as narrative: Narrative patterns and episode structure in early letters, 1400 to 1650
An Introduction to Narratology
An Introduction to Narratology is an accessible, practical guide to narratological theory and terminology and its application to literature. In this book, Monika Fludernik outlines: the key concepts of style, metaphor and metonymy, and the history of narrative forms narratological approaches to interpretation and the linguistic aspects of texts, including new cognitive developments in the field how students can use narratological theory to work w…
Introduction: Beyond New Historicism
This special issue arose from questions of whether or not the NewHistoricist paradigm in early modern studies has been superseded by newer theoretical approaches and, if so, whether these have entirely broken with New Historicist tenets (“after”) or are in constructive dialogue with them (“beyond”). This introduction and the following essays lay out a number of considerations that argue for the existence of newer approaches; at the same time, the…
Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental Thought and Group Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative
Taking its inspiration from cognitive narratology and particularly the work of Alan Palmer on the Victorian novel, this essay examines to what extent collective minds can be traced in early modern narratives. One of the typical sites of intermental thought is the representation of crowds. The essay discusses how collectivity and intermentality are textualized in depictions of riots. It first analyzes Sir Philip Sidney's The Old Arcadia (1580) as …
The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative
Starting out with the observation that collective storytelling has only recently received sufficient narratological attention, this article outlines the pervasiveness of plural subjects in factual narratives and their comparative lack of salience in fictional texts. Discussing the collective on the levels of agency, mind, and narration, the article examines the alternation between plural and singular referents, using crowd scenes as illustrative …
Panopticisms: From Fantasy to Metaphor to Reality
Since Foucault’s popularisation of Bentham’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish, panopticism has become a master trope in literary criticism and inspired novelists to adopt panoptic scenarios in their work. This article follows the trajectory of the panopticon metaphor in criticism and fiction and demonstrates how the merely metaphoric model has become a reality in current penal contexts. In particular, it will be shown how literary criticism an…
Philosophy (26 works) · Art (25 works) · Literature (24 works) · History (20 works) · Narrative (17 works) · Narrative Theory and Analysis (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (9 works) · Narratology (9 works)