Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology

This essay compares two distinct traditions of narrative theory: on the one hand, that of structuralist narratology as it emerged in the s and in its various subsequent manifestations; on the other, that of German-language Erzähltheorie as codified in the s, with a prehistory dating back to German classicism. Having mapped the connections between these traditions, this essay then concentrates on exploring how narratology, unlike German narrative theory, has come to broaden its project exponentially since its first critical incarnation as a strictly formalist poetics. While the German tradition has concentrated on rhetoric and voice (with reception theory constituting a largely separate area of inquiry), narratology, which frames the text within a symmetry of real, implied, and fictional intelligences, has always had the potential to pose questions about how narrative functions in relation to a surrounding world of ideas. Of the two only narratology can therefore theorize both authorship and reading. In specific terms, this essay argues that the controversial narratological abstraction of implied authorship represents the only point at which a negotiation between textual and contextual worlds can logically take place. Evidence of how crucial such theorization has been in the development of contextualist narratology is sought in the examination of a test case, namely the much-disputed project of feminist narratology. French structuralist narrative theory has a well-known history, the moment This essay was written with the assistance of a visiting fellowship in the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Manitoba. Poetics Today : (Winter ). Copyright ©  by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. 830 Poetics Today 22:4 of its genesis usually recognized as identical with the  publication in Paris of the seminal eighth issue ofCommunications containing a collection of essays bymembers of the Poétique group. Along withGérardGenette’s more analytically comprehensive codification of narrative forms in his  book Figures III, this work constitutes the immediate ancestry of the formalist tradition that established itself in North America around  under the ambitiously scientific name of narratology.The catechism of narratology’s more remote prehistory is equally well rehearsed, with its reverential acknowledgment of the contributions and influences of Russian Formalism, structuralist anthropology and linguistics, French structuralist literary theory, and so on. But while this tradition in its various phases has commended itself to students of narrative literature in and beyond France and North America, those versed in the history and practice of literary scholarship in German will be familiar with a different and historically quite separate tradition of narrative theory.This datesmost immediately from , the year Eberhard Lämmert and Franz Stanzel both published extended studies of narrative form, and thus antedates the famous issue of Communications by over a decade. Despite their priority and the important positions they have assumed in the canon of postwar German-language Erzähltheorie, Lämmert’s and Stanzel’s books have not enjoyed anything like the popularity and influence of their French-language counterparts among scholars writing in English. Indeed judging by the frequency of references to it in English-language theory and criticism, Lämmert’s Bauformen des Erzählens, which has never been translated into English, is largely unknown in North America, at least outside communities of Germanists.1 Stanzel, on the other hand, has made somewhat more of an international impression. Although his first book, Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman [Narrative Situations in the Novel], was translated into English in , thus prior to the publication of Genette’s Figures III, it attracted relatively little attention.2 However, his third book . While Lämmert’s title translates as ‘‘structural forms of narrative,’’ it should be noted that the German title implies no association with any structuralist endeavor. . In its overall structure Stanzel’s  book presents a comprehensive typology of narrators based on the following three categories of novel: ‘‘auktorial’’ (authorial), for which he refers to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (); ‘‘Ich-Roman’’ (first person), as in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (); and ‘‘personal’’ (figural), as in Henry James’sThe Ambassadors (). A fourth section on James Joyce’sUlysses () discusses the possibilities for combining the three types of narrative in one text. The typology of narrative situations that emerges is shown by Stanzel in a rudimentary graphic wherein the three forms are arranged as points on a circular continuum, implying the possibility of intermediate forms.This circle, representing the situations possible in epic literature, is set within a larger circle on which three points—the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric—are marked. Correspondences are established between the figural narrative situation and the dramatic as well as between the first-person situation and the lyric. Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 831 of narrative theory,Theorie des Erzählens (), in which he substantially revises a number of aspects of his conceptual framework, is relatively well known to English-language narratologists and narratological critics in its  translation entitled A Theory of Narrative. Stanzel of course also enjoys an international reputation as a scholar who has published in both English and German on British, American, and Canadian fiction. Between them, Lämmert’s and Stanzel’s studies point ahead with varying degrees of precision toward certain of the broader analytic concerns basic to the so-called ‘‘classical,’’ low-structuralist narratology of Genette and his disciples, such as Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (albeit with an important reservation I will discuss later), and Mieke Bal, whose work has appeared in English. This is partially true of Lämmert’s work on the temporal organization of narrative, which addresses among its areas of focus (a) the sequencing of narrated events and (b) the relationship between narrative time and narrated time. Regarding the former, Lämmert’s detailed analysis of different kinds of analepis (‘‘Rückwendung’’) shares certain interests with Genette’s work, whereas his discussion of narrative foreshadowing techniques (‘‘Vorausdeutung’’) has relatively little in common with Genette’s analysis of narrative prolepsis. The latter shares certain concerns with Genette’s work on duration (‘‘durée’’). The thematic connections with structuralist narratology are less problematic in the case of Stanzel’s work over the last forty or more years on the presentation of consciousness in narrative fiction and his development of a highly sophisticated typology of narrators. He is concerned most especially with the phenomenon of mixed forms incorporating aspects of both figural and authorial narration, and in this he shares important interests with theorists working in the structuralist tradition. Lurking behind these  texts is a relatively long tradition in German philology, a prehistory that is entirely different from that of the structuralist project. It derives its basic categories and lines of inquiry from classical poetics, and this derivation manifests itself in the fact that the canonical texts of German narrative theory often have as their context the study of the relationship between the epic and the other genres. The tradition’s direct origins are found in the poetics of German classicism, in particular in two brief essays by Goethe. His  collaboration with Schiller, ‘‘Über In his laterTheorie des Erzählens () Stanzel includes a far more sophisticated graphic representation of his typology of narrators in epic literature. This representation again is circular in form, but now the general system of categorizations is more fully developed, and a great deal more of the circumference is filled with examples of pure and hybrid narrative situations drawn from the canon of Western narrative literature. For insightful commentaries on and reactions to Stanzel’s work see especially Cohn , Diengott , and Fludernik . 832 Poetics Today 22:4 epische und dramatische Dichtung’’ [‘‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry’’] (see Goethe and Schiller  [] and ), distinguishes between mimetic and rhapsodic discourse by focusing on the temporal distance that separates the represented events from their recapitulation in the performance of the rhapsodist.That essay also anticipates the later awareness of the process of manipulation of chronology in narrative. The second essay in question, ‘‘Naturformen der Dichtung’’ [Natural forms of poetry], was published in  in the collection of notes and commentaries pertaining to the Westöstlicher Divan [West-Eastern Divan]. This essay is also concerned with the basic differences between genres, and hereGoethe ( []: –) discusses hybrid phenomena that draw on the textual forms of both dramatic and epic literature. His suggestion that the three poetic natural forms— epic, lyric, and dramatic—could be illustrated by means of a circle accommodating both pure and hybrid forms clearly prefigures Stanzel’s famous graphic endeavors. Having here indicated, albeit with extreme concision, the radical differences between the intellectual origins of these twomodern traditions of narrative theory, I will progress now to the central comparative project of my essay.3 This project concentrates on what I see as two crucial though relatively unexplored aspects of the relationship between theGerman-language and the French-American traditions. The first of these is historical, and its examination requires mapping the extent and the sites of those few practical and theoretical engagements that have taken place between the two traditions over the last two decades.The second centers on fundamental differences in conception and function between these two historically distinct analytic traditions, and in addressing this aspect I will explore possible reasons why, unlike its German-language counterpart, the French-American . A history of the intervening years would be organized around such texts as: Friedrich Spielhagen, Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans [Essays on the theory and technique of the novel] (); Otto Ludwig, ‘‘Formen der Erzählung’’ [Forms of narrative] (); Käte Friedemann,Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik [The role of the narrator in epic literature] (); Emil Ermatinger, Das dichterische Kunstwerk [The literary work of art] (); Ernst Hirt, Das Formgesetz der epischen, dramatischen und lyrischen Dichtung [The formal laws of epic, dramatic, and lyric literature] (); Oskar Walzel, Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk des Dichters [Meaning and form in the poetic work of art] () and Das Wortkunstwerk [The verbal work of art] (); Roman Ingarden,Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work of Art] ( [b]) and, later, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks [The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art] ( in German, first published in Polish in  [a]); Robert Petsch,Wesen und Formen der Erzählkunst [The nature and forms of narrative art] (); Günther Müller, Die Bedeutung der Zeit in der Erzählkunst [The significance of time in narrative art] () and ‘‘Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit’’ [Narrative time and narrated time] (); Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk [The linguistic work of art] () and Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans [The genesis and crisis of the modern novel] (); and Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung [The Logic of Literature] ( []). Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 833 tradition has demonstrated a powerful capacity to develop far beyond an initial concentration on a typology of narrative forms. In doing so, as is well known, it has come to accommodate itself to the literary-critical paradigms that have developed from and subsumed the purely formalist concerns of low structuralism and have become dominant in the contemporary study of narrative as practiced in North America. This second aspect will necessarily involve an examination of the way authorship, particularly implied authorship, is theorized in the structuralist tradition, a topic not without its unresolved controversies. As a test case of that theoretical question, I have chosen the highly dynamic and at times controversial project of a feminist poetics of narrative. My argument thus aims to range over some breadth of territory. Its first steps will be, however, relatively small ones. A Tale of Two Formalisms As I noted earlier, Stanzel’s and Lämmert’s work is central to the canon of postwar narrative theory in the German-speaking countries. Not only is Genette aware of both Stanzel and Lämmert, but he seems to attach considerable importance to their work in his Figures III. In stark contrast, however, the German-language theorists are cited only relatively infrequently and are discussed very rarely in subsequent English-language theory and criticism.4 But those exceptions that do exist are significant in that they suggest the work of North American Germanists to have been the principal meeting place at which the comparative discussion of these two distinct theoretical traditions has proven productive in terms of the formalist insights it has engendered.5 Preeminent here of course is the work of the Ger. To give an admittedly crude illustration of the status of Lämmert’s and Stanzel’s work in studies of ‘‘classical’’ narratology, a quick survey reveals that in the three special issues of Poetics Today on narratology in  and  Stanzel is cited by only three authors: Stanzel himself (), Dorrit Cohn () writing about Stanzel, and Brian McHale () writing about Cohn. Lämmert is cited only by Cohn. In the three special narratology issues of Poetics Today ten years later, during which time Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens had been published in German and in English translation, still only six essays refer to Stanzel (including those by Stanzel himself [] and Cohn []) and none to Lämmert. Furthermore of the theorists concerned with the adoption and refinement of Genette’s structural(ist) paradigm, Seymour Chatman makes no mention of their work in Story and Discourse (), and he refers to Stanzel only once, and then only in a list of names, in Coming to Terms (a: ); Mieke Bal merely includes them in the bibliography to her  Narratolo! (translated from the Dutch); and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan lists them in the bibliography to her  Narrative Fiction, mentioning each just once in passing in the corpus of her text (, ). . In the German-speaking world the dominant trend in the formal study of narrative has been a continuation of work in the postwar tradition, whose boundaries and interests were mapped by Stanzel and Lämmert in , with an emphasis on the analysis of individual literary texts.While the general field hasmeanwhile not been completely immune to the intel834 Poetics Today 22:4 manist and narrative theorist Dorrit Cohn, which has engaged extensively with Stanzel’s theoretical project for a number of years. But other significant exceptions exist, such as the  anthology Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratolo!, which is edited by three Germanists, Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, andMariaTatar, and includes a number of essays that embrace this German-Austrian tradition, or the  studyTowards a ‘‘Natural’’ Narratolo! by Monika Fludernik, a professor of English at a university in Germany. Cohn’s Transparent Minds (), published the year before the appearance of the Theorie des Erzählens, operates with an explicit knowledge of Stanzel’s conceptual framework, especially of the aspects of the Austrian’s work dealing with the three types of narrative situation and how they pertain to her own subject, the presentation of consciousness in fiction. Cohn’s  review essay of Stanzel’s third book in Poetics Today, entitled ‘‘The Encirclement of Narrative,’’ is described by Hoesterey (: ) in Neverending Stories as ‘‘a mise en abîme of the international debate’’ between traditions of theory in which Cohn ‘‘puts the various structural approaches to the systematic study of narrative into historical perspective for the first time, drawing a striking parallel between narrative theory as developed by the Poétique group in Paris and by Stanzel in his early work.’’ Cohn (: ) more than anyone else has succeeded not just in outlining the points of similarity and difference between Stanzel’s and Genette’s typologies but also in achieving her stated aim of ‘‘bring[ing] Stanzel more fully into the international main stream.’’ By this Cohn clearly refers to her aims in more than just her comparative commentary on two European traditions of narrative theory: indeed, the originality of her own book Transparent Minds results to a considerable degree from her ability to effect themeeting of Genette’s ‘‘analytical’’ approach (ibid.: ) with Stanzel’s encompassing ‘‘grand synthesis’’ (ibid.: ). In her introduction to the anthology Neverending Stories, a rather nostalgic Hoesterey (: ) sees the debate between the two traditions, spanning two or three years either side of , as characterized by ‘‘theoretical lectual thrust of structuralist criticism, one can for the most part describe the relationship between the two traditions at best in terms only of a distanced contemporaneity. As for the broader picture of literary-critical scholarship inGerman, PatrickO’Neill (: ) describes how ‘‘neither structuralistnor poststructuralist-inspired criticism in a semiotic vein made anything like the impact in German-language criticism that it made in criticism written in French and English.’’ What O’Neill calls ‘‘semiotic formalism’’ (as opposed to ‘‘aesthetic formalism’’) is seen as ‘‘something of a ‘lost generation’ in German literary history—prevented from establishing itself by the prestige of historical scholarship in the first place, and essentially leapfrogged, overtaken before it had a chance to happen, by the growing hegemony of a new generation of sociocritically oriented cultural studies’’ (ibid.). Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 835 refinement at an all-time high, with intense dialogue marking differences even as it effaces them by conveying the sense of common narratological enterprise.’’ According to Hoesterey (ibid.), the ‘‘fundamental and lively controversy’’ that arises around  in connection with the grammatical concept of ‘‘person’’ aligns Stanzel and Cohn on one side andGenette, Bal, Rimmon-Kenan (and presumably Chatman, Prince, andWayne Booth) on the other. And this debate, with the same general constellation of participants, has flourished intermittently ever since and with particular vigor around the technical differentiations and terminological complications that litter the general area of free indirect discourse (or style), or erlebte Rede. Among its main contestants one finds Cohn (), Genette (), Cohn and Genette in their energetic correspondence (in French , in English ), Nilli Diengott (), and most recently Stanzel himself (, , ). Questions of Context and the Theorization of Authorship For all its sustained liveliness and its noteworthy degree of conceptual refinement, this debate has also been quite remarkable for the narrowness of its scope. Considered in a broader context, it seems astonishing that it has evidently been conducted quite independently of and virtually untouched by the profound and far-reaching redefinition of English-language narratology that began during the s. This regenerative process has seen the study of narrative take steps away from a relatively pure formalism and towardmore contextually driven concerns, and its first retrospective critical assessments are in several essays in the / narratology issues of Poetics Today. Given the productive potential of this reconceptualization within the anglophone tradition, it seems both obvious and important to ask why the formalist debate initiated by Cohn and centering on the accommodation of Stanzel’s work has proven so remarkably impervious to the changes that have taken place in most other areas of narratological enterprise. And behind that question lies the larger question of the general resistance ofGerman Erzähltheorie to the issues of narrative context and function that are becoming increasingly important in the development of its English-language counterpart. First and most bluntly, the postwar urge in writing and publishing circles in West Germany and Austria to retrieve literature and the scholarship of aesthetics from their subordination to any kind of overtly ideological value system provides a historical context. The study of genre and of narrative form has a long and relatively untainted history with strong roots in German classicism. I write here ‘‘relatively untainted’’ since it is important to 836 Poetics Today 22:4 note that this tradition had proven by nomeans intrinsically immune to the effects of ideological appropriation. In  both Lämmert and Stanzel cite with some frequency the work of Robert Petsch, whose bookWesen und Formen der Erzählkunst [The nature and forms of the art of narrative] was published in Germany in  and then revised and extended in .6 Petsch’s work, particularly his designation of basic epic forms, at times seems to anticipate some of Stanzel’s categories, but its insights into narrative typology are overshadowed by its theory of the evolution of literary genres.This is informedby essentially racist notions of theGermanpeople as privilegedwith themental equipment appropriate to the production of the purest andmost rigorously objective, long narrative forms. It is these ideal forms, supposedly realized in such works of German classicism asGoethe’sWilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship] (–) that Petsch views as the most highly evolved types of literature. Given these circumstances it is hardly surprising that, despite their reference to other aspects of Petsch’s work, both Lämmert and Stanzel are clearly keen in  and (in Stanzel’s case) beyond to distance themselves from anything even superficially resembling this kind of scholarship in either theoretical word or critical deed. The power of such extrinsic historical factors should by no means be underestimated. Nevertheless, however strong their influence on scholarship in German may have been in the s, it would be utterly wrong to suggest that German literary scholarship in general has in recent decades failed to engage either with the realm of ideas (and ideologies) or with the catastrophes of history. Therefore another explanation must exist for the resistance to any extratextual interests that has characterized both the subsequent work of Stanzel into the s and the scholarship in English on the relationship between his work and the narratological tradition. I propose that the explanation is to be found in a factor intrinsic to the conception of narrative underlying the tradition in which Stanzel is working, namely that simply no site exists in German Erzähltheorie, with its intense concentration on the activity of the fictional narrator, where the kind of development that has occurred in North American narratology logically could take place. Unlike theGerman-language tradition, anglophone narratology postulates the familiar structuralist paradigm of a narrative communication situation, with the text at the center of an, albeit still somewhat contested, symmetry of ‘‘real,’’ implied, and fictional intelligences. The importance of this symmetry lies, of course, in the tradition’s essential capacity to theorize both authorship and reading. The paradigm that informs the German tra. For a discussion of Petsch’s work in the context of German-language narrative theory see Leech : –. Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 837 dition lacks any such symmetry. Since Goethe the literary text has tended to be implicitly understood by Erzähltheoretiker as an organically structured entity, the product of a single, historically determined authorial subject. It is only since the work of Roman Ingarden, to which Stanzel (: –) acknowledges a certain connection in his own work, and of the development of critical methodologies derived therefrom that narrative theory in German has moved at all toward the inclusion of the activity of reading in its understanding of how narrative functions. Nevertheless, the undisputed presence at center stage in the German formalist tradition remains that of the narrator, and the simultaneous theorization of both writing and reading essential to anglophone narratology plays either no role inGerman Erzähltheorie or just that of a latecomer. In German thought the study of the act of reading has found its place of privilege and has achieved prominence in a historically largely separate field of endeavor: namely, that of hermeneutics. Ingarden’s subject matter does, however, represent a significant area of shared interest between the French-American and the German-language traditions, and the influence of his work is seen, albeit with a variety of consequences, not just on Stanzel’s theoretical work but on that of theorists and critics working within the structuralist tradition. This represents then a further significant point of intersection between the two traditions. Ingarden’s theoretical work on the phenomenology of reading lies behind the body of work in the area of literary hermeneutics and reception theory, work that is associated most commonly with the names of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, colleagues at the University of Konstanz. Jauss’s magnum opus Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (, b), while known thanks to its translation into English (Jauss a, ) as a work on literary hermeneutics, has remained on the periphery of the anglophone narratological consciousness.7 By contrast, Iser’s work—in particular his essay ‘‘The Reading Process’’ (in English, b; in German, ) and his book-length studies Der implizite Leser ([a]; The Implied Reader []) andDer Akt des Lesens ([];The Act of Reading [])—has exerted a considerable influence on the ways reading is theorized in anglophone narratology. But even while Iser’s theoretical work became a powerful force in both Germanand English-language literary scholarship, and while it has indeed permitted a crossover of ideas and perspectives between traditions of narrative theory, it serves nonetheless also to draw attention to a sig. Jauss’s study is in two parts. The first appeared in  (English translation a), and a volume containing both parts was published five years later (Jauss b). A selection of essays from the second part appeared in English translation in . 838 Poetics Today 22:4 nificant difference in the disciplinary organization of literary theory within and outside the German-speaking world. This difference in turn has roots in the deeper, theoretical difference that the present essay addresses. For while the structuralist-narratologist paradigm of a narrative communicative system has provided an opportunity to incorporate Iser’s and, by more or less conscious or explicit osmosis, Ingarden’s ideas into a more broadly conceived narrative theory, theGerman-language tradition ofErzähltheorie, with its concentration on narrative form and technique per se, shows a far less integrated relationship with the theoretical and critical study of reception aesthetics and hermeneutics. By way of an illustration of this separation, the terms in which Stanzel (: –) notes the importance of Ingarden’s concept of ‘‘areas of indeterminacy’’ suggest that this point of coincidence between his own work in narrative theory and Iser’s work in reader-response theory is, while worth noting in passing, of no particular explanatory significance. To state that the German-language and anglophone traditions share an interest in the theorization of reading is by no means to suggest that the same holds true for the theorization of authorship. On the contrary, the theorization of authorship is manifested in anglophone formalist narratology in the more or less acknowledged participation of an implied author in the narrative communication situation, but this theorization is absent from and, for the reason discussed above, quite irrelevant to the Germanlanguage tradition.My proposition is that this implied intelligence occupies precisely the point in the process of narrative communication that admits an interaction between contextual considerations and formalist analysis. Viewed from this perspective, it is quite logical that the arch-formalist of French structuralism, Genette, in his Nouveau discours du récit (), attacks this theorization as superfluous and so carries out, to quote Cohn’s  letter to Genette, the ‘‘dazzling execution of the implied author’’ (Cohn and Genette : ). It is, perhaps, equally unsurprising that Cohn’s dispute with Genette’s Nouveau discours avoids any confrontation on this very point, the question of the inclusion of the implied author in the structural paradigm, which she designates a matter ‘‘of mutual, but not mutually controversial, concern’’ (ibid.: ).8 The passage by Genette to which Cohn responds here is itself a response toRimmon-Kenan’s (: –) unambiguous redefinition of the implied author as a depersonified ‘‘construct inferred and assembled by the reader’’ rather than as an anthropomorphic entity, an author’s second self, as the . Cohn’s letter to Genette, from which these two quotations are drawn, was first published in French translation (Cohn and Genette : ). Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 839 implied author was originally conceived by Booth (Booth : –).9 If one identifies this textual intelligence as a ‘‘set of implicit norms’’ (RimmonKenan : ) rather than as an author’s deliberate projection, a definition over which Chatman’s (: –) Story and Discourse equivocates, one can make it function as more than just a formalist index, what O’Neill (: ) refers to as ‘‘a narrative gold standard,’’ against which the reliability of an individual narrator can be measured. Rather, the norms and values it comes to represent can be considered to include those of the larger cultural discourses that have come to represent the concerns of contemporary narratology.Thus an abstracted intelligence, such as an implied author that is itself the product of negotiations between intratextual and extratextual realms, can be argued to be the only kind of intelligence capable of negotiating between, on the one hand, the formal characteristics of individual narratives and, on the other, those critical concerns of narrative theory that have increasingly concentrated on ‘‘the narrative level of textuality, extratextual discourse, that level for which the narratology of the sixties [not to mention of course the work of Stanzel and Lämmert] had no place in its conceptual repertoire’’ (ibid.: ). Toward a Functionalist Narratology An interesting illustration of the possibilities of a more broadly conceived theory and practice is found in Fludernik’s radical reconceptualization of narratological thought in the  studyTowards a ‘‘Natural’’ Narratolo!. Fludernik, like Cohn and the editors of Neverending Stories, works to some extent in the space between the German and French-American traditions. Her study defines itself primarily in relation to Stanzel’s work. Fludernik (: –, ) acknowledges a substantial and perhaps primary intellectual debt to Stanzel, and she characterizes the relationship of her own theory, which is explicitly capable of accommodating context-driven concerns, to different parts of Stanzel’s project as a series of acts of integration, subsumption, supersession, and radical opposition. Also indicated in her work is a secondary and far less sympathetic relationship with the low-structuralist tradition exemplified by Genette, which is suggested at least to have generated some ‘‘useful conceptual tools’’ (ibid.: ). In fact while Fludernik proceeds from an explicit affiliation with Stanzel’s work, a further major component of her study, on the one hand, makes . Prince (: ), elsewhere little concerned with authorial subjects, deftly avoids the distinction in hisDictionary of Narratolo! (though at the price of confusing Booth’s and RimmonKenan’s definitions), where he refers to the ‘‘author’s second self, mask, or persona as reconstructed from the text.’’ 840 Poetics Today 22:4 her work especially interesting in the present context and, on the other, further complicates the history of the crisp and clean division of narrative poetics into two separate traditions. Implicit in Fludernik’s ‘‘ ‘natural’ narratology’’ is her association with a tradition of poetics, narrative and otherwise, whose roots are found in yet another geographical location,Tel Aviv. An essential and dynamically productive aspect of the work carried out there since the s and published in considerable part (at least during the last two decades since its launch) in Poetics Today lies in the conscious elusion of the binary distinction between formalist and nonformalist (or contextualist) poetics. In doing so it has, even during the heyday of the systematization of formalist narratological terminology in English, provided a place for the generation of a synthesis between the sometimes microscopic study of form, characterized by a blindness to thematic context, and the broad interpretative sweep of a historicist criticism with little interest in the particulars of the rhetoric of narrative.10 This work is manifested in the project of a mature narratology that, to cite the editor of Poetics Today, ‘‘offers a principled alternative-and-corrective to both extremes—the atomistic and the reductionist—so that, once developed, the theorist could review their achievements and turn them to the best account within an integrated framework’’ (Sternberg : ). This narratology is informed by an understanding of itself as ‘‘functionalist’’ (ibid.: ), whereby what narrative (fictional and otherwise) is in formal terms and what narrative does in terms of its communicative function are seen as indivisible from each other, except at the expense of falling victim to either of the extreme (and deadend) consequences indicated above. It is just such an understanding that MarkCurrie (: , ) refers to when hewrites (echoing Sternberg’smetaphor) of narratology’s having undergone ‘‘a very positive transition away from some of the limits and excesses of its youth,’’ of its having escaped ‘‘the absurdity of a debate which casts formalism as the polar opposite of historicism when the two camps have [during the s and s] clearly forged a more cooperative relationship.’’ Indeed Currie sees this debate as having fundamentally misrepresented developments in critical theory and practice that are clearly visible in retrospect. He writes: Whatever revolutionary moment structuralist narratology may have inhabited in its heyday in the s, the impact of narratological method was certainly greater in literary studies at large in the s, when it was operating alongside new critical developments from deconstruction and various new historicisms. Rather than a model of linear displacement, it would be more realistic to see the . Hoesterey (: ) likewise notes the importance of work done in Tel Aviv in helping ‘‘move narrative theory into a truly intercultural stage in the s.’’ Darby • Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology 841 new criticisms of the s and s as approaches that were enabled and resourced by narratology—as the products and not the successors of narratology.