Verbal storytelling -in a sense broad enough to include all forms from casual conversation across oral folklore to written literature -seems to be a universal human activity and has thus been considered an evolutionary adaptation several times in the past few years. The fact that a particular trait is a specieswide universal, however, does not automatically make it an adaptation; it could also be a contingent universal, that is, a cultural behavior which notably relies on biological substrates and therefore emerges in similar fashions in all human cultures, times, and milieus. Yet verbal storytelling is not only universal but also distinct to our species. The uniqueness of a trait can indeed be indicative of a biological adaptation 1 in that we have reason to assume that this trait emerged newly in the given animal lineage and thus might owe its existence to the process of natural selection. However, since verbal storytelling completely depends on language, that is, another uniquely human faculty, 2 the uniqueness of storytelling is hardly surprising and cannot serve as a conclusive argument for considering storytelling itself to be a specifically selected trait. Storytelling could simply be a particular use of language (though we shall see below that the relationship between language and narration is a little more complicated). A third possible indication of a biological adaptation, however, is the fact that storytelling seems to be a notably self-rewarding activity. It occurs on a much larger scale than would seem justified by rational choice or other reasons. As fitness-enhancing behaviors should, as a rule, be intrinsically motivated under certain conditions, the unusually high frequency of 30 1 Note that this is not to say that, conversely, a trait has to be distinct to a species in order to be an adaptation. There are many adaptations which we have in common with other species (socalled "homologues," which derive from common ancestors, and "analogues," which result from comparable selection pressures). 2 Though much more of the capabilities involved in producing and understanding language than previously thought can also be found in other animals (cf. Hauser and Fitch 2003), there are strong reasons to assume that human language in its present form, i.e., as an incomparably sophisticated design for "grammar," is a distinct adaptation of the human species (cf. Pinker 2003); see also Donald 1991, pp. 236-261.
Hans-EdwinFriedrich, Fotis Jannidis, Marianne Willems (Hg.): Bürgerlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert (Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 105). Tübingen: Niemeyer 2006, S. 201-240.Das in der Vorrede anvisierte ›Freundschaftsverhältnis‹ mit dem Buch gilt als typisch für die Empfindsamkeit. 5 Auch wird der Roman als ganzer gemeinhin der Gattung des empfindsamen Briefromans in der Nachfolge Richardsons und Rousseaus zugeordnet. Ich will ergänzend dazu zunächst einen bislang unterbelichteten Aspekt des Romans, seine anthropologische Fragestellung, hervorheben und empfindsames Sprechen unter dieser Voraussetzung neu plausibilisieren (1.). Ausgehend von den Symptomen des historischen Bezugsproblems der drohenden sozialen Desintegration 6 in den Werken des jungen Goethe wird dann die konsolatorische Funktionalität des auf Identifikation hin angelegten Sprechmusters be-3
Except for Katja Mellmann's and Ellen Dissanayake's contributions, all the following essays began as presentations given at a panel discussion on Stephen Davies's The Artful Species at the 19th International Congress of Aesthetics in Krakow,
The distinction of voice (who speaks?) and perception (who sees/hears/ smells?) (Genette 1986:186; 1988:64) can be said to be the egg of Columbus in Gerard Genette's analysis of narrative discourse. Whereas in traditional models of literary narrative we had to deal with typologies mainly (for instance, of "narrative situations"; see Stanzel 1971Stanzel , 1984Fludernik and Margolin 2004;Genette 1980), we now possess a systematic description of the imagination evoked by a text, which takes into account the quasi-ontological (see Bortolussi and Dixon 2003) status of its constituents. In this chapter I search for the cognitive functions that correlate with the text features of "voice" and "perception" and for how they bring about such a "layered" imagination in the reader. The aim is to explain how and why literary narratives can run properly in the human mind-which is another way of asking how humans could develop narrative discourse as a way of communication at all.To make more graspable what I am trying to do, let me start with a consideration by Genette that I regard as crucial for a profound understanding of the interplay between narrative texts and human cognition. Genette says: "Unlike the director of a movie, the novelist is not compelled to put his camera somewhere; he has no camera" (Genette 1988:73). Vice versa, it can be said: Unlike the novelist, the director of a movie is not compelled to talk to the audience; he has no voice. If these propositions are true (I shall discuss them later), it can be stated that there are two distinct narrative functions, as I will call them, which can occur independent from one another in principle, although they used to occur in combination very often.Literary narratives-especially since the age of realism, but also in the Homeric epics and all through history-can (but need not) possess longer or shorter "focalized" passages, and motion pictures can (but
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