A01 (Conermann / Bonn)
What to Remember? Narrativity and Historical Thinking in Mehmed Giray’s Crimean Tatar and Ottoman History (1683–1703)
We assume that the history conveyed through Mehmed Giray (d. after 1703) in his Taʾrīkh is a construct of authorial imagination through the narrativity indispensable to the representation of past events. A01 is concerned with the editing, transliteration, and translation of this chronicle and with these questions: What narrative strategies can be discerned in the Taʾrīkh? What forms of historical sense-making, contingency management, and authorial intention can be identified? What linguistic means are employed to realize this? What logical connections lend coherence to the text?
A02 (Friede / Bochum)
Narrative Constellations: New Perspectives on the Old French Prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle
The sub-project responds to the continuing need for a systematic narratological analysis of extensive thirteenth-century French prose cycles. It works with the specially developed narratological category of narrative constellations, focusing on three important constellations, the analysis of which can also be helpful for other narrative corpora: (I) a narrative constellation that focuses on metaliterary aspects and authority; (II) a narrative constellation that focuses on chivalric practices; and (III) a narrative constellation that focuses on (Arthurian) history and its religious crossovers.
A03 (Krause / Bochum)
Narrating Prophecy: A Diachronic Narratological Approach to Story and Discourse of Prophetic Books in the Hebrew Bible
A03 develops a diachronic narratological approach to prophetic literature, thus addressing a twofold gap. Firstly, narratological questions have been applied scarcely, if at all, to prophetic literature. Secondly, the few contributions which do usually restrict themselves to a synchronic analysis of the canonical text. By contrast, the utilization of synchronic and diachronic methods in A03 will, for the first time, systematically exhaust the analytical potential inherent in a narratological approach to prophetic literature. As case studies, the books of Amos and Ezekiel will be employed.
A04 (Morenz / Bonn)
Hardship Teaches Storytelling: Two Great Societal Crises and New Narrative Styles on the Past in Pharaonic Egypt
The project A 04 takes into view two of the most formative phases of storytelling in Pharaonic Egypt: a) The collapse of the old territorial state, new social patterns and new narrative styles in the late third millennium BCE and b) the begin of a novel historiography in the 16th century BCE. It looks at extraordinary time periods when new narrative strategies for dealing with history were developed and shaping a distinctly “Egyptian” style of historiography.
A05 (Setzer-Mori / Bochum)
Narrating History under Censorship and Commerce: Warriors and Rulership in Popular Historical Fiction of Early Modern Japan
Project A05 inquires how history was told to a common readership in the politically repressive, yet commercialized book market of early modern Japan (1600–1868). Using the examples of the popular biography Ehon Taikōki 絵本太閤記 (The Illustrated Chronicles of the Regent, 1797–1802), which was banned by governmental authority, and two other works of comparison, the analysis searches for narrative differences between historical fiction which was censored and texts of the same genre which were successfully adapted to the regulations.
A06 (Tilg / Freiburg)
John Barclay and the 17th-Century roman-à-clef: Origins, Forms, and Functions of a Historical Narrative Mode
This project aims to write a new history of the roman-à-clef as a distinct narrative mode. Its emergence is traced back to the Latin novels of John Barclay (Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, 1605/07; Argenis 1621), after which it became a general seventeenth-century literary phenomenon. The guiding hypotheses is that the hybrid status of the corpus between fact and fiction relates to particular realizations of the major narrative parameters considered by the CRC (character, narrative structure, [ideological] perspective, and narrative situation).