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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Mannheimer Beiträge zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.
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Corinna Assmann / Jan Rupp / Christine Schwanecke (eds.)
The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative
Promoting Positive Change. A Conceptual Volume in Honour of Vera Nünning
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395737
Umschlagabbildung: Adobe Stock-ID: 359840858; Ping198
© 2023 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 0175-3169
ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0389-3 (ePub)
Inhalt
Foreword
This project initially grew from our collective desire to celebrate Vera Nünning’s outstanding contribution to the research of narrative and the study of English literature and culture on the occasion of her 60th birthday in April 2021. As her (former) PhD students and mentees, we were keen to express our gratitude for her academic guidance and long-standing support. With her research and teaching at Heidelberg, she has generated a veritable ‘school’ of literary scholars who are both narratologically-minded and interested in culture, in historical contexts, as well as in the functions, effects, and values of reading fiction.
This volume began with an online celebration of Vera Nünning’s jubilee in the form of a virtual colloquium with greetings, presentations, and musical interludes. Besides the contributors to this volume, we would like to thank, first and foremost, Ansgar Nünning, whose cordial and conspiratorial support in preparation of the surprise colloquium proved essential and invaluable. We are also grateful to the former members of Vera Nünning’s team who participated in the colloquium but were not able to submit a chapter to this book – Claire Earnshaw, Stephanie Frink, Gesine Heil, and Bernard Woodley.
We, the editors, would like to extend our thanks to our colleague and friend Caroline Lusin and the other general editors of the MABEL-series, in which this volume appears. We are grateful to Kathrin Heyng, Sariya Sloan, and Iris Steinmaier from Narr Francke Attempto, who kindly assisted us in the publication process. For further support we thank Marion Gymnich (University of Bonn) and Jacqueline Auer (University of Graz). Last, but not least, we thank our magnificent English proof-reader, Max Cannings, as well as our fantastic copy-editing crew, Lukas Kreutzwiesner and Alex Thallinger from the University of Graz, for their energetic, thorough, and substantial contribution to this publication.
Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, and Christine Schwanecke
Heidelberg, Gießen, and Graz, August 2022
Introduction
1.Celebrating Vera Nünning’s Scholarship in Literature and Narrative
Literature and narrative play a central role for individual and collective lives – this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. Whether it is to grapple with increasingly complex identities or with a proliferation of migrant, public health, economic, and environmental crises, literature and narrative are time and again being evoked as interpretive frames and tools of meaning-making. For anyone interested in the formal workings, the cultural functions, and the transformative power of literature and narrative, Vera Nünning’s scholarship stands as an eminent orientation and inspiration. With the present volume, we would like to pay tribute to our mentor, who celebrated a jubilee birthday in 2021 and from whom we were able to learn so tremendously since she became Chair of English Philology at Heidelberg University in 2002. Collecting contributions from a school of junior researchers and colleagues who cut their academic teeth under her supervision, we seek to celebrate her work by bringing it into dialogue with ‘positive change’ – a concept that resonates in many of her writings and, as a veritable travelling concept, informs a broad range of current inter- and transdisciplinary debates.
With her groundbreaking research in English literature and culture, as well as in literary and narrative theory, Vera Nünning has profoundly influenced and shaped the national and international landscape of English literary and cultural studies.1 With her accomplishments in breaking down the complexities of literature and its wealth of cultural repercussions for introductory purposes, she has, together with her husband Ansgar Nünning, moulded generations of students and academics-to-be.2 Not least, she has managed to demonstrate the importance of narrative to human existence and its potential to instigate positive change to scholars outside the field of literature (see “Brückenschlag”), as well as to a wider non-academic audience beyond the university’s ivory tower (see “Contemporary Absurdities”).
Apart from their academic weight, Vera Nünning’s efforts to scrutinize and promote literature and narrative are of fundamental social, political, and cultural value. This is especially true today, at a time that has come to be perceived as one of innumerable democratic, economic, political, and humanitarian crises.3 It is a time at which nationalistic and economic narratives are dictating political and private actions,4 and at which the humanities, which may actually provide tools for unmasking reductive metaphors and plots, are being publicly devalued and disavowed: “Diese schlimme Zeit macht jetzt hoffentlich auch dem Letzten klar, dass Professoren für Medizin, Chemie und Biologie unendlich viel wichtiger sind als solche für ‘Gender Studies’” (qtd. in Hensel 2020).5 Posts on so-called social media like this Tweet are not just latter-day aberrations of the ‘two cultures’ debate, but deeply ignorant at best and politically dangerous at worst.
In the 21st century, we have all too often witnessed the power of narratives and the detrimental, even life-threatening consequences they can have.6 Regarding this concerning trend, Vera Nünning’s work offers an extremely powerful and instructive counterpoint. Her studies do not only shed light on how narratives work, but also on how they are used in literature and culture, and, perhaps more importantly, how they can be used to better ends. In its academic complexity, her œuvre counters trends of political over-simplification and medial reduction of cultural intricacies. In her appreciation of literary fiction, Vera Nünning time and again highlights the transformative potential of literature. In its positive thrust, ultimately, her work illustrates the power of literature to counter the hegemonic narratives of 21st-century culture, to serve as a “cultural resource of resilience” (Nünning, “Resilience” 35), and to inspire positive change in individual and collective lives.
In this light, the present volume sets out to actualize and further substantiate Vera Nünning’s long-standing case for literature and narrative, celebrating and taking inspiration from her wide-ranging scholarship over the past few decades. We begin by elaborating further on the concept of ‘positive change’ (Sect. 2). Based on Vera Nünning’s understanding of literature as an art form with positive potential and real-world effects, we consider more closely how reading and narrative relate to positive change (Sect. 3). We will then sketch major directions of Vera Nünning’s formative work in literary, cultural, and narrative studies as are pertinent to our project. Against this backdrop, we will preview the contributions to this volume, which variously take up Vera Nünning’s interdisciplinary inquiry to explore potentials of the transformative power of literature and narrative, which can be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today’s world (Sect. 4).
2.Locating Positive Change: Towards a Definition of a Transdisciplinary Concept
Over the past few decades, ‘positive change’ has emerged as a truly transdisciplinary or ‘travelling concept’ (see Bal). Its application in literary and cultural studies is arguably less pronounced than in other fields, leaving a research gap that we hope this volume will work towards filling. Notable recourse to positive change comes in Elizabeth Ammons’s Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet. In this book-length study, Ammons confronts questions of relevance and the humanities’ increasingly embattled status quo by pointing out their embeddedness in real-world concerns: “Liberal arts faculty need to own the fact there is real-world purpose to our teaching” (32, emphasis in original). As she insists, “we need to link our work to the progressive antiracist, feminist, materialist, gay and lesbian, and anti-imperialist work of the last half century” (ibid.). By drawing on or restoring these connections, Ammons pays homage to a long “activist tradition in American literature” (ibid. 38), in which she assembles writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Toni Morrison: “a tradition of profound hope and idealism, belief that people can and will hear, think, and take action to bring positive change” (ibid.). In the humanities and beyond, this is a “paradigm [which] believes human beings have the power to create fundamental positive change and will take action in the service of social justice and planetary health” (ibid. 169) – a hope that Ammons rearticulates with a particular view to 21st-century US-American culture wars.
While Ammons makes a powerful case around the activist tradition of liberal arts in the US, we suggest that there is much more to say about the role of literature and culture for positive change, even (or especially) from a more philologically grounded and less overtly political stance that we seek to explore by engaging with Vera Nünning’s work. Before fleshing out these perspectives on positive change in literary and cultural studies, however, we first want to look further afield at where the concept has travelled and how it is used in pertinent contexts.
Across a broad disciplinary spectrum from psychology to economics and sports, positive change is variously discussed as personal growth, corporate and collective values, global competence, sustainable life, and cultural participation. Mapping the most recent academic monographs and articles, one realizes that the topic features especially in three fields: first, economics, finance, and technology; second, education, psychology, and the behavioural sciences; third, environmental research and sustainability studies. Many studies have in common that they are not interested in change in general (in the sense that things become or can become different); but all are interested in phenomena that change or can be changed for the better – to the benefit of an individual or a collective.
By way of a brief review, we will single out current academic research in the above domains to illustrate how they conceptualize and make use of positive change. Within the first field, that of economics, finance, and technology, the concept is often used to demarcate strategies of successful leadership, to guide effective business transformations, or to enhance strategies of re-structuring teams and companies. Within the realm of management, it has been defined as a leader’s “successful transformation” within companies (Tkacyk 38) with the aim to “change teams, increase [their] change friendliness and readiness, overcome resistance, promote resilience, develop change agents, and lead an agile culture” (ibid. 35). Studies and guidebooks like the one just quoted seem to have rather limited concerns, their interest being predominantly quantitative and intra-sectorial in that they pertain exclusively to business matters. Positive change, brought about by a certain kind of leadership and coaching, is to increase a company’s efficiency, perhaps at the cost of individual concerns (e.g., resistance on the part of teams) and of ignoring extra-sectorial matters (beyond the world of economics). It may also mean to follow through with one’s own agenda, by way of effective communication strategies (“leading by listening”, Levine 102) and successful advertising (e.g., urban renewal projects; see ibid.). In these uses, the qualifier ‘positive’ does not define specific values pursued through change, meaning it does not primarily describe or relate to the aspired outcome of change, but it refers to the ways in which change is carried through, enforced, and communicated. There are, however, business studies framing positive change in a more qualitative and socially considerate manner. Even though they do not put principles before profit, either, they manage not to completely exclude the former: they at least link potential positive changes within an organization to a CEO’s “integrity” and concern for “human, environmental, social, cultural and political” issues (Smith 1).
Within the second field, the realm of education, psychology, and the behavioural sciences, positive change is neither framed as a change of people, their opinions, or of infrastructure, nor as an increase of efficiency; rather, it is conceptualized as a matter of perspective, experience, and/or cognition. The concept, in this context, is situated within the larger field of positive psychology, which presents a shift in 20th-century psychology away from a focus on “repairing damage using a disease model of human functioning” towards “the idea of a fulfilled individual and a thriving community” (Seligman 3). Such an understanding sees the possibility of change not only in “pathological situations” that need repair or healing, but also in “virtuous situations and situations of development” (Inghilleri et al. 6) more generally, which entails a much broader vision of both the beneficiaries and the contexts of positive change. In a study on adversity in sports and the resulting effects on individuals, teams, and cultures, for instance, psychologists explore how defeats or other unfavourable experiences in sports can be a repository of personal growth and institutional development. For example, they study how, on the basis of negative experiences, “individuals can become more resilient, relationships can strengthen, teams can develop a more positive identity, organizations can improve their policies and practices, […] and countries can bring about greater social justice” (Wadey et al. xvi). On a more general level, the behavioural sciences have explored what people may experience as positive change in everyday life, for instance, in education, therapy, or political participation. They have located the roots of such change in four areas – “personal characteristics, everyday experience, psychological well-being and elements of the socio-relational and environmental context” (Inghilleri et al. 1) – and they relate occurrences of such a transformation to experiences of flow “as a driving force for the subjective development” (ibid.). A central concept of positive psychology, flow is intricately connected to well-being: “a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 89, emphasis in original).1 In contrast to the streamlining endeavours of the economic sector, in which unwanted or unnecessary elements are reduced or removed to promote positive change, the behavioural sciences explicitly expect positive change to make individuals and institutions more complex and creative (see Inghilleri et al. 4).
To define the ‘positive’ element of change in more detail, we can draw on fields of research and practice that use similar concepts and provide more concrete ideas of what qualifies as objectively positive. Two areas seem particularly pertinent in order to gauge positive change in its individual, intersubjective/social, and collective dimension: psychology and sociology. As mentioned above, the field of positive psychology can be regarded as a disciplinary anchor for some of the main uses of the concept. Although not an established concept per se in the field, positive change is alluded to and implied in its basic tenets surrounding the question of “[w]hat constitutes a good life” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 89). The founder of the field, Martin Seligman, sets out what constitutes positive experience on the level of the individual as well as that of the group:
[T]he subjective level is about positive subjective experience: well-being and satisfaction (past); flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and happiness (present); and constructive cognitions about the future – optimism, hope, and faith. At the individual level it is about positive personal traits – the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future-mindedness, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic (3).
These two levels are closely intertwined, with the social level feeding back into the level of subjective experience, as, for instance, research on the positive effects of enhanced empathy on personal well-being shows (see Bauer; Shanafelt et al.). The interconnectedness of the individual and the social level is important in order to delimit the concept of positive change, even if the outcome does not necessarily incorporate all aspects contained in the three main fields of positive change research outlined above. The example of economics in particular shows that change might lead to growth and thus promote goals set by a company, but if these goals on an individual level (even if shared by a group of individuals) do not align with group goals of responsibility, altruism, or moderation, we would be hard-pressed to classify such change as positive at a more general level. In contrast, positive change accounts for change as embedded in larger social structures and interconnected with other developments. The question of perspective mentioned above does not mean that change can be viewed as positive from one side and negative from the other, and still qualify as positive change. It means that a situation, an event, an experience can be reviewed from a perspective that highlights those elements that may induce personal growth, resilience, strength, or satisfaction – in this sense, it becomes a question of narrative emplotment and meaning-making.
While psychology is interested in the personal and intersubjective dimensions of well-being, sociology may offer a fruitful complementary perspective that focuses on the larger picture of society or culture. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont ask what makes societies successful, and thereby propose another possible way of capturing what we mean with ‘positive change’. Taking “population health […] as a proxy [and quantifiable measure] for social well-being” (2), Hall and Lamont underscore the social dimension of individual health with regard to different levels of relationships, social networks, and community.2 What this perspective adds to the above, however, is that it goes beyond the intersubjective level and takes society and culture into account, “bring[ing] the cultural dimensions of such relationships into fuller focus” (ibid. 8 f.). By regarding “institutional practices and cultural repertoires” (ibid. 1) as “social (including symbolic) resources” (ibid. 7) for problem-solving, overcoming challenges, or improving well-being, the approach acknowledges the role of narrative and other cultural ways of world- and meaning-making in positive change. It looks at how social relations are embedded in ‘webs of meaning’, and thus takes into account not only (self-)interest but the dimension of morals and ethics, and how these are structured by values (see ibid. 11). Positive change, in this light, connects with values such as “wellbeing, solidarity, and [social] recognition” (Berezin and Lamont 202), the dissemination of which may promote social transformation and positive change.
In the third context, environmental research and sustainability studies, positive change is called for in view of “insurmountable environmental challenges”, such as the exhaustion of finite resources and irreversible consequences of climate change (Zeunert 35). Scholars in these fields make the case for implementing positive changes within the environment (instead of merely talking about them), which intend to ‘heal’ the environment and/or avert the disastrous and lethal ecological scenarios humankind is speedily heading towards. With regard to the complexity and scope of environmental developments, understanding the interrelation of multiple systems, human and non-human, as well as institutions or political and cultural beliefs is vital. Ecocritical approaches analyse, for instance, how systems like forests, capitalism, and political institutions are intertwined and how they develop alongside and with each other (i.e., how they transform in their connectedness). The aim of such research is to spot the points at which one or more systems are capable of accommodating positive changes and to identify how those critical points can be used to promote resilience and sustainability within these system(s) (see Gunderson and Holling).
No matter from which perspective the travelling concept of positive change is studied, in which ways it is defined, or how its outcomes are envisioned – if we abstract from the aforementioned research fields, they all implicitly or explicitly demarcate two situations: One before a certain event or transformative incident, and one after it. Thus, the concept of positive change can be regarded as a mini-narrative, one that entails a change of situation (brought about by an event, incident, or series of events). At the same time, it is less open than any default mini-narrative because it already entails a certain ending, one with an inherent promise; the outcome is always a good one or at least one that shows an improvement: institutions, relations, situations ameliorate; people get better, more creative, efficient, or fulfilled; environments are less exploited or even saved. Most of the time, this change does not happen instantaneously – rather, it takes time; it is brought about by repeated efforts (in business settings, therapy sessions, landscape architecture, and the like); and the energy invested is consciously geared towards a change of the status quo for the better.
3.Changing Minds and Worlds: The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative in Vera Nünning’s Work
Taking up this multidisciplinary debate, and taking their cue from major directions of Vera Nünning’s research, the contributors to this volume acknowledge that the reading of literature, too, can be conceived in the terms of such a mini-narrative. Especially her most recent work has become invested in how literature and narrative may work towards positive change in an ever more complex 21st-century reality. She has framed these changes and slow transformations as exceedingly powerful ones, as they can have a strong and lasting impact on the lives of individuals, collectives, and cultures.
In the context of this volume, we want to emphasize two strands of her research that lie at the heart of her conceptualizations of the role of literature within culture, and which, accordingly, define her scholarship as one that is equally interested in culture and literature. The first focuses on the possible effects of reading on the reader with regard to empathy, cognitive abilities, belief change, or values. As a narratologist, she has contributed to the field by providing frameworks for textual strategies and narrative techniques that further particular responses and positive effects in readers. The second strand is her interest in narrative more generally as a way of worldmaking and a ‘tool for thinking’. Rather than following the ubiquitous use and conceptually vague notion of narrative that we can see in both academic and public discourse at large, she argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary, theoretically sound concept of narrative and narrativity, and for the specific contribution that literary scholars can make to the field (see “Erzählen und Identität”; “Narrativität”). In Vera Nünning’s work, these two strands are closely connected, with narrative, “as a way of understanding, conceptualizing and constructing the world” (“Narrativität” 1, our translation), forming the basis for how we may gauge the power of literature to induce change in readers.
It is, in particular, the exploration of “Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life”, as per the title of one of her articles, which has increasingly won her international attention and recognition. In her monograph Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, she illustrates the positive effects engagement with fiction and narrative can have on the brain, on personal behaviour, and on interpersonal relations:
First, fiction can improve readers’ cognitive abilities […] by encouraging readers to take the characters’ perspectives. By these means, fiction can enhance two important components of the cognitive skills necessary for understanding others, viz. empathy and what are called ‘theory-of-mind’ abilities. Second, reading fiction can arguably increase narrative competence and cultivate cognitive processes by providing complex models for understanding the connections between human desires, thoughts, intentions and actions. Third […], fictional tales are an important source of social learning, particularly for adults: cognitive skills can be practiced, honed, refined and extended by dealing with a wide range of personalities and situations […], a much broader spectrum of situations than one could possibly encounter in daily life […]. (19)
In her pursuit of cognitive narratology and of adjacent fields, Vera Nünning has concentrated on a variety of questions that include individual well-being (see “Literaturwissenschaft”; “How to Stay Healthy”) and cognitive abilities (see “Intelligenz”), readers’ transportation into the storyworld and their (emotional) investment in specific characters and their perspectives (see “Value”; “Affective Value”), and the dissemination of values (see Nünning and Nünning, “Extortion”). Most importantly, she analyses the ways in which literature supports processes of perspective-taking and empathy in readers, which in turn may lead to more altruistic behaviour and the cultivation of pro-social values. Highlighting the comprehensive cognitive, emotional, and social potential of literature and the notable effects that a life-long immersion in fiction and narrative can have on individuals as well as on groups, she generates imposing arguments that not only foreground the positive power of literature but also invalidate claims that belittle the importance of narrative fiction and/or the humanities.
The second strand of her research that we wish to single out builds on a long engagement with narrative as a way of worldmaking (see Nünning and Nünning, Cultural Ways), which ranges from self-making to community-making and literary worldmaking (Nünning and Nünning, “Ways of Worldmaking” 12). Narrative is a fundamental device of meaning-making and thus for processing events and evaluating and understanding our lives and the world around us: “By telling a story, we render what happened intelligible; we organize events in a way that makes it possible to understand them.” (Nünning, “Identity” 59) This is not only a retrospective process; rather, our thinking, perception, and experience is always prefigured by narrative forms and patterns. Such narrative schemata are culturally specific as much as they constitute the foundations of cultures more generally. As Vera Nünning has shown, this cultural component is an integral part of research in this field, whether it focuses on individual self-making (see, for instance, “‘Writing Selves’”) or on the collective level of meaning-making. This nexus of narrative and identity can be seen as a cornerstone of her approach to the study of culture, and has shaped her specific perspective as both a literary scholar and a historian. We can trace this approach early on in her work, for instance in her analyses of what was formerly known as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ (a word that in itself contains a mini-narrative that brings a certain framing to the historical events which, in turn, served to legitimatize violent retributions and widespread atrocities). Her corresponding publications engage with the construction and reality-shaping power of narrative in different formats of writing (from historiography and personal eye-witness accounts to literature) and dissect their various forms of cross-pollination, thus offering up a model of how broadly and encompassing the study of narrative in culture can be laid out (see “Bedeutung”; “Ereignis”).1
As Vera Nünning makes us aware of, narrative is not inherently an agent of positive change:
[S]tories – especially origin myths – can foster social cohesion and improve the relations between members of a given culture. In contrast, competing stories can also exacerbate conflicts between different groups and incite their emotions, possibly pushing them into violence. (“Identity” 61)
A more recent example of how “conflict- and worldmaking” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 187) may go hand in hand (when we look at the functions and effects of narrative) is the case of former US President George W. Bush’s “stories of mass destruction” (see ibid.) or the so-called ‘war on terror’ (see Nünning, “Identity”). In all this, however, Vera Nünning does not lose sight of the wider goal, namely to find answers to the question of how the worldmaking power of narrative can help societies build a better future, or, in other words, to achieve or induce positive change. Besides defusing the potentially dangerous powers of narrative through gaining a more thorough understanding of their workings, she points to the ways “narratives can arguably also be ways of conflict-solving” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 224) and thereby agents of positive change.
Considering the proliferation of scenarios and narratives of crisis since the turn of the 21st century, these questions have become even more pressing. In their special issue on Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien, Vera and Ansgar Nünning show how these narratives, disseminated by mass media, exert a certain authority within cultural debates and how they, even though they deal with critical scenarios, can trigger positive situational transformations within collectives and cultures. Dealing with crises as metaphorical mini-narratives, Vera and Ansgar Nünning foreground how these metaphors structure perception and steer human cognition towards the successful processing of current political and cultural affairs (see “Krise”). They explore to what extent narratives of crisis enable the cognitive and emotional processing of complex, critical circumstances, which may be perceived as overpowering and inaccessible. Moreover, they demonstrate how these narratives further historical understanding, diagnoses of the present, and conceptualizations of possible futures (see ibid. 256-61).
The transformative power that makes narratives of crisis accessible to humans, thus turning feelings of helplessness and despair in the face of challenging situations into experiences of understanding and manageability, can also be attributed to literature itself. Referring to Paul Ricœur’s three-dimensional model of mimesis, Vera and Ansgar Nünning convincingly argue that literary texts may function as ‘laboratories’ of alternative worlds and futures (see ibid. 262-69), in which there is far more possible than the technological, political, humanitarian, and mental constraints of our present time suggest:
Indem literarische Werke auf reale Krisengeschichten referieren, erweisen sie sich einerseits als ein Medium des kulturellen Gedächtnisses für kollektive Krisenerfahrungen. Andererseits können literarische Krisennarrative durch Formen der Konfiguration, Reintegration, Verfremdung und Metareflexion von realen und imaginären Krisen maßgeblich dazu beitragen, den Horizont des Denkbaren und der Handlungsmöglichkeiten zu vergrößern. (Ibid. 266)2
Framing narratives (of crisis) in such a way, Vera and Ansgar Nünning display the profound impact literature can have on collectives and individuals: It is not only a powerful cognitive device that helps archiving and historicizing crises; it also allows people to cope with present challenges, specific crises, and overpowering times. Ultimately, it may help us to imagine positive change and better futures, broadening our minds and furnishing societies and cultures with novel thoughts and new scopes of action.
4.Mapping Positive Change in Literature and Narrative: Contributions to this Volume
The present conceptual volume is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and thus reflects the broad range of implications and possibilities opened up by Vera Nünning’s advances in research on literature and narrative. Following the routes that she has mapped out with her work, we identify three general directions in her research regarding the potential impact of literature and narrative. Accordingly, the volume is concerned with, firstly, the way literature affects lives at the level of the individual, but it also deals with how personal aspects of reading play out at, secondly, an intersubjective level – relating to how individual factors improve social interaction and enable understanding, communication, and community – and inform, thirdly, the role of narratives in promoting social and cultural change.
With regard to the first aspect, contributions tackle the question of how literature and reading foster well-being and advance psychological health. Understanding narrative as a form of self-making moreover draws attention to how narrative can be used to make processes of healing possible, help overcome individual crises, or incite redemptive change. This approach ties in with Vera Nünning’s work on the nexus of narratology and ‘salutogenesis’ (see Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy”) as well as the knowledge of literature as a resource for building a good life (eudaimonia) (see ibid.; “Literaturwissenschaft”).
The second focus is concerned with the cognitive potential of literature and narrative to induce positive effects in readers’ minds, thereby promoting understanding and empathy for others and laying the foundations for more equitable forms of community and stronger social cohesion. With her monograph Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, Vera Nünning has explored in depth the cognitive value of literature for life (see also “Cognitive Science”; “Narrative Fiction”), the functions of representing and evoking emotions (see also “Affective Value”; “Zugang zu Depressionen”), as well as the role of perspective-taking and the ethics of reading (see also “Ethics”).
Thirdly, taking the cultural dimension of narrative into account, possible aspects of the topic relate to how narratives help to counter crises and promote positive change. Narrative holds the potential to envision alternative routes into a more liveable future and offer conciliatory (re-)imaginings and retellings of the past. Negotiating and conveying cultural values, literature plays an important role in imagining and shaping our society. Possible avenues for research into this topic have been laid out by Vera Nünning in writings on a variety of different subjects. In these, the role of narrative as a form of worldmaking constitutes an important focus in explorations of the relationship between culture, narrative, and literature. While the dissemination of values through literature has always featured prominently in Vera Nünning’s work, the question of how narrative becomes important with regard to resilience and meaning-making in connection with crises (see “Resilience”; “Affective Value”; Nünning and Nünning, “Krise”) presents a more recent focus of research.
Responding to these avenues of research, the contributions in this volume build and further elaborate on the transformative power of literature and narrative in a broad variety of theoretical reflections and case studies. In his contribution, Jan Rupp takes up Vera Nünning’s holistic perspective on the “value of literature for life” (“Cognitive Science” 85), importantly including matters of health, while also drawing on what she and Ansgar Nünning have called the “salutogenetic power of narrative” (Nünning and Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy” 169). Revisiting the pandemic classroom, Rupp explores the potential of literature and stories to foster narrative sense-making, mental well-being, and resilience in adverse times. His close readings include Zadie Smith’s collection of coronavirus essays, Intimations, which is partly based on her rereading of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as well as a set of student texts that have used haiku to compose and share stories of pandemic experience. In both cases, he argues that the affordances of concrete literary and narrative forms allow for expressing and channelling experiences to begin with, highlighting the extent of positive change to be had from reading and writing.
In her contribution, Stefanie Schäfer takes her cue from Vera Nünning’s work in cognitive narratology, invoking her discussion of Virginia Woolf’s essays as another major concern in her scholarly œuvre. As Schäfer recalls, Vera Nünning enlists Woolf’s dictum about books as “emotion which you feel” (Nünning and Nünning, “Stories as ‘Weapons’” 38) to complicate the potential of affect in literature and the reading process beyond the idea of feeling empathy with fictional characters. Thinking along with and on from Woolf, Nünning delineates empathy formation as a “dual process”, as a back and forth between engaged and disengaged cognitive activities in the reader’s mind, feeling like the protagonist on the one hand and assessing the overall situation in question on the other (see ibid. 43 f.). Schäfer applies this distinction to her reading of the African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. As Schäfer shows, Butler explores how hyperempathy on the level of characters can confront nationalist ideologies in 21st-century America, as well as forcing readers to position themselves in relation to the global climate crisis.
Travelling in time, Christine Schwanecke provides a historical example of literature’s positive thrust. Studying Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, she shows the extent to which Vera Nünning’s research is also pertinent for an analysis of early modern fiction. Focusing on literature as salutogenesis, Schwanecke explores, on the one hand, the possible psychological healing powers of narrativization. After all, the narrator processes incisive historical events, namely the outbreak of the bubonic Plague in England in 1665 and its aftermath, by psycho-geographically and narratively mapping them. On the other hand, she deals with literature’s potential function as a pandemic archive, which, passing down pandemic knowledge to new generations, seems to display even the potential to actually – physically! – save lives.
Also engaging with Vera Nünning’s work on the salutogenic, healing power of literature, Cristian Camilo Cuervo focuses on therapeutic dimensions of writing and storytelling. With a view to the production and praxis of literature specifically, he differentiates a wide range of motivations and purposes, including bibliotherapy or the use of writing to cope with challenging experiences. Based on a set of typological distinctions at the intersection of literature, well-being, and medicine, he then turns to a brief literary history of therapeutic writing from Virginia Woolf via Stephen King to Amanda Gorman. In this tour d’horizon, the manifold uses of expressive writing – tackling such diverse conditions as depression (Woolf), alcoholism (King), or speech impediments (Gorman) – become clear. Moreover, as Cuervo shows, writing is not only a form of self-therapy for authors. It can also offer help and healing to audiences, as Gorman’s inaugural poem The Hill We Climb and its message to a divided nation suggests. In an all-around sense, Cuervo argues that therapeutic writing works towards a consolidation of well-being for both individuals and collectives.
In her article on The Buddha in the Attic, which won its author, Julie Otsuka, three prestigious awards, Daniela-Dorina Vasiloiu illustrates the validity of Vera Nünning’s observation that “literary works […] enable us to appreciate […] heterogeneity and complexity, but also help us to accept otherness, to refrain from stereotyping and categorizing others, and to abandon the insistence on closure” (“Ethics” 47). Theorizing and analysing the both unusual and complex narrative situation of the US-American novel, which largely hinges on the use of the second person plural, Vasiloiu demonstrates how the narrating ‘we’ traces stories of Japanese picture brides immigrating to the US in the early 1900s to reflect both same- and otherness. She displays, in addition, how the peculiarly heterogeneous narrative voice enables readers to improve their cognitive abilities and broaden their world-knowledge. Furthermore, she exemplifies how this kind of ‘unnatural narrative’ unfolds its tremendous transformative power: after all, the reading of Otsuka’s ‘we’-narrative cautions readers to refrain from rigid classifications and to reassess normative belief-systems critically.
In his contribution, Max Cannings asks how reading not only enhances our empathy and understanding, but also our abilities of self-examination. He approaches this topic from the angle of unreliable narration and thus connects the issue of empathy with another of Vera Nünning’s particular and longstanding narratological interests (see “Historical Variability”; “Ethics and Unreliability”; Unreliable Narration). He demonstrates the question of unreliability to be particularly interesting for analyses of empathy and perspective-taking, as the complexity of the narrative form challenges readers to question their investment in the narration from an ethical standpoint, and to reflect what this means regarding the empathy or understanding they may have developed towards the narrator. Comparing three texts – Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal –, Cannings offers a complex reading of different forms of unreliable narration and explores the positive insights that readers may take away from such novels, and what they can learn for their own lives.
With Sebastian Beckmann’s article, another aspect of narrative’s power to change the world for the better comes to the fore. Dealing with Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel Gone Girl, Beckmann speculates how the transformative power of literature may be put to use in a classroom setting to broaden students’ horizons both cognitively and emotionally. As a narrative that features a narrator who is unreliable and has a mental illness, it might enable readers to critically cope with a postfactual world in which simplifying and essentializing dichotomies, such as true vs. false, good vs. bad, or right vs. wrong dominate. Novels like Gone Girl, which play with narrative and ethical ambivalence, if studied at school, might induce students to examine their possible beliefs in these dichotomies. In-class discussions of complex narratives like Gillian Flynn’s might, as Vera Nünning has shown in another context (see Reading Fictions), both enhance empathy for others and engender critical self-reflection. They may provide a helpful resource for a critical re-assessment of students’ possible social (media) practices – not least because Gone Girl’s complex narrative design and character construction problematize the notion that reality’s complexities can be captured in just one picture on Instagram or in 280-character tweets.
Caroline Lusin turns to contemporary Irish literature, examining Anna Burns’ award-winning novel Milkman as an example of a ‘broken narrative’. She uses this concept developed by Vera and Ansgar Nünning (“Broken Narratives”) as a basis to further elaborate this volume’s inquiry into literature’s positive merits. Uncovering the novel’s intertextual references to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, Lusin highlights the possible dark sides of narratives and their ambivalent functions in processes of worldmaking and self-making. In their ‘brokenness’, both novel and short story probe the limits of narrative meaning-making. Both Milkman and “The Overcoat” emphasize the constraints of narrative processing and expression, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. At the same time, they enable readers to see how narratives, broken though they may be, can empower characters – as well as narratees and readers – to overcome a shattered sense of worlds and selves.
In his contribution, Alexander Schindler turns to the potential of positive change in and through crime fiction, a major scholarly concern as well as a passion of Vera Nünning’s. Her edited collection on the American and British crime novel (see Kriminalroman), among other publications, has been one of the first studies to trace and take stock of crime fiction’s contemporary metamorphosis from a niche of easy entertainment and genre fiction into a template of serious literary fiction. Taking up her characterization of crime novels as modern-day social novels, Schindler demonstrates a broad range of positive change in terms of gender, race, and class. His case study is Cheryl A. Head’s multiperspectival novel Bury Me When I’m Dead, which features a bisexual woman of colour as a hard-boiled private eye heading a team of private investigators in Detroit. As Schindler shows, this narrative constellation allows Head to tackle a broad array of topics, including gender politics and racial diversity. Capitalizing on its generic adaptability, crime fiction thus lends itself to a broad spectrum of progressive agendas where positive change can happen.
Like other contributions, Corinna Assmann also focuses on empathy, but foregrounds a mostly overlooked feature of perspective, namely its spatial dimension and how this relates to spatial (and social) positionings and mobility. This angle prompts her to set narrative into relation with maps as another way of worldmaking, and to examine how the two share qualities that may be effective in promoting positive change. With the help of two Anglo-Pakistani novels that revolve around social conflict and division, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, Assmann investigates the power of narrative and cartography to create a common ground and connect people, despite the violence and trauma that govern the characters’ lives.
Delving into the realm of historical fiction, Nina Gillé shows in her contribution that values take a prominent role in the context of literary crisis narratives. She looks at George Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, to gauge how self-transcendence values can be beneficial in solving crises. This group of values includes concepts such as benevolence, universalism, and compassion, and correlates with the novel’s interest in empathy and altruism. In her reading of the novel, Gillé teases out the correspondences between structural elements such as the polyphonic narration of the novel and its constellation of characters on the one hand, and the negotiation of values and their ultimate hierarchization on the other. In the end, she is able to demonstrate how the novel broaches broader concerns such as racial and social inequality, and may thus offer valuable incentives for productively overcoming the social divisions that threaten society and social cohesion then and now.
Désirée Link’s contribution deals with one of the issues of our times that most urgently calls for positive change, namely the climate crisis. In light of the imminent dangers to our living conditions that this crisis poses, as well as its vast dimensions and complexity, it is often asked how news stories, for example, can create a sense of this urgency and incite a willingness for change rather than overwhelm people and leave them paralyzed in the face of a catastrophic outlook. In other words: Is there reason for optimism in the Anthropocene? Link makes the argument that literature may play a prominent role in cultivating hope as an instigator and motivator of positive change, while also accommodating the complexities and intricate interdependencies of climate conditions that we need to understand for changes in our behaviour to be purposeful and effective. Her analysis of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour explores the ways in which hope and optimism are connected with narratological questions around empathy and character perspective.
With their explorations of narrative and positive change, the assembled (former) PhD students and mentees of Vera Nünning conduct analyses that she, once more, has prepared the ground for and that in many ways would not have been possible without her fundamental work. The contributions not only draw on and attest to Vera Nünning’s recent explorations of the transformative power of literature (at the levels of both the individual and the communal, as well as in theoretical terms attending to the intricate relationship of narrative and culture); they also owe to her breadth of interest, versatility, and knowledge. Her research is the same as her mentorship: comprehensive, flexible, and widely applicable – a treasure trove and an invaluable inspiration for further inquiry at the intersection of narratology, literature, and cultural studies.
Thank you, Vera Nünning! Obviously, not only fiction can lead to positive change in a variety of ways, but also your wide-ranging work. For us, it carries a tremendous amount of academic and personal transformative power – a fact which this volume celebrates and, we hope, is a testament to.
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