Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

18 Introduction
“hypothetical filmmaker,” Alber integrates the viewers’ speculations about
the conscious or unconscious motivations of the professionals responsible for
the making of the film into the analysis. He thus combines the views on intentionality
provided in Herman (2008) with a cognitive and reader-response
oriented model. Alber applies this new theoretical framework to an experimental
narrative, namely David Lynch’s film Lost Highway (1996).
Susan Lanser sketches the ways in which a particular topos, namely lesbian
desire, may be linked with historically variable narrative parameters,
thus combining feminist/queer narratology with a diachronic outlook on narrative.
More specifically, Lanser explores what she calls the “sapphic dialogic,”
a form of narrative intersubjectivity in which erotic content is filtered
through the relationship between a (typically intradiegetic) female pairing
of narrator and narratee. Reaching back to the sixteenth century, Lanser
uncovers the history of a typical scenario in which female narrators tell other
women about heterosexual congress in a context in which the telling becomes
yet another erotic experience. Hence, Lanser identifies sapphic form as an
underpinning of the eighteenth-century novel’s domestic agenda. Linking
these analyses to the rise of the novel, Lanser is able to demonstrate that the
eighteenth-century novel female protagonist is not only swept up in the consolidation
of the heterosexual subject; but further, the novel preserves within
its heterosexual frame the secret of domesticity’s dependence on the structural
deployment of lesbian desire. Lanser’s contribution therefore uses the communicative
scenario of text-internal dialogue and storytelling to figure an
underlying sexual subtext. The paper combines a gender approach with a
framework of reader response and the concerns (if not the model) of rhetorical
narratology.
Our next contributor, Amit Marcus, merges narratology with psychoanalysis
by looking at René Girard’s notion of mimetic (or triangular) desire
(Girard 1965) and setting this in correlation with the story-discourse distinction.
For Girard, the subject does not desire the object in and for itself. Rather,
the desire is mediated through another subject, who possesses or pursues the
object. This third figure (the mediator or rival) is admired by the subject but
also despised as an obstacle in achieving the object. In his contribution, Marcus
looks at narratives in which the narrator is both one of the main characters
in the story and the desiring subject. He shows that the narratives he
analyzes present several ways in which narration can be linked with mimetic
desire. While in two of the narratives he analyzes (Grass’s Cat and Mouse
and Genet’s The Thief’s Journal) mimetic desire only motivates the narration
and the narrator’s appeal to a narratee, without there existing a story on that
level, in Camus’s The Fall the story at the level of narration is woven into the