135825 KO Narrative Perspectives and the Changing Concept of the Subject (2026S)

Narrative voice and narrative perspective can be understood as symbols of the fact that we do not apprehend the world as it is, but rather as it has passed through the medium of a perceiving mind (Käte Friedemann). It therefore seems plausible to suggest that changes in the concept of this mind (the subject) and in its relation to the world result in corresponding changes in narrative structures. A prominent example of this relationship was provided by Theodor W. Adorno: in “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”, he describes, as a consequence of the process of the subject’s alienation from the world, the formation of an interior space by the narrative voice in the novels of aesthetic modernism that “spares it the misstep into the alien world.” For later developments, however, different diagnoses apply.

The aim of the seminar is to reconstruct this relationship between selected historical transformations of the concept of the subject and narrative structures, tracing an arc from the beginnings of modernity to the present. Through narratological interpretations of excerpts from representative prose texts, from the picaresque novels and Tristram Shandy to contemporary literature, this relationship will be illustrated exemplarily. The general formulation of the thesis is intended not only to invite the interpretation of prose texts in its terms, but also, where appropriate, to open the thesis itself to discussion.