РАБОТЫ П. ХЮНА: НАРРАТОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ КАТЕГОРИИ СОБЫТИЯ

Abstract

A significant phenomenon in modern narratology is a complex concept of eventfulness, which P. Hühn has been developing for many years in several books and numerous articles. In his theoretical elaborations P. Hühn relies on a close reading of individual texts, considered in comparative and historical context. P. Hühn interprets event as a hermeneutic category, reflecting not only objectively existing intratextual structures, but also the significance of changes in narrative situation for perceiving subject, which can be a character as well as a narrator or an implicit / real reader. For P. Hühn an event is not any change of situation, but a change that is relevant, unexpected and unusual, so the researcher links it not to a minimalist definition of narrative, as many other narratologists do, but to the concept of tellability. Hühn refers to Lotman’s plot model and R. Shank and P. Abelson’s theory of cognitive schemata as a theoretical bases, he also demonstrates their complementarity in the practical analysis of artistic narratives. P. Hühn puts special accent on the historical and cultural variability of eventfulness, which manifests itself, on the one hand, in a more or less frequent occurrence of events in literary narratives, and on the other hand, in the variablity of changes that might be interpreted as events in different historical and cultural contexts. An important feature of P. Hühn’s theory is the analysis of events on several narrative levels – not only on the level of happenings (the level of the story / histoire), but also on the levels of presentation and reception. Another original element of Hühn’s theory is the notion of non-event that covers cases when the absence of relevant and unexpected changes is perceived as an event, since it contradicts readers’ expectations. Hühn analyses eventfullness not only in fictional prose, but also in dramatic and lyrical works.