Kleine Prosa: Theorie und Geschichte eines Textfeldes im Literatursystem der Moderne by Thomas Althaus, Wolfgang Bunzel, Dirk Göttsche

Abstract

908 Reviews missed in theirwriting the firsttime round. Admittedly, this is rathermore difficult in the case ofHeimatmuseum, which, as Schaal himself notes, has never been mistaken foranything other than a novel about displacement. Schaal sees theoriginality ofhiswork-in a fairly well-tilled field-as lying ina shift of emphasis fromcontent to form: from flightand expulsion as a theme to thenarrative structures thatconstruct displacement as a personal and national experience. Each of the threemain chapters ends inpraise of the author's particular achievement in this respect: Grass succeeds in expressing the trauma of loss through the split between a narrating 'Ich' and a narrated 'er'; Lenz constructs a literary 'Heimatmuseum' that forsakes nostalgia in favour of critical understanding; andWolf constructs a narra tive journey back in time that effects a kind of therapy.The detail of the argument, however, ismore interesting than these broad conclusions. Schaal displays an impressive array of scholarship: a knowledge of classical tradi tions,baroque art, narratology, and theories of exile writing. One possible criticism is that, inhis drive to taxonomize with reference to authorities and antecedents, Schaal runs the twin risk of overcomplicating and oversimplifying. Well versed in the nar ratology of Genette and his successors, he sometimes agonizes over the 'diegetic' status of a narrative statement, where a more commonsensical approach might as sume that readerswill remain happily oblivious to all such logical anomalies provided that they serve some purpose. On other occasions, the taxonomic urge produces un helpful statements of theobvious such as 'Paris ist - uiber das gemeinsame Register "Frankreich" - metonymisch mit der Normandie verkniipft' (p. 69). In his analysis of Die Blechtrommel, Schaal might have investigated theways in which Oskar's mixed ethnicity (towhich Oskar alludes in several passages cited by Schaal) sets his storyapart from thedominantWest German myths ofmonoculturally German homelands. Similarly, Iwould have welcomed a clearer sense ofjust how little all three novels have to tellus about the lives of the Poles who settled inpreviously German towns.Does thewillingness to embrace thePolish 'other' thatSchaal thinks he detects inat least one of thenovels have any narrative consequences, or does Polish lifeamong the remnants ofGerman communities remain a narrative blank space? Like most German doctoral theses, thisone appears tohave gone fromdissertation to print without substantial revision.While itmight have benefited from editorial pruning, it isvery professionally presented, and the substantial bibliography, which includes some English-language titles,will provide a good starting-point for future work. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER CHLOE PAVER Kleine Prosa: Theorie und Geschichte eines Textfeldes imLiteratursystem derModerne. Ed. by THOMAS ALTHAUS,WOLFGANG BUNZEL, and DIRK GOTTSCHE. Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2006. 360 pp. E88. ISBN 978-3-484-I0902-5. In hisKleine Prosa in Moderne undGegenwart (Miinster: Aschendorff, 2006; reviewed in MLR, I02 (2007), 94-I5), on a scale commensurate with the subject-matter it self,Dirk G6ttsche managed toprovide in just I44 pages a succinct, challenging and wide-ranging appraisal ofwhat, despite theauthor's brave 'Annaherung an eine The orie der Kleinen Prosa', may well prove tobe a genre which defies definition. In that fittinglyslender volume, inwhich he reviewed the 'family relationship' between the many varied forms of short prose, Gottsche also announced the imminent arrival of thevolume under review here, amulti-authored work based on a symposium held in Miinster in2005. Gottsche provides the linkbetween the two volumes, co-authoring the introductory 'Riinder,Schwellen, Zwischenraume: Zum Standort Kleiner Prosa MLR, 103.3, 2008 909 imLiteratursystem derModerne' and contributing an essay on contemporary pro duction of 'Kleine Prosa' by such authors as Botho Strauss and Gisela vonWysocki. The volume is tripartite in structure, dealing with theperiods 'Spataufklarung und Vormiirz ( 770-I 850)', the 'Klassische Moderne (i88o-i 930)', and 'Gegenwart (i 960 bis heute)'. In each section there are both theoretical essays and examinations of indi vidual authors such as Friedrich Schlegel, Alfred Lichtenstein, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Alexander Kluge. Given its range, and even allowing for the absence ofwork on the central but often ratherneglected nineteenth century, thisbook representswithout doubt amajor con tribution to the understanding of a 'Textsorte' which has been central toGerman (and European) writing since the eighteenth century, and which could be regarded as seminal in the twentieth. It has not, however, attracted the...