Nora Berning Knihy

Nora Berning grasps the narrative potential of journalistic reportages via a set of narratological categories. Spurred by an interdisciplinary framework, she builds on transgeneric narratological research and shows that journalistic reportages can be described, analyzed, and charted with categories that originate in structuralist narratology. The author spells out minimal criteria for particular types of reportages, and challenges the argument that journalism and literature have distinct, non-overlapping communicative goals. By showing that the reportage is a hybrid text type that seeks to inform, educate, and entertain, this study advances a re-conceptualization of journalism and literature as two fields with permeable borders.

Interdisciplinary approaches to the intersection of space and experience, which comprise an emerging research topic in the study of culture, are few and far between. This conceptual volume maps the rapidly developing international field of research related to the presentation and representation of spatial experience as well as the experiential interfaces of space and experience – particularly in light of new directions in research, which include the exploration of space as a ‘cultural-theoretical’ or ‘psychogeographical’ category. Far from merely revisiting the key concepts of space and experience within the study of culture, Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience highlights their interdisciplinary overlaps, discusses crucial (historical) practices linked to both notions, and explores the concepts’ positions within phenomena of transformation and materialization. Drawing on specific objects of inquiry, scholars from a wide range of culturally oriented disciplines provide theoretical frameworks for the intersection of space and experience and shed light on experience as a cross-disciplinary concept and as an affective and corporeal practice. Moreover, by revisiting well-known urban places, they illuminate topological imaginaries and concrete materialities in the study of literature and culture. In doing so, they examine the ramifications of the theoretical articulations of the spatial turn for the concept of experience.

Concepts are indispensable tools for literary and cultural studies scholars. Far from serving only heuristic purposes, they fulfil a range of important functions: Firstly, concepts are historically determined cultural constructs that both shape and are shaped by the theories and cultures out of which they emerge. Moreover, concepts serve a purpose. They validate, question and subvert established power relations and hierarchies of norms and values; they construct and challenge knowledge (cultures); they are involved in the formation, dissolution and emergence of new research fields and disciplines. The present volume on the reframing of concepts in literary and cultural studies bears witness to the fact that concepts are by no means stable entities. They are best understood as cognitive constructs and models for thought that travel between (academic) cultures, communities and disciplines. The ongoing trend toward internationalization and globalization in the humanities, the move toward greater interdisciplinarity as well as the growing influence of intermedialization processes on literary and cultural products and practices have involved a constant (re)framing of concepts, theories, models and methods. Against this backdrop, theorizing and analyzing conceptual transfers are crucial issues for understanding ‘reframing’ – that is, the implicit processes underneath the essential human practice of making ‘meaning’ and ‘worlds’.

Narratives in general and the postmodern, hybrid genre of literary non-fiction in particular supply the ideas that delineate the important themes of our culture. Vehicles of knowledge, values, and beliefs, works of literary non-fiction formulate philosophical themes, define what we consider to be existential problems, and construct our cultural worldmodels. This study analyzes value construction in literary non-fiction in different types of media: literary non-fiction novel, photo narrative, graphic novel, hypertext. Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN) is an analytical framework specifically designed for shedding light on the worldmaking potential of literary non-fiction. CEN is a valuable tool for researchers who want to keep both the normative function of ways of worldmaking and the conditions of mediality that shape cultural world-construction firmly in view. CEN is able to address not only many of the pressing questions that an ethical or critical analysis alone could not resolve, but it also enables scholars to work independently of a conception of narratology that privileges either form or content.