Ironie als Mittel politischen Engagements: Der unzuverlaessige Erzaehler im Werk Heinrich von Kleists und Heinrich Boells

This project examines the role of unreliable narration in the works of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and Heinrich Boll (1917-1985) as a form of political engagement. Its first section provides an extensive historical analysis of the scholarship on unreliable narration within the field of narratology. It argues for a shift away from structuralist narratological models and toward a hybrid model of historical, cultural and cognitive narratology. Furthermore, the case is made for a reconceptualization of unreliable narration as a fundamental form of "discrepant awareness" and as the equivalent of dramatic irony in prose. Building on this insight, it locates unreliable narration in the trajectory of avant-gardist and partisan writing. Drawing on concepts of "subversive affirmation", such as Umberto Eco's "communications guerilla warfare", Michel Foucault's "non-positive affirmation", Slavoj Zizek's "over-identification", and Linda Hutcheon's theory of post-modern irony, it argues that unreliable narration is frequently used as a pedagogical tool by way of parodic subversion.;By way of contrast, Heinrich Boll, in his novels Group Portrait with Lady and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, uses a narrator who sees himself as writing in the tradition of Erika Runge, Gunter Wallraff, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and other authors of the wave of "Dokumentarliteratur" that emerged out of a desire for authentic art in the 1960s. By making his narrator fail at establishing a new master narrative, Boll reveals the orthodox and iconographic aspects of realistic writing. At the same time he explores new ways of thinking about society while reminding his readers of the dangers implicit in any change of social power structures.;The subsequent study of the works of Kleist and Boll further substantiates this claim. In trying to conform to the conventions of his time, the narrator in Kleist's journalistic writing and prose repeatedly cites a variety of contemporary genres, such as the "moralische Erzahlung" and the bourgeois tragedy, as well as the aesthetic ideals of German Romanticism. His unreliability, however, allows Kleist not only to circumvent Napoleonic censorship, but also to infiltrate the public discourse and sabotage its codes. A close reading of the novella Michael Kohlhaas reveals how Kleist's narrator makes use of manipulated focalization to steer the reader's sympathies.