Dual narration
As a dual narrative (engl. "Dual Narrative") is (rarely, documentation) referred to in the literature a narrative in which an equal starting point from two perspectives is told or seen - that can be two people or the same person in two stages . The emergence of this term can be described as emergent , but can clearly be assigned to US literary reviews. It is unknown who first coined this term; The term is often found in reviews in English.
A well-known author who used dual narration as a stylistic device in several works is Charles Dickens . In his book Great Expectations ( Great Expectations ) from 1861, the same person is described in different ages (1st and 2nd part), only in the third part of puzzling correlations dissolve first. Another novel of this type by Dickens is Bleak House .
In contemporary literature, the best-known book is Eiskalt (youth novel) ( Stone Cold ) by Robert Swindells (1993), in which a murder is told simultaneously from the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim. Here the stylistic device “dual narration” is used so clearly that practically all reviews refer to it and this novel has become a teaching example for dual narration in English-language literary studies.
Johanna Schopenhauer's novel Gabriele (Leipzig 1819–1820) is one of the best-known works in German that have been reviewed under the aspect of “Dual Narration” or “Dual Narrative” .
Dual narration and social empathy or narrative empathy
Fritz Breithaupt explains social empathy as the most important basis for a humane social system . In doing so, he attaches great importance to the literature of a society and in particular to literature with a pronounced dual narration.
According to Breithaupt, social empathy arises - in contrast to the pure "two-person empathy" (mother / child etc.) that arises - as a product of "taking sides in a three-person scene". Breithaupt calls this form of empathy " narrative empathy ".
Dual narration triggers the reader to take sides through the particularly pronounced view of the two perspectives of the protagonist (sometimes also the antagonist ) and particularly clearly creates the "threesome scene" necessary for the emergence of narrative empathy or social empathy.
According to Breithaupt, literature can therefore be classified between introspective or first-person (poetry, lyric, today also many music texts) on the one hand and dual narrative on the other. The former creates more “two-part empathy”, the latter creates “three-part or narrative empathy” in the reader or viewer, which has a societal effect on social systems.
Individual evidence
- ↑ see e.g. B. Robert Higbie, "Dickens and imagination," 1998, p. 112.
- ↑ cf. z. B. "English", Kath Jordan, 2002, chap. 6.6.
- ↑ cf. the essay "Resignation and Rebellion, the dual narrative of Johanna Schopenhauer's Gabriele " by Cindy Brewer in "The German quarterly 75", 2002, No. 2, pp. 181-195
- ^ Fritz Breithaupt, Cultures of Empathy, 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-29506-9 , pp. 152 ff