Metalepse

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Meta lepse or in Greek metalepsis (literally "takeover") is a term from classical rhetoric that was used ina new wayin narrative theory . Since the term has already been used in different contexts within rhetoric, a total of three interrelated uses can be distinguished:

  • Metalepsis as a form of improper speech, as a figure of meaning or trope of classical rhetoric .
  • The metalepse as a term for a special relationship between the narrative levels in narrative theory .
  • The oldest use of the term is in the theory of the court speech. See also the article Statuslehre (rhetoric) .

For the concept of classical rhetoric, the Greek form is preferred, for that of narrative theory the "metalepse", which is also used in French, but the other form is also used.

The metalepsis of classical rhetoric

The metalepsis or metalepse is defined differently in classical rhetoric:

  • As a replacement of a word by a partial synonym , which is not meant in the context, as if one were to say "The meal is meeting" instead of "The court is in session". This definition can be found for the first time in Tryphon in the 1st century BC. BC, in his writing Peri tropon , and was taken up by Quintilian . The latter cites as examples condescending puns with the meaning of proper names (e.g. Verres , Eber, or Catus , clever), which were obviously frowned upon by the Romans.
  • As an allusion across several mediating ideas, quasi as "remote metonymy ", so if, to cite one of the most frequently cited examples, Virgil speaks of ears of corn at one point ( Eclogues 1, 69), but by this means harvesting and transferring years . In Quintilian's discussion of the metaleps in the Institutio oratoria , this conception is already in place; it is favored as the main meaning by Aelius Donatus in the 4th century, who also mentions the Virgil example.
  • As a representation of the preceding by the following and vice versa. In terms of content, going back to Philipp Melanchthon , this definition is mostly cited from César Dumarsais' Des Tropes ou des différents sens of 1729.

The former meaning was often presented theoretically in the successor of Quintilian, but his rejection of this figure was communicated in the same way. He calls them "extremely rare and improper, but more common among the Greeks" ( Institutio oratoria 8.6.37). As a Greek example he uses the naming of the centaur Cheiron (which also means "lesser") as "the stupid". At most, he sees a sensible use in comedy (ibid. 39).

George Puttenham (1529–1590) understands metalepsis in his influential book The Arte of English Poesie from 1589 in the second meaning and therefore translates it as the farfet , "the far-fetched".

Quintilian already wrote that the metaleps "opens the way, as it were, from one trope to another" ( Institutio oratoria 8.6.37). Giambattista Vico , in his Institutiones oratoriae of 1711, summarizes the first and second word meanings to form the more general but also precise definition: the metaleps is a "link between several tropes" ( plurium troporum nexus , § 42). In the chapter "Poetic Chronology" of his Scienza nuova he emphasizes the "evolutionary rationality" (A. Burkhardt) of the Virgil example by pointing out that in a peasant society the years after the harvests must have been counted before one abstract term "year" evolved.

The metaleps of narrative theory

In literary studies , a metalepse is always spoken of when (at least) two separate narrative levels (e.g. the narrator's extradiegetic level and the fictional intradiegesis of what he is telling) are mixed up in a way contrary to logic. The term "narrative Metalepse" ("métalepse narrative") was introduced by Gérard Genette in "Discours du récit" ( Figures III , 1972).

In Genette, the "narrative metalepse" describes the crossing of the boundary between a fictional internal world and a likewise fictional framework of the narrator. On the one hand, this can mean that the narrator (as a character or even just the voice of a fictional text, not to be confused with the empirical author!) Interferes in the plot of his story. This is paradoxical in that the narrator gives up simulating factuality and reveals that his story is only fictional. On the other hand, for Genette the motivic reversal of this penetration into a fictional world, namely the stepping out of a figure of the internal narrative into the (also fictional) 'reality' of the frame narrative, counts to metaleps. As an example of this second case, Genette names Julio Cortázar's story "Continuidad de los Parques" from Final del Juego ( end of the game ), in which the characters kill their reader. In his more associative essay Métalepse from 2004, Genette extends this approach to the description of films and other works of art, e.g. B. Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo , but it also blurs the conceptual clarity of 1972.

John Hollander understands the metaleps in The Figure of Echo as a literary allusion and a cultural echo, thus bringing it close to the topos .

Related to the Metalepse is the narrative mise en abyme (French: "send into the abyss" in the sense of "extend into infinity / bottomlessness") according to André Gide (theoretically explicated by Lucien Dällenbach). The name is based on the heraldry and refers to the repetition of the same coat of arms in miniature on the shield. Accordingly, the narrative mise en abyme stands for a text that suggests containing itself again (reduced in scale). Since such a potentiation would have to lead to infinity and no printed text can be infinite, a "mise en abyme" can only be hinted at in literature. A similar effect can also be observed in a mirror alignment, in which your own reflection is repeated almost infinitely and becomes smaller from reflection to reflection.

Jorge Luis Borges gives an interesting reference to the function of metaleps (but without giving the phenomenon this term, which was later coined by Genette) in "Magias parciales del Quixote" (Spanish: "Partial magic in Don Quixote"): "Why is it so concerned that the map is included in the map and the 1001 Nights in the book A Thousand and One Nights ? Why is it that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote , Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet ? I think the cause found out too have: such exchanges suggest that if the characters of a fiction can be readers or spectators, [also] we, their readers or spectators, can be fictional "(cf. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas , Vol. 2, Buenos Aires : Emecé 1989, p. 47).

Metaleptic structures do not only exist in narrative literature. Examples can be found u. a. already in Ludwig Tieck's early romantic dramas. The play Six Persons Looking for an Author (1921) by Luigi Pirandello can be viewed as a further example text with dramatic metal episodes .

literature

  • A. Burkhardt: Metalepse . In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Volume 5, Tübingen 2001, Sp. 1087-1096.
  • Gérard Genette : Figures III . Paris 1972, pp. 243–246 (in German in ders: Die Erzählung . Edited by Jochen Vogt, Munich 1988).
  • Gérard Genette: Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction . Paris 2004.
  • John Hollander : The Figure of Echo. A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After . Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1981.
  • Lucien Dällenbach: Le récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme . Paris 1977.
  • John Pier, Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Ed.): Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la representation . Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris 2005.
  • Sonja Klimek: The metaleps in contemporary children's and youth literature - a paradoxical narrative phenomenon in the age of medialization . In: July (from vol. 2: inter-July ). Journal for International Children's and Youth Literature Research 1 (2009), pp. 5–22.
  • Sonja Klimek: Paradoxical storytelling. The metaleps in fantastic literature . Mentis-Verlag , Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-89785-119-1 . (= Explicatio book series . Analytical studies on literature and literary studies) .
  • Sonja Klimek, Karin Kukkonen (eds.): Metalepsis in Popular Culture . Verlag Walter de Gruyter , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-025278-1 . (= Book series Narratologia , vol. 28).
  • Bastian Reinert: Metaleptic Dialogues. Reality as a reflection process in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's verse epic The Doctor's Legacy . In: Edited Tradition. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's literary historical positioning . ed. by Claudia Liebrand, Irmtraud Hnilica and Thomas Wortmann, Ferdinand Schoeningh, Paderborn 2010, pp. 75–89.
  • Siegmar Döpp : Metaleps as significant elements of late Latin literature . In: Ute E. Eisen / Peter von Möllendorff (eds.): Over the border. Metalepse in text and image media of antiquity. Transferring Borders. Metalepsis in Texts and Artifacts of Antiquity (Narratologia 39). Berlin 2013, pp. 431–465.

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