Emergent Remembering II. Saying the Unsayable

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Pfänder
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391351163

This proposal continues the SNF/DFG-funded research project Emergent Remembering. Fragmented Syntax and Textual Production in Contemporary Literature and Oral History (Emergentes Erinnern. Fragmentierte Syntax und textuelle Herstellung in Gegenwartsliteratur und Oral History) with a new point of focus. The project group, consisting of literary scholars from Zurich and linguists from Freiburg, previously conducted a comparative investigation of the production of autobiographical memories in literature and interviews, on the basis of memory narratives in French, but also in Italian and German, that focus on the period of World War II. The collaboration between literary and linguistic researchers proved highly fruitful. Hence, building on the achievements of the first project, as documented in thirteen articles and two books (PhD theses), we will now move on to examine more generally emergent remembering in literary and oral history memory narratives from the perspective of the unsayable. For the continuation of the project, we thus start from a fundamental challenge of text production that lies in the (un)sayability of the extreme experiences of violence suffered in war, forced labour, deportation, and concentration camp internment. We ask how narrators of eyewitness interviews and literary narratives can master the challenge of telling the unsayable and making it present, by creating specific forms of recipient design. This has not been done before, especially considering that our various corpora have not been compared previously. Our preliminary work has shown that there are certain techniques for coping with the challenge of unsayability which are applied in both corpora. For the joint project work, we will focus on three of these techniques: (1) the explicit naming of the unsayability of the experience, (2) the choice of only one salient aspect of the narrated situation, which as a pars pro toto makes the experience comprehensible, and (3) the evocation and presentification of a situation, which is not reported but re-enacted through a textual accumulation of sensory experiences or by the oral narrator’s body language. The research goal is twofold: on the one hand, we will work out how the very diverse medial conditions of reception and production shape the narrative techniques; on the other hand, we will show that despite these medial differences, one factor remains constant: the inclusion of the recipient.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Thomas Klinkert