Narratology asks about the principles and structures of narration in a given text, image, film or similar communicative sign systems. In addition to the classical hermeneutic question of its content (the what? or the represented), the question of the form or mode of the respective narrative work (the how? or the representation) comes into focus. In this, a broad selection of theoretically established categories can be drawn upon, which can be used to describe elements of narrative structure across various times and literary genres.

The narrative categories presented below lead to the key narratological themes. The following link will take you to general Information and Illustrations .

The analysis of narrative structures can not only help to deepen the understanding about the inherent structure of the respective object of investigation. Moreover, the results of narratological investigations can be used for heuristic purposes in order to address overarching questions in an interdisciplinary context. For example, the aesthetics of representations of violence (in Catullus, Ovid, or Lucan's civil war epic De bello civile, among others) can be made explicit with the categories of time and space and thereby linked to modern concepts of sociological theory ('time of violence'). Questions about the '(post-)modernity' of ancient poetry thereby open comparative perspectives for the history of narrative also in diachronic and intercultural terms.

The following overview gathers a selection of fields of research in literary and cultural studies that play a role in the current projects of the working group and that are linked in one way or another to the method of (post-)structuralist narratology.

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