Approaches of classical (Genette 1972; Schmid 2010), postclassical (Herman 1999; Nünning/Nünning 2002; Alber/Fludernik 2010) and medievalist narratology (Vance 1987; Vitz 1989; Schulz 2015; Contzen/Kragl 2018) allow to analyze texts in terms of content (story) and language (discourse) and to scrutinize the basic spatiotemporal schemes of the works under investigation. Apart from Genette’s (see also Fludernik 2005; Honold 2010; Werner 2011) very basic categories of “order,” “duration,” “frequency” and “time of narration” (Müller 1968; Werner 2015), approaches of cognitive narratology (Herman 2007; 2010; [2009] 2014, Ogata 2016; Gebauer 2021), that share a focus on the mind-narrative nexus in storytelling practices, are at the core of our interests. One such approach is what Sternberg (1992: 529) calls the three “master functions of narrative” to evoke narrative effects, i.e. prospection (suspense), retrospection (curiosity), and recognition (surprise), successfully applied by a team member to medieval tales (Balmes 2021). Further areas of focus are gendered constructions of mental worlds and questions of fictionality, probed by the PI of this project (Müller 2009, 2015). The latter of which help to determine whether time-related emotions in specific works/genres are related to their degree of fictionality. Finally, inspired by Bakhtin’s concept of the literary chronotope, we look at chronotopic “images of affections” (Keunen 2010: 43–44) that help to specify temporal conflicts by showing the degree of temporal acceleration and spatial saturation of specific chronotopic paradigm scenarios (cf. Müller 2020). Further narratological approaches that will be applied in the project by some but not all team members are Medievalist Narratology, Gender-Narratology, Intertextuality, and Possible Worlds Theory.
