Fuchs, Florian. Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature

Extract

Fable, novella, proverb, fairy tale. Florian Fuchs invites us to think beyond generic considerations and to dive deep in the fabric of texts, literature and reality. The result is a timely exploration of short form narratives: not only what they owe to Aristotelian ars topica, but also how these forms adapted it to suit and impact the real world, the here and now of modern readers.

Chapter 1 opens with an overview of the Aristotelian ars topica. Its gradual disappearance from the eighteenth century onward allows short form narratives to retain one of its vital features, topical speech: a ‘mode of addressing the present’ (p. 16). The afterlife of the ars topica leads to the spatial, historical, social and political relevance of short forms in the ‘living, present moment’ (p. 17). The re-evaluation of the fable in Chapter 2 reveals its topical potential beyond a mere didactic function. The fable is reconsidered as a ‘modern form of storytelling that is both philosophical and poetical’ and has been ‘symptomatically overlooked’ (p. 19) as Hans Blumenberg showed in the 1980s. Using Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist’s fabulatory experimentations as case studies, Fuchs shows that, from the late eighteenth century onward, the fable is the first short form to lead back to pre-Aristotelian ainos: ‘a story told in a specific instance for practical use’ (p. 19). It becomes a ‘mode of speech’ that can speak to the present (p. 19). From actualization to agency, form, argumentation and perception, subsequent chapters each focus on different qualities of the ars topica that were inherited in various short narrative genres. At the heart of Chapter 3 are novellas which centre on one narrative incident, spurring the reader both to pause reality and to use that incident as a frame of reference to question or act in the real world. Chapter 4 presents proverbs as micronarrative agents, ‘a fictional return […] of topical knowledge as an initiator of fictional narration’ but also as ‘a prosaic, realistic speech of the people’ (p. 21). The topical qualities of the fairy tale, timeless and placeless, have the power to alter our own perception of reality, as Chapter 5 shows by examining Walter Benjamin’s overlooked fairy tale theory. Finally, Chapter 6 establishes that, by 1900, short form narratives fully embrace topical discourse and adapt the ars topica, as exemplified by James Joyce’s epiphanies and Hannah Arendt’s enacted stories.