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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter August 29, 2014

Der künstliche Baum

Höfischer Roman und poetisches Erzählen

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Abstract

According to Konrad’s von Würzburg description of the artificial tree in the city of Troy, narrative practices in courtly romances are to be comprehended as an artificial reconstruction of truth. Since reality is conceived as an order of immutable regularities in the underlying metaphysical episteme, truth could be invented in a plausible way by referring to probability. As Latin tradition allowed poets a broader use of this option than historiographers, learned poets exemplified true regular relations between actions and their consequences by inventing particular factual truth on the basis of probability knowledge from the very beginning of the history of courtly romances. In this way, vernacular romances of antiquity produced a concept of poetical narration of the truth from the learned concept of historia. While the orders of knowledge facilitated the invention of particular factual truth, they made it impossible to conceive the invention of true general regularities. For this reason and according to the pattern of fabula, true general regularities could also be exemplified by invented untrue facts. Essentially, treating Matière de Bretagne implied a decision for this concept of poetical narration, although poets tended to introduce Breton narratives as historiae as well. Because of the differences between premodern and modern epistemic contexts, it must be considered unlikely that the claims of truth and the cognitive values of poetical narration in courtly romances can be explained in an adequate way by terms of fictionality or by concepts of imagination rooted in modern aesthetics. Rather, historical narratology should try to develop methods for reconstructing correlations between cultural probability knowledge and the rhetorical concepts of inventio and evidentia. Since human praxis (understood in an Aristotelian manner) may be conceived as the main subject of premodern narratives, a praxeological narratology might study the topics of social actions in narratives as discoursivizations of practical probability knowledge.

Online erschienen: 2014-8-29
Erschienen im Druck: 2014-8-1

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