'But the noise in the ball-room is really becoming so loud, that we must rush back thither, and see what is the cause of the disturbance'
Join Project Narrative for the annual Founders' Lecture with Monika Fludernik! This event will be hybrid.
The lecture will focus on different types of rhetorical metalepsis in the Victorian novel, elaborating on the insight that nineteenth-century British fiction deploys this device mostly to enhance immersion rather than to break aesthetic illusion. The presentation remind listeners of some key aspects and types of metalepsis and will go on to sketch a scale between inconspicuous forms of metalepsis that are similar to dead metaphors and more foregrounded quasi-ontological types of rhetorical metalepsis like the one in the title of the paper (from Trollope's Pendennis).
Monika Fludernik is Professor emerita of English Literature at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany. Between 2012 and 2021 she served as director of the graduate school "Factual and Fictional Narration" (GRK 1767). Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, 'Law and Literature,' postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics. She is the author of, among others, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction ( Routledge, 1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), An Introduction to Narratology (Routledge, 2009), Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, most recently, Developments in Narrative Structure: From the Thirteenth Century to the Rise of the Novel (Routledge, 2 vols, 2025). In 2024 she was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.
Zoom information:
Meeting ID: 978 9531 4464
Password: 596935