Andererseits

Zusammenfassung

The origins of the prose novel in the sixteenth century are closely connected with the chronological development of Wickram’s narration throughout the history of his oeuvre. The texture of the genre takes shape in the succession of his novels as a combination of heterogenous narrative elements. It accommodates various representations, concepts of meaning, and an experience that is determined by differing case-related clarifications. Narrative coherence is not what drives this process. Such coherence is rather a result of reinforcing certain perspectives and ostentatiously dismissing others. In this sense Wickram’s Der Jungen Knaben Spiegel functions as an overregulated text that essentially repeals opposing actualities and insists on a linear flow of narration. – Further inquiries into Ritter Galmy and Der Goldtfaden concern conceptual dimensions of contradiction, which assign the narrated events as a whole to different perspectives. The selection of one perception over the other is not governed by an apologetic or a subversive treatment of norms. It is rather based on a differentiation of knowledge, which can not be contained in individual truths. It is this situation that is negotiated in the variable model of the prose novel.