This article proposes a reconceptualization of the narrative form that Ian Watt saw as constitutive of the novel as it emerged in the eighteenth century: its “circumstantial view of life.” Elaborating on the structural similarity between the Aristotelian peripeteia and Roland Barthes’s, Paul Ricœur’s, and Frank Kermode’s theory of narrative as an operation that transforms chance into destiny, the article argues that the circumstantial view of life is what constitutes the narrative peripeteia in the novel. The author explores what this means for our understanding of the function of narrative transformations in the novel through examples from the eighteenth-century German novel and the theoretical discussion surrounding it.

This article puts forth a theory and history of the experiential moment of romance, traced from Homer’s Odyssey to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Differing from other forms of the moment that have been bequeathed by Western tradition—such as kairos, conversio, the Aristotelian pair peripeteia and anagnorisis, or the Romantic Augenblick—the experiential moment foregrounds experientiality within a self-enclosed and atelic temporality: a time that goes nowhere. Building on previous theories of epic and romance that see them as conflicting temporal forms, the first part of the article demonstrates how the experiential moment in traditional romance always exists in tension with the temporality of the epic project of the collective. The second part proposes a new reading of Rousseau by showing how his three works, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les Confessions, and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire not only continue this conflict into the modern period but also begin to reverse the old hierarchical relationship between epic and romance or the temporality of the collective and that of the experiencing individual in her individual consciousness. It is argued that Rousseau in his final work the Rêveries strives to liberate the experiential moment from epic temporality altogether and thereby lays the foundation for a wholly new way of approaching the moment in literary modernity.

Of all the major literary genres, the novel is the only one that has no poetics of its own and thus no given place in the canon of genres established in Antiquity. Formally speaking, the novel emerged as a homeless genre—a fact with which it has had to cope ever since the rise in popularity of romance during the Italian renaissance. How this homelessness is dealt with is however not an historical constant but undergoes substantial change throughout the history of the novel. One watershed moment in this history takes place in the eighteenth century during the so-called modernization of the novel. In this period, the formal homelessness of the novel goes from being a problem to be solved externally in poetological treatises—an attempt to give the novel a place within tradition après coup—to being a problem internal to the novel. The present essay considers how this fact forever changes what it means for the novel to have a form by turning to the eighteenth-century German writer and critic Friedrich Blanckenburg and his seminal work Essay on the Novel. 

Der Band untersucht das Modernwerden des deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert als eine narrativierte Auseinandersetzung zwischen Zufall und Romanform. Die ‚Arbeit am Zufall‘ beschreibt, wie der moderne Roman sich selbst formt, indem er auf verschiedene Weise Zufälligkeit theoretisiert und narrativiert. Zufall ist in dieser Hinsicht sowohl das, was im Roman an Form gewinnen muss, aber auch das unerschöpfliche Potential, was wiederum den modernen Roman ständig erneuerbar macht.

The present dissertation deals with the relationship between chance and the form of the German novel during its modernization in the eighteenth century. In novels by Wieland, Moritz and Goethe, ‘chance’ poses a complex of problems that the novels process in the course of their narrations and that in turn also influences how the German novel itself, as a new genre in the late eighteenth century, began to gain definition. The overarching thesis is that neither chance as it appears in the novel nor the novel itself have a fixed form in modernity, but that both arise as part of the same dynamic and evolve in interaction with one another. In this context, the ‘work on chance’ describes the process whereby the novels under consideration seek to define their form by exploring different ways that chance can be given shape in the narrative. The work on chance is thus at the same time an examination of the possibilities of the form of the novel, which the narratives of Wieland, Moritz and Goethe undertake in three different ways. What ultimately unites them is the way that the form of the novel emerges as the protagonist of the story being told, thus making the novel itself the hero of the modern German novel.

Ever since Erich Auerbach's harsh verdict in Mimesis, the German realist novel has been seen as a peripheral phenomenon in the history of nineteenth-century literature. Criticized for being too idealizing, insular, or simply irrelevant, it has gone down in literary history as a less modern form of realism, not being able to join the realist traditions of French, British, and Russian literature as a harbinger of modernity. In my paper, I want to challenge this view by rereading Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest. I want to show how Fontane's novel can be read as not just one more and rather belated example of the novel of adultery, but as an intricate reworking of the realist subgenre. Proceeding from Frederic Jameson's theory of realism, the paper argues that Effi Briest takes up generic elements of its precursors in order to set itself off against them. It stages an internal reconstruction of the genre that through negation opens up a space for writing not yet beset by the tradition. By doing this, Fontane not only finds a new way of attaining the proverbial l'effet du reel, but also places the novel of adultery at the cusp of what is to become Modernism.