Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology
Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology

Summary/Abstract: Despite the long tradition of narrative poetry, postclassical narratology struggles with acknowledging the genre. I argue that this stems from a common assumption that poeticity functions as an antonym to narrativity, such as when Monika Fludernik locates narrativity and poeticity at opposite ends of a spectrum by suggesting that the point where ‘narrativity can no longer be recuperated by any means’ is where ‘the narrative genre merges with poetry’. Similarly, while critiquing Fludernik’s proposition that experientiality be considered the bedrock of narrativity, Alber inadvertently predicates his argument upon the charge that natural narratology allows ‘almost every poem [to qualify] as a narrative’. Instead of the model according to which poeticity and narrativity are two polar opposites at the ends of a spectrum, I propose that we reconceptualise them as two axes upon which literature might be iterated instead, with varying degrees of poeticity and narrativity present in any given text at any one time.

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