Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik

University of Freiburg
English literature and Narratology

Internal Senior Fellow
October 2019 – July 2020

E-Mail: monika.fludernik@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 31.08.2020

Curriculum Vitae

Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg/Germany. She is also the director of the graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration (GRK 1767). She studied English language and literature, Indo-European Philology, Mathematics and History in her home town, Graz (Austria) and in Oxford. Her PhD supervisor was Professor F. K. Stanzel. Her PhD thesis was submitted in 1982. She then moved to a position as assistant professor at the University of Vienna, where she specialized in American literature. Her habilitation was completed in 1992, following which she took up a Humboldt fellowship in Freiburg in the context of the SFB 321 (“Übergänge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit”). In 1994 she was appointed as professor at the University of Freiburg. Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, ‘Law and Literature,’ postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics. Monika Fludernik was director of the SFB 541 (“Identitäten und Alteritäten” (2000-2003). She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park, NC, at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Paris. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and recipient of the Landesforschungspreis Baden-Württemberg as well as the Perkins Prize for the best book in narratology in 1997.

Selected Publications

Monika Fludernik is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996, paperback 2010), Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici’s Creative Oeuvre (2000), An Introduction to Narratology (German ⁴2013, English 2010) and Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (2019, in print). Among her several (co-)edited volumes are Hybridity and Postcolonialism (1998), In the Grip of the Law (2004), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory (2011), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses (2010, paperback 2016) and Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (2015). She has also (co-)edited several special issues of journals, for instance on second-person narrative, on German narratology and on description in Style (1994, 2004, 2014), on metaphor and on approaches to early modern literature in Poetics Today (1999, 2014), on voice in New Literary History (2001) and on symmetry (European Review, forthcoming). Articles have appeared in, among others, Text, Semiotica, The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English Literary History, New Literary History, Textual Practice, ARIEL, Diacritics, and The James Joyce Quarterly.
Her complete bibliography is available here: http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/angl/department/dept-admin-sections/literary-studies/fludernik_chair/publications

FRIAS Project

Diachronic Narratology

At FRIAS Fludernik will be starting her DFG-funded Reinhart-Koselleck project on diachronic narratology. This work intends to look at the development of English narrative from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century from the perspective of functional changes in narrative strategies and to do so by considering several narrative genres and their evolution. The intention is to compare between genres both synchronically and diachronically in order to determine which changes are genre-related and which changes occur in all genres at roughly the same period. In contrast to historical narratologies, focusing on narrative strategies within a particular period (medieval narratology, early modern narratology, etc.), the project wants to highlight the shifts in form and function between different periods and genres.