Qualitative Literary and Media Interaction Research

Interdisciplinary narratology

Broadening the methodological horizon and epistemological habitus the of literary studies in an interdisciplinary manner means to not only pursue inner-philological exchange which unites different philological disciplines on the basis of more or less conventional traditions of philological text exegesis, but also implies engaging in a methodological collaborations with the fields of (inter-) action theoretical, qualitative empirical research such as sociological and psychological studies.

Such collaboration has become all the more promising recently since substantial fractions of these empirical fields have turned more hermeneutical and are not any longer as predominantly quantitative and statistical than before. Qualitative-empirical research’s methodology employs approaches of narratological sequence analysis which interpret and/or analyze the oral narratives given by individuals; it thus is hermeneutical in essence – albeit in a more systematic and methodologically rigorous manner. Hence, a potential of cross-disciplinary collaboration comes into sight which may bring together the text-theoretical humanities and the (inter-) action theoretical social and psychological disciplines as well as qualitative methodologies. At any rate, with empirical research in qualitative sociology having thus become hermeneutical in a sense, the old days of unproductive confrontations between the dominant hermeneutical and the small empirical fraction in literary studies may today be resolved – and effectively sublated.

Collaborating on this common theoretical denominator thus enables humanities’ researchers interested in interdisciplinary work to go beyond just discussing conceptual parallels and importing-exporting terminologies from other non-philological fields. Rather multi-method research settings of literary/ aesthetic interaction and teaching research come into sight which operate (inter-) action theoretically both in text analysis and reader/ author case studies.
[Psychotrauma, Narration in the Media, and the Literary Public (2005a), "Das Trauma muss dem Gedächtnis unverfügbar bleiben" (2007a)]

Most favorable for further strengthening this common theoretical denominator is the fact that literary studies at present experience a rekindling of interest in issues of literary narration. There, narration has been conceived as a transgeneric form of human aesthetic activity which encompasses different sorts of text and media and also pertains to other fields than culture studies.

The new interest in narration may serve as a helpful vehicle of interdisciplinarity in the humanities since narratological assumptions and qualitative methods today can be found in many other fields such as historiography, law, various areas of social and media studies, in ethnography, in psychology, in psychotherapy research, psycho-trauma studies, and developmental psychology. In as much literary narratology will be able to effectively profit from this potential and consequently adopt an (inter-) action theoretical concept of literature and art and integrate qualitative and psychological methodologies is still an open question.
[Dissoziative (Medien-) Interaktion (HW 2003e), Psychotrauma, Narration in the Media, and the Literary Public (2005a), Empirisch gestützte psychoanalytische Literaturforschung (2006c), Der Mensch – ein Homo Narrator (2006e), Kulturwissenschaftliche Traumanalysen (2006f), Geisteswissenschaften und Psychologie (2008l)]