Rezensionen 175 könnten Lobsiens Collingwood-Lektüre zudem dazu nutzen, die literaturwissenschaftliche ebenso wie die trans- und interdisziplinäre Text-Kontext- Debatte differenziert weiterzuführen, liefert sie doch zahlreiche spannende Anregungen zur Beantwortung der Frage, wie diskursanalytisch orientierte Studien textsortenbzw. wissenschafts-spezifische Unterschiede in Bezug etwa auf Relevanzsetzungen, semiotische Verfahren und performative Praktiken intensiver mitberücksichtigen können, als dies bisher oft der Fall ist. Ich jedenfalls wünsche Lobsiens Die Antworten und die Frage viele Leserinnen und Leser, die sich auf die letztlich immer nur scheinbar hermetische Argumentation einlassen und sich dem Prinzip des hier propagierten produktiv-tautologischen Denkens öffnen. Literatur Collingwood, Robin George (1964). ―The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History.‖ In: William Debbins (Ed.). Essays in the Philosophy of History. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 34-56. Collingwood, Robin George (1946). ―Human Nature and History.‖ The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon. 205-231. Katharina Rennhak Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Bergische Universität Wuppertal Jan Alber, Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln, NE/ London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Felicitas Meifert-Menhard Jan Alber‘s Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama constitutes a groundbreaking study of antimimetic, anti-illusionist, and antirealist strategies in literature. Rooted in the analysis of postmodern texts, but consistently and convincingly harking back to earlier periods of literature, Alber‘s book provides a comprehensive and wide-spanning survey of the startlingly pervasive presence of ‗unnatural‘ phenomena in fiction. These phenomena, he argues, not only hold ―unexpected story potential‖ (7), but also challenge our very perception of reality, both as it is represented in fiction and beyond. Far transcending a mere inventory of unnatural strategies throughout the history of fiction, Alber‘s diachronic perspective on impossible fictional occurrences, under which he compares postmodernist impossibilities to those found across earlier historical periods, not only provides a comprehensive survey of the unnatural across literary history, but constitutes a re-definition of the postmodern agenda itself. Such a re-definition is Alber‘s ultimate goal AAA Band 4 2 (201 7 ) Heft 1 Rezensionen 176 in the study, as he aims at ―unearth[ing] the history of the postmodernist rebellion against our natural cognition of the world‖, thereby ―qualify[ing] the stereotypical argument about the antimimetic extravagance of postmodernism‖ (9). He achieves this reconceptualization through connecting, rather than separating, postmodernist strategies with those of earlier literary periods by demonstrating how both functionalize - albeit to very different ends and with very different effects on the reader - fictional impossibilities to challenge conventional realism. In doing so, Alber extends the definition of postmodernism beyond classifications such as those of Waugh (1984) or McHale (1987), who foreground the self-reflexivity or metafictionality of postmodernist narratives. Alber, reaching for a broader understanding of the term, ―define[s] the postmodernist project in terms of the systematic undermining of our ‗natural‘ cognition of the world‖ (8). That is, he reads postmodernism as a fundamental challenge to real-world logic in terms of physical, ontological, spatial, and temporal laws because it consistently confronts us with impossibilities concerning these laws: a speaking human breast (in Philip Roth‘s The Breast, 1972), a house that is able to selftransform and alter its interior space (in Mark Z. Danielewski‘s House of Leaves, 2000), a story running backward in time (in Martin Amis‘ Time‟s Arrow, 1991), to name only a few of his examples (one could add the very recently published Nutshell by Ian McEwan to this list, in which the story is told by an unborn fetus in the womb). Such deviations from what we perceive as logical or ‗natural‘ (Alber concurs that his study is fundamentally based on the notion that ―the world we inhabit is dominated by physical laws, logical principles, and anthropomorphic limitations that are permanent and stable‖; 6) force us to reconsider what we know about the world, making us cognitively ―more flexible‖ (216) in our evaluation of difficult and challenging concepts and situations: the unnatural, Alber argues, ―celebrates the faculty of the imagination‖ (215). This is quite a sweeping claim, but it taps into the very heart of what literature is able to do: to be a playground of ‗what if's‘, an alternative space for trying out ideas that are in reality impossible. Alber‘s study provides a very thorough narratological mapping of this playground. Alber embeds his argument about the postmodernist foregrounding of logical impossibilities into a larger historical context, and it is this context which makes his conceptualization of postmodernism truly innovative. Steering away from the claim that postmodernism constitutes a separation from and rejection of earlier literary endeavors, Unnatural Narrative reads postmodernism as the radicalization of strategies that have been present in literature throughout time; in this sense, postmodernism is understood as a modification, an intensification even, of older literary forms, and not as a repudiation thereof. More specifically, Alber demonstrates how postmodernist texts take up unnatural phenomena and impossibilities present in earlier texts and insert them into a different context, thereby making them ‗strange‘ again in the sense of Shklovsky‘s ostranenie or defamiliarization. He convincingly argues that unnatural occurrences such as speaking inanimate objects, physically impossible beings such as animals blended with humans, Rezensionen 177 physically impossible objects and geographies such as flying islands, and unnatural chronologies are by no means exclusive to the domain of postmodernism, but have been present in literary history through time. What differentiates earlier presentations of the unnatural is that in the periods leading up to postmodernism, the unnatural tends to have become conventionalized in terms of genre - the beast fable, the satire, children‘s literature, the gothic novel, the science fiction novel - and has thereby become familiar and accepted as a generic particularity rather than a disturbance to the reader‘s conception of reality: in these earlier literary periods, ―the represented unnatural scenario or event has already become conventionalized and turned into a perceptual frame. In other words, the process of blending has already taken place, and we have converted the unnatural into a basic cognitive category that is part of certain generic conventions. In such narratives the unnatural no longer strikes us as being strange or unusual‖ (49-50). In contrast to this kind of ‗normalized‘ unnaturalness easily accepted by the reader, postmodernist unnaturalness achieves its defamiliarizing effect by being placed into an otherwise wholly familiar or ‗natural‘ context - namely, realism. ―[P]ostmodernist narratives‖, thus Alber‘s conclusive conceptualization of the term, ―not only consistently project unnatural scenarios and events but tend to form part of an intertextual endeavor that radicalizes physical, logical, or human impossibilities that have already been conventionalized in well-known historical genres and defamiliarizes these impossibilities again by transferring them to realist contexts where we do not expect them to occur‖ (225; italics in original). Such a perspective on postmodernism helpfully and productively serves to tie the postmodernist program into the web of literary history rather than setting it apart as merely reactionary, redefining postmodernism as ―connected to the history of literature through manifestations of the unnatural‖ (13) instead of presenting it as antagonistically severed from past literary endeavors. Postmodernism thus becomes metafictional in a double sense: not only because it foregrounds its own fictionality, but also ―because it harks back to the history of literature and recycles conventionalized impossibilities from earlier genres by transferring them to - or blending them with - realist contexts‖ (227). Apart from this diachronic approach, Alber also provides a synchronic perspective on the unnatural in fiction. He achieves this perspective first by defining the unnatural through relating it to other existing theoretical and analytical concepts (such as realism, narrativity, Shklovsky‘s ostranenie, metafiction, and anti-illusionism, among others; cf. 22), and second, by offering reading or interpretative strategies for coming to terms with impossible phenomena in literature. These reading strategies are then consistently applied to specific example texts in Part Two of the volume. Concretely, Alber (building on prior work by Ryan and Yacobi) identifies nine different reading strategies that help to process and make sense of unnatural occurrences in fiction. Each of these strategies offers an approach to dealing with impossibilities presented in a text, and Alber takes recourse to a variety of analytical tools and theoretical concepts, such as cognitive narratology (by which the whole of his story is thoroughly informed), genre Rezensionen 178 theory, literary periodization, and reader-response theory, to build his analytical tool-kit for the interpretation of unnatural narratives. As he concedes, the strategies are neither mutually exclusive (that is, readers may find more than one of them helpful in dealing with the same text), nor are they meant as fully comprehensive explanations of the unnatural - rather, they ―lead to provisional explanations that illustrate that the unnatural is not completely alien to our thinking‖ (55; italics in original). It is this kind of interpretative sensibility that makes Unnatural Narratives such a valuable contribution to the field of narratology, as Alber consistently manages to steer clear of broad-brush generalizations in his analysis while, at the same time, achieving analytical depth and differentiation by drawing on a multitude of concrete textual examples in Part Two. Part Two divides up the presentation of unnatural narrative features into four sections: ‗Impossible Narrators and Storytelling Scenarios‘, ‗Antirealist Figures‘, ‗Unnatural Temporalities‗, and ‘Antimimetic Spaces‗. Each of these subchapters provides a thorough investigation of unnatural phenomena in narrative texts, beginning with examples from postmodernism before turning back in time to older examples, demonstrating how texts from previous literary periods have functionalized the unnatural for their own purposes. The argument in each chapter is constant throughout: postmodernism takes up impossibilities that have been conventionalized in older forms of literature and provides a fresh - and often startling - perspective on these impossibilities by blending them with realism. Alber‘s examples cover a broad range of periods and genres, deepening and solidifying his theoretical claims in Part One of the study. The analytical readings thus concretize the theory; at the same time they present a comprehensive literary history of the unnatural in fiction, spanning an impressive timeline from Old English literature to postmodernism and beyond. Alber‘s study of the unnatural in fiction provides a valuable contribution to the fields of narratology, literary theory, and literary history. It not only fills a pressing gap in the theorization and analysis of impossible phenomena in literature, but challenges and reconceptualizes the very history of postmodernism itself. Felicitas Meifert-Menhard Institut für Englische Philologie LMU München