Short storytelling in the 21st century – conditions for the emergence and general potentials of short narrative forms in the present

DissDissertation

Short storytelling in the 21st century – conditions for the emergence and general potentials of short narrative forms in the present

The dissertation project sets itself the task of investigating the current situation, i.e. the conditions for the emergence and appropriation potentials of short narrative forms, from a literary-sociological perspective using a deductive mixed-method approach. To this end, the literary-historical development and understanding of short narrative forms in theory, practice and from the perspective of their authors since 1945 will first be traced and then a catalog of characteristics distilled from this. The general approach to the structural phenomenon of brevity, its specific intrinsic values and their consequences for short narrative forms in the present are concretized through an empirical analysis of the field of short narrative forms. Based on Bourdieu’s field-analytical studies, data on publications of short narrative forms in four relevant sub-publics (book market, magazine market, literary events, social reading platforms) from the observation period (2008-2023) are collected, stored in a relational database and statistically evaluated in order to derive the strategies of and relations between the actors involved in the creation, dissemination and reception. In addition, a broad text corpus is derived from the publications examined and evaluated using a computer-aided procedure (topic modeling) with regard to the material and thematic dimensions. With the qualitative classification of the combined results of the empirical field analysis, topic modeling and their exemplary presentation by means of in-depth drilling (individual case analyses), the work provides insights into the socio-cultural, economic and media framework conditions of short narrative forms and their possible effects/functions in the differentiated public spheres of the present.