The Forms of Friendship How women’s friendships shape and challenge narrativity in contemporary German and Anglophone literature

Since the narrative form of women’s stories is historically entangled with heteronormative romance, what happens to narrative form when women’s stories are told in relation to their friends? This thesis explores the narrative innovation that accompanies portrayals of women’s friendships in contemporary novels and memoirs. The first chapter, ‘Surviving Marriage Narratively’ contrasts Lara Feigel’s 2020 adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 The Group with McCarthy’s original text, looking at portrayals of friendship and of how it inflects women’s narratives after marriage. The focus is on the shift from the third-person to a first-person narrator (Miller 2003,chio 2020), and the entanglement of narrative structure with gender and sexuality, especially in relation to Lanser’s work (1996, 2018, 2020). Chapter Three, ‘Relational Epistemologies’, shifts the focus from gender to race, and explores how the protagonists’ friendship in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021) subverts racialised stereotypes. Building on Lanser’s and Rimmon- Kenan’s ‘Narratology at the Checkpoint’ (2019), I show that the novel challenges the conventions of reading and interpreting in the Western tradition, especially with respect to Genette’s categories of narrative events (1980). The third chapter, ‘Race is Bigger than Our Friendship’, then looks at racialised subjectivities in the narration of a shared memoir in the first-person plural in Aminatou Sow’s and Ann Friedman’s Big Friendship (2020). Focusing on the fictionality of the we-voice (Dwivedi, 2020) and racialised subjectivities (Du Bois, 1903), this chapter explores the entanglement of the narrative arc with white ignorance. The fourth and final chapter, ‘Narrating Networks’, focuses on Paula Irmschler’s Superbusen (2020), drawing together the narratological insights of the previous chapters to provide an exploration of women’s friendships as narrative form. Drawing on Halberstam (2005) and Levine (2015), I argue that Irmschler’s novel suggests (women’s) friendships as a way of thinking and living in networks that resists the binaries of heteronormative narratives, and allows the co-narration of diverging experiences.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Schwarz, Miriam

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Colvin, Sarah

• Contemporary Literature
• Friendship
• Gender
• Narrative Voice
• Narratology
• Plot
• Racism

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c725bc79-7403-49bd-b6b4-05ad06a926fe/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.123462

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392927