Barbara Schmid

Personal information

First name

Barbara

Last name

Schmid

Narratological interest

My research deals with genre-history in the middle ages and early modern period, especially with autobiographies, biographies, house-books and family-books. I am interested in the methods of narratology which allow us to understand how a "story" and "story-telling" works. In early autobiographies authors describe different aspects of their life in standardised ways, combining different forms of writing and telling. The medieval and early modern texts are testimonies of narrative traditions which were handed down from generation to generation. One of the central questions is that of the perspective of the narrator: It shifts when the author decides to introduce the autobiographical writings of their ancestors in their own texts. This is when the focus opens towards the large field of intertextuality, and towards the question whether the early autobiographical text has to be described as fiction or narrative of facts. I have worked with theories by Gérard Genette, Käthe Hamburger, André Jolles, Clemens Lugowski and others and therefore am interested in the history of narratology, as well.