Adventure: Violence and Narrative Form

Literaturhaus München, Salvatorplatz 1, Munich

Adventure involves both the fascination of exerting and the fear of suffering violence. Situations of attack and defence or of flight and pursuit are central to most plotlines in adventurous storytelling. At least one of the historical roots of this conception of adventure, the medieval courtly narrative, meets this threat with a practice of culturally regulated violence. The concept of adventure suggests that social conflicts can be miraculously displaced from the ‘civilized’ centre to the wild periphery in order to be settled there by violent means. While it temporarily lifts cultural taboos around aggression and belligerence, adventure endows its protagonists with an unusual resilience towards the destructive physical and psychological effects of violence. In modern experiences of war, however, this form of psycho-somatic wish-fulfilment becomes suspiciously ideological since it denies the reality of trauma.

The 2023 annual conference of the Munich Research Unit Philology of Adventure will examine the many ways in which adventure relates to violence, paying special attention to the violent dimension of narrative form itself. Narrative devices such as cliff-hangers, episodic division and endless repetition have an aggressive potential of their own that must be taken into account.

Conference program