The article adresses the literary theoretical issue of unreliable narration in first-person fictional narratives. The theoretical discussion is prefaced by an interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s narrative poem “Journey of the Magi”. The interpretation concludes that the narrator, contrary to critical consensus, qualifies as unreliable according to Wayne Booth’s original definition. Having thus opened ...

The point of departure for this article is Peter U. Beicken's description of Franz Kafka's distinctive narrative rhetoric. It examines the extent to which Beicken's description can be applied to Kafka's short text "A Hunger Artist". The article argues that Beicken's description is relevant to the understanding of this text, but that this particular text also deviates from his description in interesting ...

This article attempts to make sense of the speaker in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s «Wandrers Nachtlied II» and Rainer Maria Rilke’s «Herbst». It starts from the observation that the utterance in both poems combines a rhetorical function with a space-creating function, and that both functions participate in the poem’s organization as a communicative act in decisive ways. My conclusion is that the ...