The starting point of the project is to analyze literary works that in some fundamental respect diverge from the (unmarked) characteristics of narrative. On the experimental side of the problematic, the latest historical, thematic, and formal approaches to the phenomenon will be accounted for (The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 2012 Gibbons 2011). 2013) in narrative theory are crucial in this respect. Especially the competing definitions of narrativity (Pratt, Fludernik, Herman, Ryan see Theorizing Narrativity, 2008 ) and the debate around “natural” and “unnatural” narratology (Fludernik 1996 Alber & al. Theoretically and methodologically, the project utilizes and develops recent contributions to narrative theory and to the poetics of experimentality. My main corpus consists of the following works: Gilbert Sorrentino, Gold Fools (2001) Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (2009) David Markson, Reader’s Block (1996) and This Is not a Novel (2001) Tom Phillips: A Humument (1980–2012) and Graham Rawle, Woman’s World (2005). The project focuses on the characteristics, problems, and possibilities of narrativity by analyzing a representative selection of experimental or anomalous prose fiction published in English during the past 20 years. Repetition in narrative fiction can also be thematized as part of unnatural (or supernatural) narratology and as a rereading of the fictional character in terms of adaptation. Furthermore, the project hypothesizes that the principle of literary repetition itself tends to be repeated, to be accumulated on different textual levels. The project hypothesizes that literature performatively, but of course not always intentionally, studies that more general difference in signifying systems, especially language, as well as the particular literary difference with the very use of repetition. Those functions relate to the textual features of a given work but also to the generic intertextual status of it. The project suggests that the inevitable difference that repetition brings about in any signifying system has specific functions in literary discourse. The project deals with the textual, intertextual, and generic features and signifying functions of repetition in narrative fiction as exemplified by selected French- and English-language novels and short stories. The article considers the differences in receiving silence through print and audio media, and concludes that ‘Murke’ demonstrates, in both formats, that the medium is an integral part of the ‘message’, even the silent one. The comparison of the three silence-related scenes in the Murke radio plays shows considerable variation in the length and manner of pauses.

In the printed story, silence is either verbally named or typographically indicated, whereas the radio plays present or perform it. The Böll story thematises silence and media in various ways, and has definite countertextual aspects, in the sense of technology, textuality, and materiality of language.

Reference is also made to Benjamin Gwilliam's sound art piece (2007) based on the 1986 adaptation. This article analyses silence at the interface between print and audio media by reading and listening to Heinrich Böll's short story ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ (‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’) in its book (1958) and three German-language radio play versions (1965 1986 1989).

Radio silence definition