Die Informationsverhältnisrekonstruktion und ihr Vergleich in der Figurenkonstruktion als Ausgangspunkt und Zugangsmöglichkeit zum Wissen des Modell-Retextualisierers in der historischen Perspektive

The following article emphasizes the possibility of using cognitive literary approaches in a historical context with the aim of following the process of the construction of a literary character. In doing so, it derives from the specific literary transmission of Old German texts and their corresponding Old French source texts. These literary transmissions are not tied to modern translation theoretical frameworks. This peculiarity is manifested in a large gap in content, which nevertheless maintains similarities between the transmitted and original texts. The focus of the research is placed on literary characters who are carriers of both similarities and differences in transmission for a new recipient. Theoretically, they are understood as mental models that arise in the interaction between the reader and the text. Mental models as final products remain inaccessible for research, since each recipient creates their own unique mental model in interaction with the text, and this remains inaccessible not only in the absence of a historical recipient, but also through empirical analysis in the present. However, this does not prevent the study of the text, which presents instructions for the construction of mental models. The method is based on the comparative reconstruction of a relationship between two information sources of the same literary character. This informational relation, however, has become a paradigm for the analysis of the construction of these two literary characters in a cultural transfer. Their comparison also enables the changes that occurred during retextualization of literary characters to be tracked in and for the new socio-historical context. For this analysis, the model from Fotis Jannidis’ Figur und Person (2004) is presented, which describes the construction of a literary character on four levels: from its creation and the first information given through characterization, motivation and all the way to identification. The comparative tracking of the constructions of two literary characters with the aforementioned model on four levels enables the process of construction of differences, and thus the changed instructions for the construction of the mental model to be tracked and the knowledge of the mental retextualizer to be accessed.