Zeit der Begegnung – Begegnung mit der Zeit : zeitliche Aspekte literarischen Lesens

The dissertation is centered on two main subject areas: the act of reading a fictional text (seen as an "encounter" between text and reader) and the topic of "time". The central goal is to point out the key role played by temporal factors in the act of reading, in terms of text understanding and experience and, consequently, in terms of the text impact on the reader's personality development and formation.
To achieve this, the investigation is divided into two parts. In part I ("Zeit der Begegnung") important approaches of (mainly philosophical) time investigation are discussed and compared. As a result a new theoretical model of subjective time experience is introduced, suitable to be related to the process of fictional reading. The model suggests social encounter as a key condition for the potentiality of subjective time awareness and understanding.
Based on this model, in part II of the study ("Begegnung mit der Zeit") the attention is focussed on the act of reading and its specific temporal characteristics. On this score, three perspectives are taken into account: the formal one (reading technique and competence; literary reading as specific type of social communication), the aesthetic one (facets of literary reading as a highly dialogical, yet very private experience) and the perspective on the text
content itself (literary strategies of time configuration). To illustrate the specific aspects, several examples of contemporary fiction (Paul Auster, Uwe Timm, Milan Kundera etc.) are referred to.