‘Evil tongues’: the rhetoric of discreet indiscretion in Fontane’s L’Adultera

Abstract

‘Gossip’ is yet to be discovered as a genre of everyday talk in the study of German language and literature. So far, it has been described in detail only in sociology, anthropology, ethnography of communication, and feminist linguistics. The focus of study in these fields has been on aspects of conversation analysis, social function, psychological implications, constellation of relationships, and the like. By contrast, based on a broadly established methodological foundation, linguistic tools of dialogue analysis are applied in this article to various forms of gossip in Theodor Fontane’s society novel L’Adultera. The main interest here is the way in which the author creates these forms of fictive, simulated, literary gossip in order to structure the course of the action, to give an indirect sketch of the characters, to include critical comments on the society of the time and to present literary means of negotiating social relationships.