First used in Aristotle’s Poetics, where “peripeteia” refers to the turning point in a tragedy, the IRTG expands the concept to an umbrella term for different kinds of turning points, of radical change and upheaval. Understanding peripety through the notion of expectation opens new options for cross-disciplinary research into social and cultural dynamics. It touches on a core characteristic of narrative itself. Experiencing a peripety means admitting that assumptions about the anticipated course of events were misleading. The narrative breach – “when events occur contrary to expectation [παρὰ τὴν δόξαν] yet on account of one another” (Aristotle: Poet. 1452a, 2-3) – brings to light the implicit rules on which the story is based. A ‘falsifiable’ expectation can even be an essential component of a narrative system as a whole. Collective expectations accumulated over long periods of time may have permeated one’s lifeworld to such an extent that they are barely perceptible. Within the lifeworld, a peripety is something that always comes too early, too unexpectedly. It might lead to or result from a crisis and involves an imperative to actively relate oneself to this transformation. A peripety can reveal unspoken prefigurations of decisions; it can bring to light latent expectations by proving them wrong. Reinhart Koselleck has identified the nexus of experience and expectation as key to understanding large-scale historical change. He has shown that for pre-modern societies, societal expectations rely on experiences passed on through generations: expectation and experience are understood as interdependent. New experience arises out of the unexpected – both realms can drift apart, but never become fully separate:
It takes breaking points, zones of transition and inversion, undefined upheavals, or epochal thresholds to bring to light what had been expected but had eluded perception. Peripeties can enforce analytical shifts that evoke tacit knowledge including unspoken norms, values, and habits that remain below the threshold of awareness in routine circumstances but are made explicit and brought into question in the situations of crisis and uncertainty. A peripety can also be part of the horizon of expectation itself, as the ‘cliffhanger’ structure illustrates. In imagining the continuation of a serial episode‘s plotline, multiple breaches of expectations can be anticipated.
Extended to comparative linguistic approaches, we identify shifting expectations on the level of signification/designation, especially useful in the multilingual Baltic Sea Region. This research frame puts new emphasis on the latency of expectations potentially brought to light in ‘peripetic’ zones. It is this inverting narrative dynamic that distinguishes peripeties from ‘crises’, ‘Bruchzonen’, or ‘critical junctures’. However, significant overlaps of these concepts exist in their approaches to contingency. The IRTG inquires about the discourses, narratives, and rhetoric of reversal as tools to identify what it was that had been (or still is) expected.