Realized tropics in Wolfram's "Parzival"

This article negotiates the immense poetical potential inherent in the rhetorical operation of the "epische Realisierung" of tropes, which is paradigmatically used by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his "Parzival". This technique not only presents prevalent literary topoi of courtly culture in an innovative way, but also provides the possibility to unfold the text's metaphors, which are habitually restricted to a specific moment, within the entire narrative framework. Furthermore, Wolfram applies this technique, arguably, to connect text passages, which otherwise diverge widely from the linear of the narrative, by the virtue of their corresponding metaphorical or visual logic. Through these established ana- and cataphoric intratextual references, even distant episodes are brought into a dialogue that discloses both analogies and differences as well as new levels of meaning.