{"id":961,"date":"2013-06-30T18:18:59","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T18:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jcmeister.de\/?p=961"},"modified":"2023-05-23T20:26:34","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T20:26:34","slug":"alive-kicking-narratology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/alive-kicking-narratology\/","title":{"rendered":"Alive & Kicking: Narratology!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Just returned from the “International Conference on Narrative” which was hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University this year – many thanks to our splendid local hosts, Ginette Carpenter and Paul Wake, for organizing a stimulating and smoothly run conference with a rich programme, excellent and friendly support for delegates in a town that has a fascinating and real vibe: Manchester! – The ISSN (International Society for the Study of Narrative) conferences are not “hard core” narratologist events, but rather bring together researchers from various quarters – those who are interested in particular narrative genres, narrative works of art in different media, non-fictional story telling, cultural studies based approaches, literary and media criticism, and of course also theoretical work.  However, this year both day one and two started with a block on “Contemporary Narrative Theory”, and in addition to that a number of papers in the main program then also addressed theoretical issues. All in all this demonstrated how the theoretical work on narrative which is perhaps mainly, but certainly not exclusively of a narratological vein nowadays provides a common ground for many of those who are interested in the phenomenon of narrative representation.Just returned from the “International Conference on Narrative” which was hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University this year – many thanks to our splendid local hosts, Ginette Carpenter and Paul Wake, for organizing a stimulating and smoothly run conference with a rich programme, excellent and friendly support for delegates in a town that has a fascinating and real vibe: Manchester! – The ISSN (International Society for the Study of Narrative) conferences are not “hard core” narratologist events, but rather bring together researchers from various quarters – those who are interested in particular narrative genres, narrative works of art in different media, non-fictional story telling, cultural studies based approaches, literary and media criticism, and of course also theoretical work.  However, this year both day one and two started with a block on “Contemporary Narrative Theory”, and in addition to that a number of papers in the main program then also addressed theoretical issues. All in all this demonstrated how the theoretical work on narrative which is perhaps mainly, but certainly not exclusively of a narratological vein nowadays provides a common ground for many of those who are interested in the phenomenon of narrative representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I listened to many excellent papers and can unfortunately only highlight a few. Richard Walsh’s ‘Some Commonsensical and Uncontentious Thesis on Narrative and Spatiality; Leavened by a Perverse Reading of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy<\/em>‘ was big fun, particularly the perverse part of it. Ruth Page’s ‘Counter Narratives and Controversial Crimes: The Wikipedia Article for the Murder of Meredith Kercher<\/em>‘ demonstrated a fascinating piece of research into the variation that stories can undergoe during the process of repeated editing in Wikipedia. Ruth combined this with a cross-cultural comparison of the Kercher-articles in the English\/US and Italian Wikipedia versions. Obviously, this is the type of work that one would want to support with a tool like CATMA – but in order to do that we will first have to integrate a collation module! It’s now on the road map… Johanne Helbo Bondergaard’s ‘Forensic Literature: Evidence and Fictionality in Contemporary Memory Narratives’ and Inke Gunia’s ‘On Evidence Regarding to Factuality and Fictionality’ were both not entirely new to me (Inke and I are working together in a research project on ‘Factuality’ <\/a> and Johanna has presented at one of our workshops) but have progressed further significantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johanne is also one of a number of Danish colleagues from Aarhus University with whom we (that is, members of Hamburg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Narratology) have started a collaboration that will hopefully result in a larger joint research project. Her colleague Louise Brix Jacobson presented an interesting paper on ‘Fictionalization as Performative Self-Fashioning Strategy’, and Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen tackled Richard Walsh head on with her lucid contribution ‘Fictionality in Terms of Speech Act Theory’: and the ensuing debate between her and Richard showed that that’s exactly how academic discourse should be conducted – open, unafraid of controversy and friendly! I really enjoyed that – a PhD student taking one of her mentors to task in public; great! And great how Richard responded!<\/p>\n\n\n

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On Friday afternoon there was a special panel that paid tribute to Gerald Prince and his ‘Contribution to Narratology: A celebration’. Three witty and polished papers by Susan S.Lanser, Thomas Pavel and Hilary Dannenberg each threw their own light not only onto Prince’s work, but they also brought together facets of a more personal image of Gerald Prince to whom I, like many others, am deaply indebted. INdeed, for me this was a ‘double feature’ because one of the speakers himself, Thomas Pavel, is the narratologist who had the greatest impact on me personally: his 1986 “Poetics of Plot” is the study that opened my eyes to the possibility of combining narratology with a computational approach. And so it was a great honor and pleasure for me to talk to Thomas after the panel and exchange some thoughts on the fruitful tension between formalism and content oriented literary criticism. Thomas’s “narratological journey”, I think, has marked a path that I have unconsciously followed myself; as he put it: “The older I get the more I become interested in content again. I mean, let us be honest – do we really<\/strong> read Madame Bovary<\/em> because of its formal features, or do we read it because we’re interested in the fate of that stupid woman?”  He’s right, and all one can say to this is quote Barthes who (well, I don’t quite know where, and I am not even absolutely sure it actually WAS Barthes who said this; couldn’t it also have been Jacobson or Levy-Strauss? Never mind) said something along the line of “A little bit of Formalism takes us away from content. A lot of Formalism brings us back to it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

way from content. A lot of Formalism brings us back to it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just returned from the “International Conference on Narrative” which was hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University this year – many thanks to our splendid local hosts, Ginette Carpenter and Paul Wake, for organizing a stimulating and smoothly run conference with a rich programme, excellent and friendly support for delegates in a town that has a fascinating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2304,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions\/2304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}