Alternatives to Narrative
Virtual Session
Description
There is a growing awareness among Anglophone humanists that narrative as a meaning-making mode has been overemphasized. Having migrated from the study of the verbal arts into history, law, medicine, philosophy—and finally into the everyday discourse—“narrative” and “story” seem to be now the default for how we make sense of the world and for how we express ourselves to ourselves and to others.
In Against Narrativity (2004), Galen Strawson argues that narrative constructions of selfhood are not the only option: “There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.” Peter Brooks, in his Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022), traces the current “hyperinflation of story” and asks: “Why is it that other forms of presentation and understanding have been largely abandoned in favor of telling stories?” Maria Mäkelä and Hanna Meretoja, in a special issue of Poetics Today dedicated to the “storytelling boom” (2022), suggest that adjustments are necessary to the ways we study narrative: “‘Narratives are everywhere’ was once the triumphant slogan of narrative scholars, but now we are starting to realize that this pervasiveness might in fact be a problem.”
How can we denarrativize and unstory ourselves and our reality? What are the potential benefits and dangers of such an exercise: ethically, politically, therapeutically? Is the “lyric” mode a viable alternative to narrative beyond the realm of the strictly literary? Can we look to literature’s sister arts of music and painting for a respite from narrativity? In our own work as scholars and teachers, must we construct arguments and syllabi in a narrative form?
This seminar will look for alternatives to narrative in different media and genres, as well as in different time periods and locations. Proposals for presentations in a variety of subfields—including but not limited to poetics and narratology, film and media studies, queer and feminist theory, and environmental humanities—are welcome.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Roi Tartakovsky is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and American Studies at Tel Aviv University and is currently serving as department chair. He works on poetry and poetics and has published articles on lineation, rhythm, figurative language and poetic sound, among other topics. His book, Surprised by Sound: Rhyme’s Inner Workings (2021), deals with the phenomenon of sporadic rhyme formations. He is the associate editor of the journal Poetics Today.
Speaker Bio
Nomaan Hasan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthropology & Humanism, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Speaker Bio
Amanda P. Vieira is a second-year Master's student in Literature at the Federal University of Piauí. She holds undergraduate degrees in English Language and Literature from the Federal University of Piauí and in Law from Faculdade Estácio in Teresina. She is currently the primary instructor of Portuguese at Fisk University as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant. Her research interests include gender studies, queer theory, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, modernism and postmodernism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nina Farizova is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese at Kalamazoo College. They work in literary theory, film and media studies, and premodern Japanese literary studies. They received a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2023. Their current project explores alternatives to narrative that exist in various media and have the potential to be exportable into our everyday thinking about the world and ourselves.
Speaker Bio
Daniel W. Pratt is assistant professor of Slavic Literature at McGill University. He works on Central and Eastern European literature and culture, primarily Polish, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, and Austrian. He is currently finishing a monograph on non-narrative constructions of temporality, while developing a second monograph on Bruno Jasieński and his pursuit of internationalism.
Speaker Bio
Wenyi Xiao, MA student in Beijing Foreign Studies University, specializing in 20th Female Poetics, Feminist and Queer Narratology, Modernist Poetry Criticism.