Organizer: Nina Farizova
Contact the Seminar OrganizersThere 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.
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.