PhD students and senior researchers are invited to participate in a workshop bringing together scholars interested in narrativity and queer/feminist narrative theory. This will give an opportunity to exchange ideas and make new acquaintances, in addition to discussing different types of projects.
The workshop's specific and more general concerns include, but are not limited to: contextualist narratology, queer/feminist narrative theory, historicist narratology, and other identity- and context-based approaches.
The sessions are based on case studies and ideas generated and presented by the participants. Participants will be encouraged to explore specific approaches, challenge assumptions and develop new perspectives on their work. The short list of readings will be distributed in advance to prepare you for discussing particular aspects of your own project in relation to narratological research. The sessions will be facilitated and chaired by Susan S. Lanser and Robyn Warhol.
The morning talks by Warhol and Lanser will be open to all.
PROGRAM
09.00–10.30 Robyn Warhol: “Reading Like a Victorian: How to Experience Novels in their Serial Moments"
10.30–10.45 Break
10.45–12.15 Susan Lanser: "Narratology at the Checkpoint: Israel-Palestine and the Poetics of Entanglement"
12.30–13.30 Lunch
13.30–14.30 Discussion of queer/feminist narrative theory and the chapter readings (to be distributed) from Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions.
14.30–17.30 (including breaks): Workshop on narrative and medium, narrative and political context, and other concerns related to contextualist narratology, queer/feminist narrative theory, historicist narratology, and other identity- and context-based approaches
LIST OF READINGS - all from Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, ed. Warhol and Lanser (Ohio State University Press, 2015):
1) Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, "Introduction."
2) Susan S. Lanser, "Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology."
3) Robyn Warhol, "Giving an Account of Themselves. Metanarration and the Structure of Address in The Office and The Real Housewives."
4) Suzanne Keen, "Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy"
5) Hillary Chute, "The Space of Graphic Narrative: Mapping Bodies, Feminism, and Form"
6) Martin J. Ponce, "Queer/Feminist/Narrative: On the Limits of the Reciprocal Engagement"
Susan S. Lanser is Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on: narrative theory and the novel, with a particular interest in women writers; eighteenth-century European studies; and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (1981), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992), The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 (2014). Lanser is currently pursuing projects in the history of sexuality, in representations of the French Revolution, and in Israeli-Palestinian narratives.
Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on: narrative theory, feminist theory and the novel; Regency and Victorian novels, British and American women writers; television narrative and graphic memoir. She is the author of Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989), Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (2003) and Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (2015). Warhol’s current project is a website, Reading Like a Victorian: http://victorianserialnovels.org/
Susan S. Lanser and Robyn Warhol are considered as originators of feminist narrative theory. Their co-edited volume, Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015), was the first collection to bring feminist, queer, and narrative theories into direct conversation with one another. The book placed gender and sexuality at the center of contemporary theorizing about the production, reception, forms, and functions of narrative texts.
For more information, please contact: Tina Skouen at tina.skouen@ilos.uio.no. The organizer in Oslo would like to thank Christer Johansson and the organizing committee at Stockholm University for sponsoring this event in the first place. Thanks also to Prof. Karin Kukkonen. For information about the workshop in Stockholm 7 May, please contact: christer.johansson@littvet.su.se.