NARRATIVE ACROSS DISCIPLINES
Professor James Phelan (Ohio State University) will direct a two-day interdisciplinary workshop for doctoral students and researchers working on narrative-related topics, hosted by the Department of Literature and the Arts at the University of Tampere in October 27 – 28, 2008. Professor Phelan is the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature; a founding member of the Project Narrative at the Ohio State University, and a cardinal mover and shaker in the rapidly expanding arena of narrative theory today. His recent publications include Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005), Experiencing Fiction. Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007), and the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (co-edited, with Peter Rabinowitz 2005).
We invite submissions from participants of any disciplinary orientation. Our interest is in bringing together approaches employing both the specialized tools developed for literary-narratological and rhetorical analysis and the more broadly-ranging concepts stemming from work done on narratives in social sciences, cultural and media studies, cognitive science, as well as in other interdisciplinary research fields. There is no restriction on the topics, which may range from blog to Bildungsroman; television to testimonio; opera to obituary. It is our belief that such a fusion will be helpful in bringing about a mutually beneficial small knowledge explosion in its own right.
Each participant will prepare a preliminary abstract of his/her argument (1-2 pages) which will be distributed in advance to all members of the workshop. The participants will be expected to elaborate on their arguments at the start of each seminar session, after which Professor Phelan and the rest of the group provide commentary. The sessions will be conducted in the spirit of free intellectual give-and-take. We expect to be able to accept ten to twelve participants.
The event is organized jointly by the research team Politics and the Arts in the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change at the University of Jyväskylä, directed by Dr. Matti Hyvärinen and the Department of Literature and the Arts at the University of Tampere.
Please send your abstracts by August 29th to Dr. Markku Lehtimäki (), Department of Literature and the Arts, University of Tampere. The organizing committee will screen the submissions and contact the selected participants by mid-September.
The organizing committee:
Matti Hyvärinen
Academy Research Fellow
Department of Sociology and Social Psychology
University of Tampere
(matti.k.hyvarinen (at) uta.fi)
Markku Lehtimäki
Docent of Comparative Literature
Department of Literature and the Arts
University of Tampere
(markku.lehtimaki (at) uta.fi)
Pekka Tammi
Professor of Comparative Literature
Department of Literature and the Arts
University of Tampere
(pekka.tammi (at) uta.fi)