CFP: The Narrator in Theory and Practice
Call For Papers
“The Narrator in Theory and Practice
Abstracts Due: September 30th
As Sylvie Patron writes, “The narrator … is a concept used widely in the teaching of literature, even though it is a subject of continued debate within narrative theory or theories” (“The Death of the Narrator and the Interpretation of the Novel” 253). While Patron interrogates the concept of the narrator in communicational models of narrative and takes up the question of whether one always needs to posit a narrator in fictional narratives, other points of debate concern the usefulness of the concept of “voice,” the relation between narrators and focalisation or the analysis of narrator unreliability, for instance. The postulation of the presence or absence of a narrator in certain texts ties in with fundamental narratological issues like, for example, our understanding of (fictional) narrative, the notion of fictionality, the cognitive processing of narrative or the historical development of fictional narrative.
This panel seeks to bring together papers that discuss and question theoretical approaches to the narrator concept in view of specific literary test cases. Papers on all kinds of narrators (both what is traditionally referred to as first and third person narrators) are welcome, as are papers with a diachronic focus.
Please submit abstracts for papers by Friday, 30 September to Rahel Orgis, University of Neuchâtel, rahel.orgis@unine.ch. Abstracts should be about 150 words long and accompanied by brief statement (no more than 100 words) about your work and your publications.”