The ISSN and the Southasian and Southasian Diasporic forum invite 300 word abstracts by March 15 to Lindsay.holmgren@mcgill.ca, kanika.batra@ttu.edu, and chris.gonzalez@usu.edu in response to the call below.

Persistent Commercialization: Literary Criticism, Publishing, and the Academy

Literary endeavors have long been deeply imbricated with commercialization. Drama for the stage, poetry for patrons, and fiction for mass readership ensured that the production of literature was always connected to market imperatives. Today, authors and literary works are embedded in a global profit-oriented publishing matrix.

The emergence of literary studies as a discipline towards the end of the nineteenth century ensured that literature was embedded in a different market: that of the academy. Charting a narrative of literary studies from the long twentieth to the twenty-first century we can, even at the risk of some generalization, say that early-twentieth-century public institutions of higher learning sought to resist market imperatives in pedagogical approaches to literature. The privatization and corporatization of universities, however, have ensured the dominance of STEM disciplines, thereby threatening the inclusion in academic programs of narrative and literary studies.

Given these conditions, this panel seeks to interrogate the persistent commercialization of narrative studies and literary criticism in the context of postcolonial literatures. Some of the topics that might emerge from this enquiry are:

• Splintering of literary studies into sub-specializations such as rhetoric and writing, literary theory and cultural studies, film and media, and creative writing in the academy.
• Rise of “popular” narrative courses on topics such as the vampire novel, graphic fiction, and video games to counteract the diminishing number of students enrolling in literature courses.
• Creative experiments with narrative and form leading to new genres such as Facebook Fiction, Instapoetry, and translation of canonical literature through technology such as the Global Chaucers project, Emoji Dickinson, and Emoji (Moby) Dick and the persistent translation of Jane Austen into South Asian contexts via film, TV, and popular fiction.
• Theoretical responses to these forms, including those of postructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, new media, feminist studies, and queer studies.
• Big-stakes prize money for creative writers, with several newly-instituted prizes (the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize offered by Yale University), along with established prizes such as the Man Booker, the Commonwealth Writers’, or the Neustadt International Literary Prize, often won by South Asian and postcolonial writers.
• The primacy of conglomerates such as Amazon Publishing, Routledge, Palgrave-Macmillan, Penguin, and Hachette in the creative-critical market threatening university and small presses that are increasingly looking to publish postcolonial literature following the global success of South Asian writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Kamila Shamshie.

We look forward to hearing from you and to working together on this productive collaboration.

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, each year the International Society for the Study of Narrative confers the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the study of narrative over the course of a career. I am writing to invite members of ISSN to submit nominations for the 2021 winner of the Booth Award. Please send your nominations by December 9th, 2019 to maria.makela@tuni.fi. Use my private e-mail address instead of replying to the entire list, please!

Dear narrative colleagues,

Would you like to take part in a joint, international effort at popularising narrative studies & discussing and debating contemporary storytelling practices online? We have a platform for that all set up now!

We have just launched a visitor blog for our consortium project Instrumental Narratives. The first entry is by Marie-Laure Ryan and it deals with Trump and the case of escalated online storytelling known as the “Sharpiegate”.

Election Results!

The membership of the ISSN has elected the following officers:

Second Vice-President: Erin James, University of Idaho

Dear Members of ISSN,

This October the Society will elect two new Executive Board members, to serve for three years, as well as its next Second Vice-President, who serves for four years (proceeding to First Vice-President, President, and Past President).

The nominations for these positions are drawn up by the nominating committee, which comprises the current VP and two or three other Society members. This year, that is Irene Kacandes, Jonathan Culler, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Sylvia Patron.

All ISSN members are invited to propose names for the nominating committee to consider. Self-nominations are entirely in order!

Note that eligible candidates will have attended recent ISSN conferences, and will usually commit to attending two meetings of the ISSN Executive Board in each year of their term – one at the ISSN Conference and one video meeting in December. Candidates for Second VP should have attended 3 out of the last 5 annual conferences.

Please send your suggestions to Irene Kacandes, Jonathan Culler, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Sylvia Patron (along with a brief indication of the reason for your recommendation) no later than August 15, 2019.

Irene Kacandes: Irene.Kacandes@dartmouth.edu

Jonathan Culler: culler@cornell.edu

Henrik Skov Nielsen: norhn@cc.au.dk

Sylvie Patron: sylvie.patron@orange.fr

Dear colleagues,

The International Society for the Study of Narrative awards the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize outstanding scholar-teachers who have made sustained contributions to narrative studies over the course of their careers.

Please send your suggestions regarding potential nominees to the initial nominating committee:

Dan Punday (dpunday@english.msstate.edu), Maria Mäkelä (Maria.E.Makela@uta.fi), and Sylvie Patron (sylvie.patron@orange.fr).

The deadline for nominations is December 1, 2018.

This prize will be awarded at the 2020 Narrative Conference in New Orleans.

Thank you,

Dan Punday

Dear Narrative Society friends,

Due to a number of extenuating circumstances, the dates of the 2019 International Conference on Narrative has been changed to May 30 to June 1, 2019. The conference website has been updated: https://www.unav.edu/web/narrative-2019.

The plenary speakers will remain the same, and the deadline for proposals remains January 15, 2019 (send to narrative2019@gmail.com)

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience; the change had to be made for the best Narrative Conference experience possible! (We’re the BEST conference!)

If you have any questions, please do feel free contact me or the conference organizers, Professor Rocío G. Davis (rgdavis@unav.es) Professor Rosalía Baena (rbaena@unav.es).

Thank you as always for your understanding and good cheer!
Sincerely,
Sue

Project Narrative Summer Institute:

July 4 – July 15, 2016

“Narrative Medicine across Genres and Media”

 The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week workshop at The Ohio State University devoted to an intensive study of issues in narrative theory as they relate to a specific theme or movement. This summer’s PNSI on Narrative Medicine will be led by Project Narrative core faculty Jared Gardner and James Phelan. On July 13-14, we will be joined by Rita Charon (Columbia University), the pre-eminent scholar-practitioner of the movement.

 The goal of Narrative Medicine is to reform medical practice. It asks: how can reclaiming the centrality of narrative to the processes of illness, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery (or the impossibility of recovery) change the way both practitioners and patients experience those processes? How can narrative theory be marshaled to help effect these changes?

 This focus on practice and people feeds back into the project of narrative theory. To what extent has the field displaced the mind and body of the storyteller with theoretical tools designed to provide quantifiable, mappable, and universal structures? What happens when the endpoint of working with narrative theory is not the construction of new tools or new interpretations but practical consequences in the lives of tellers and listeners? 

 PNSI 2016 will take up these and other questions in connection with a wide range of narratives and narrative theory.  Above all, we will explore the complex interplay among medicine, narrative, and narrative theory that constitutes the lifeblood of Narrative Medicine. 

The deadline for applications is Monday, March 25, 2016. For more info on how to apply, see http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/programs/summer-institute.

The Forum on Transdisciplinary Connections between History and Literature is soliciting papers on the topic of historical approaches to “writing resistance” or “writing rebellion”. We construe the topic broadly to encompass the narrative construction of historical incidents of resistance, but also the practice of writing history as a form of resistance, or, in yet another vein, the resistance to historico-literary approaches in our discipline. Papers that problematize the location of historical practice (Global North or South, for example) are also of interest. Furthermore, we welcome papers that address different media, including film and the digital, as well as papers that address material from a broad historical span. This is an open call for the Forum’s guaranteed MLA panel. Proposals are due on March 10 to Marguerite Helmers (helmers@uwosh.edu).

Eleni Coundouriotis

Professor

Department of English

University of Connecticut

215 Glenbrook Rd

Storrs CT 06269-4025

Phone 860 486 3050

Call For Papers

Narrative Empathy for “the Other”

International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) panel

MLA 2014, Chicago, IL

January 9-12, 2014

Over the last two decades, scholars in a variety of disciplines ranging from cognitive psychology to neurobiology to child psychiatry have made exciting advances in understanding the nature and importance of empathy. Studies of autism have revealed the mechanisms of “theory of mind” cognitive processing, in which humans interpret the mental states of other humans by “reading” facial expressions, postures, gestures, and other forms of non-verbal communication. Neuro-scientists have discovered that “mirror neurons” cause the human brain to undergo a “shared activation” when observing another individual performing an action. This “embodied simulation,” which occurs automatically and unconsciously in the human brain, may provide the “fundamental functional mechanism for empathy and, more generally, for understanding another’s mind” (Gallese et al 2007, p. 132). Child psychiatrists and developmental psychologists have gained an increasingly nuanced understanding of how humans learn empathy during infancy and early childhood, primarily through the ability to recognize and identify emotions in specific faces. Most social scientists now understand empathy as a complex relation consisting of both affective and cognitive dimensions, which enables humans’ ability to experience love and mediates the “fight-or-flight” instinct to fear or attack the unknown and the unfamiliar.

This panel will investigate the relationship between narrative and empathy. Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking 2007 work Empathy and the Novel argues persuasively that empathy is central to the experience of reading fiction as well as the act of writing fiction. Fritz Breithaupt suggests that narrative empathy “operates like a nutcracker to crack open the [reader’s] hard shell of selfhood in order to reveal the soft flesh that all [human] beings share” (“How” 407). Lisa Zunshine explains narrative empathy as an evolutionary adaptation that “pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates theory of mind mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people…. As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds the powerful, representation-hungry complex of cognitive adaptations whose very condition of being is a constant social stimulation” (Why 10). In light of this inherently social context, Dominick LaCapra proposes that “empathy should be understood in terms of an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized as other” (Writing 212).

Submissions may consider diegetic empathy—the imaginative identification by a narrator or character with other characters in the text; readerly empathy—identification by a reader with narrators or characters; authorial empathy—the author’s own identification with his or her narrators or characters; or the complex relationships between these three elements of narrative empathy, defined broadly. Papers may discuss the role of narrative empathy in reconsidering figures of categorical difference—those marked as “Other,” based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, language, or any other category—as fellow humans. Panelists may wish to draw upon the emergent fields of cognitive literary studies or affect theory. All submissions will be carefully considered, but priority will be given to studies that focus on narrative structures and strategies that are especially likely to elicit readerly empathy, or those that tend to squelch or discourage readerly empathy. Discussions of non-fictional narratives or of other media, such as film or the graphic novel, are also welcome.

Please email abstracts of 500 words or less to Patrick Horn (pathorn@unc.edu) by March 1, 2013.