Conference: Cult

Call for submissions for _The Cult of Difficulty: Critical Approaches to the Comics of Chris Ware_, edited by Dave Ball, Dickinson College, and Martha Kuhlman, Bryant University.

_The Cult of Difficulty_ is a proposed collection of essays on the work of Chicago-based contemporary graphic novelist/comic book artist/cartoonist Chris Ware. Author of _Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth_ (2000, winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Award), _Quimby the Mouse_ (2003), and _The Acme Novelty Library_ (2005), Ware has quickly emerged as one of the central figures in contemporary comics. We are currently seeking abstracts for 20- to 25-page articles that analyze Ware’s work, with particular interest in multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to his oeuvre. A university press has already expressed interest in this collection, and we are hoping to build upon the MLA panel on Ware’s comics this past December. Essays that address the following questions are especially encouraged, but other topics are also welcome:

-- How do Ware’s texts raise questions about representations of race, gender, class, and disability?-- How has Ware’s work as an editor, anthologist, and collector shaped the landscape of contemporary comics and informed his own corpus?
-- In what ways are questions of narrative and temporality engaged and complicated in Ware's texts? What insights do narratological and semiotic approaches offer to a reading of Ware’s comics?
-- How does Ware's work intersect with advertising culture, web sites, media, and packaging?
-- What is Ware's relationship to the literary canon (both in terms of graphic and conventional literature) and how does he re-imagine our relationship to the idea of literariness?

Please send 500-1000 word abstracts (or completed articles), c.v., and contact information in Word format to warecollection@gmail.com by March 10th. Papers from a diversity of disciplinary orientations and methodological approaches are especially encouraged._____________________________________________

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Style

Style Journal

Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics, including research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, rhetorical analysis, and the pedagogy of style. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric and writing studies. In addition, Style publishes reviews, review-essays, surveys, interviews, translations, enumerative and annotated bibliographies, and reports on conferences, Web sites, and software. Major articles should be 5,000-9,000 words (count includes endnotes and works cited).

Narrative: The Nice Conference

Volume 26, Number 3

Links

The Narrative Consortium


Michael Bamberg - website

Narrative Inquiry

Narrative Inquiry is devoted to providing a forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological work on narrative. Articles appearing in Narrative Inquiry draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative as a way to give contour to experience and life, conceptualize and preserve memories, or hand down experience, tradition, and values to future generations. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction, including those practiced by researchers in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines.

Narratology net

Narratology - projects, debates and resources in narrative theory / Narratologie, Erzähltheorie, Erzählforschung: Projekte, Debatten und Hilfsmittel

narratology.net is now incorporated into the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (ICN) at Hamburg University.
To visit the ICN website, please click here.
To visit the previous narrnet website, please click here.

Ancient Narrative

ANCIENT NARRATIVE

As the name Ancient Narrative indicates, the areas of interest of the new journal are: Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions, including novels proper, the "fringe", as well as the fragments; narrative texts of the Byzantine age, early Christian narrative texts - and the reception of these works in modern literature, film and music

Marie-Laure Ryan

Narratology
Some of Marie-Laure Ryan's articles on narrative theory

Jourals

Image and Narrative

Image [&] Narrative is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.

Journals

Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN)

The substantial concerns and contentions of AJCN are as following:

• the "communicative" perception of literariness
• the artistic act of communication is cognized in terms of a polytonal, and at times reciprocal process, occurring simultaneously within the several dissimilar "descriptive levels of recital"
• overall preoccupation with the issue of "the discourse"
• theoretical meditation over the different "poles" of narrative-institutions, which maintain the very chain of transmitting the artistic information from what is called "author" to what is labeled as a "reader.
• the potential aim is to display the inner scheme of mechanical hierarchy, prevailing behind the complex relationship betwixt the entities of "storytelling", "recital", "history", as uniting under the contextual "roof" of the narrative.

Instruction for behaviour

Jelena vorovi, A Gypsy, a Butterfly, and a Gadje: Narrative as Instruction for Behaviour. Folklore, Volume 119, Issue 1 April 2008 , pages 29 - 40

Abstract

Serbian Gypsy narratives have a very important function in Gypsy culture - that of shaping and influencing the behaviour of those to whom the stories are told. This paper analyses two Serbian Gypsy oral narratives that place special emphasis on the kinds of behaviour that are encouraged or discouraged in everyday life, and which have presumably helped Gypsies to survive through the centuries.

Booth

The Company We Keep.



Description

In The Company We Keep, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature.

But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends?

Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

Equipment

'Literature as Equipment for Living,'

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, third edition, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1973) pp. 293-304.