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International Visiting Scholars Colloquium Looks at Issues of Narrative
Two international visiting scholars recently discussed their research with a group of Ohio State English faculty and students at a Project Narrative colloquium. Marina Grishakova, from Estonia, discussed her work "Literariness, Fictionality, and the Theory of Possible Worlds," while Jan Alber, from Germany, discussed "Toward the Limits of Human Cognition: ‘Unnatural' Elements in Postmodernist Storyworlds."
Alber's work examines the methods readers use to make sense of unnatural texts. "At some point I realized that many fictional narratives present us with physically or logically impossible scenarios," said Alber, "and I thought it would be interesting to find out what these scenarios mean and how readers can make sense of them." Alber's work turns to cognitive narratology and frame theory to offer analytical reading tools to "help us gain access to narratives which confront us with unnatural scenarios." The more radical the unnatural scenarios digress from real world frames, Alber argues, the more reading strategies will be used.
Grishakova's work focuses on terminology. "The theoretical interest of my paper stems from my work in specific terminology—meanings that everyday words acquire because of their historical existence. It's already a commonplace that many terms in the Humanities are borrowed from ordinary language or other disciplines. In their new terminological capacity, they contain traces of previous usages and are able to accommodate different contradictory meanings. Yet for the sake of economy we often suppress these meanings and use these vague terms without explicating what connotations our definitions are based on, which creates a lot of misunderstandings." At Ohio State, Grishakova has worked with graduate students to compile a database of Humanities terms.
Jan Alber is an assistant professor in the English Department of the University of Freiburg. He is at Ohio State working on his second book, and is co-editor of Moderne-Postmoderne and Stones of Law—Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age. His new book, Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens' Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film, was published in August 2007.
Grishakova is a senior research fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and a Fullbright Fellow. She is the author of The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames.
To access an audio recording of the colloquium, visit the Project Narrative blog
