University of Groningen
January 28 – February 1 

Since the narrative turn, the interest in the concept of narrative and its values has become widespread, both inside and outside the academy. There is a growing interest in narrative fiction as an ‘experimental values laboratory,’ studying both the value of narrative fiction in society and the values that are circulated through narrative fiction. Outside the academy, storytelling has become the focus of interest in many professional practices, such as psychology, counselling, medicine and health, and journalism, where it is used as a tool to piece together broken lives and make sense out of chaos and destruction. Narrative thus appears to be everywhere.

The Winter School, organized in affiliation with the Literature and Change in Europe (LACE) network, offers cutting-edge narratological research with contributions from leading narrative scholars, such as Jan Baetens (Leuven), Hendrik Skov Nielsen (Aarhus), Marina Grishakova (Tartu) and Liesbeth Korthals Altes (Groningen). In it, a broad array of disciplines and practices will be showcased, exploring how narratives are shaped by ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and social values, and how narratives function as varied and complex transmitters of values in contemporary society.

Special attention will be paid to the ‘dark side’ of the omnipresence of storytelling in contemporary virtual and mediatized culture: on the impact of simple stories catching people’s imagination and spreading like wildfire and the use of stories in politics and marketing to manipulate voters and consumers. There is a need for “narrative savviness”: the ability to critically assess narratives as constructed representations of reality, rather than reality itself, and to be aware of their implies yet often hidden values.

Participants of the Winter School will follow a series of lectures and participate in interactive workshops during which they can present their research projects. Included in the programme is a day-long symposium, organized in honour of prof. dr. Korthals Altes and her contributions to the field of narrative, where additional international speakers will present their work and engage in a lively debate on the negotiation of values in and through narratives.

More information

Location: Utrecht University, TBA
Teaching period: May-June 2019 (meetings on for May 24 and June 7, 14, 21, 28)
Instructor: Prof. Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto)
Credits: 5 EC
Open to: RMA students and PhD candidates

Registration will open Fall 2018

When they first encountered novelistic realism, writers all over the world felt it encouraged a new kind of vision: an invitation to write about things that had never been written about in order to make people see those things as for the first time. Yet at the same time realism observes rules of verisimilitude that suggest the new can be understood in terms of the already known. These twin pulls, toward the new and towards the same, make realism’s great contradiction and, no doubt, its attraction.

We will examine the meaning realism acquired as it made its way around the world by looking first at two Western texts to suggest the history of realism—novels by Balzac and Updike—and then at six more realist novels from other traditions, that is, from Africa, India, and China.

The critical theory of realism is understandably focused on the nineteenth century British, French, and Russian novel. In this course we will examine whether what is said of realism by Hegel, Lukács, Auerbach, Barthes, Raymond Williams, Jameson,

Catherine Gallagher, Moretti and others is also true of realism in the 20^th century elsewhere in the world. Realism is often associated historically with the bourgeoisie, the working class, liberalism, the Enlightenment, perspective in painting, the documentary impulse, the visual, the status quo, social activism, heteronormativity, and secularism. Does it retain those (contradictory) associations in, say, India or China? Realism appears to be the product of a particular time and place. What happens when it is found elsewhere at a later time?

Programme:

Session 1: Europe: Honoré de Balzac

Session 2: United States: John Updike

Session 3: China: Lu Xun, Eileen Chang

Session 4: South Asia: Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri

Session 5: Africa: Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie

Assignments:

• Preparation of and active participation in the meetings
• Final paper and brief presentation

Teaching period: March-April 2019 (5 meetings)
Location: University of Amsterdam, TBA
Instructors: Dr Babs Boter (VU Amsterdam) and Dr Marleen Rensen (UvA; course coordinator)
Credits: 5 EC
Open to: RMA students and PhD candidates, OSL members will have first access
Registration 

This course focuses on contemporary debates in life writing as a newly emerging field across disciplines. Life writing is an umbrella term for a wide range of writings about one’s own or someone else’s life, such as biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, bio-fiction and travel writing. In the course we will explore various life stories of men and women in the 20th and 21st centuries, who each had their own unique set of life experiences, beliefs and perceptions. This will help gain a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with, and are affected by the major events of their time — and how their lives are narrated, either by themselves or by others.

Participants will be asked to actively engage in the selection and discussion of case studies and readings; periods before the 20th century can be addressed as well. This will be done in the framework of the following five sessions:

Session 1: Life writing: art, science or ideology?

• Mapping the field
• Different disciplines and methodologies
• Hot debates in the field of life writing research

Session 2: Who deserves a ‘ life’, who is eligible to tell it —and how is it put to use by
historians, policymakers and activists?

• ‘Great men’ versus ordinary people
• The power of representation
• Cultural appropriation
• Claiming lost personal narratives of marginalized voices (e.g. women, postcolonial subjects and refugees)

Session 3: The biographer’s dilemma: how to deal with myths, taboos and secrets?

• Private versus public
• Tackling tall tales
• Deconstructing heroic stories
• Ethical issues
• The author’s own subject position

Session 4: What is the scope of the context: national versus transnational?

• Diaspora and migration
• Travelling subjects
• Intersections with race, class, gender
• Cross-cultural networks
• Circulation of life stories

Session 5: What are the effects of new media on practices of self-representation?

• Digital lives, blogs and vlogs
• Democratization and inclusion
• Youth cultures
• Agency and participation
• Creative writing