OSL PhD day: Making Stories Work

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Date: 19 May 2022
Time: 10.00-18.00
Venue: Doelenzaal in the Amsterdam University Library (Singel 425)
ECTS: 1-2 EC. See below for more information on the readings and assignment
Open for: PhD candidates and RMA students; OSL members have first access.
Registration is now open.

After the success of the first OSL PhD day last year, we are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place on Thursday 19 May 2022. The day’s theme will be “Making Stories Work” and the keynote lecture will be given by Professor Clare Hemmings. After Hemmings’ lecture, the program will consist of two panels, each made up of three fifteen minute presentations on your work in progress. This means that six of you will have the opportunity to present. 

The first panel will loosely revolve around the question “How does literature work?” Issues related to this theme could include:

  • What work does literature do?
  • The mobilizing potential of literature
  • The ‘work’ of different genres
  • The world-changing potential of literature
  • The affective work of literature
  • The ways literature ‘works’ upon readers

The second panel will loosely revolve around the question “What work do we, literary scholars, do?” Issues related to this theme could include:

  • How do we work with different media?
  • How do we work with different methods?
  • How do we work within the institution of the university?
  • How do we work outside of it?
  • What happens when we have too much work/stop working/can’t work?

The PhD day will take place at the Doelenzaal in the Amsterdam University Library (Singel 425), from 10.00-18.00. The panels will be followed by drinks.

Keynote Prof. Clare Hemmings

The Genre of Inheritance: Dancing with Grandma

In this paper I combine extracts from my short story ‘Grandma Was a Dancer’ with critical reflection as a way of exploring the narrative features of the gendered and classed history I inherit. It is part of a larger project where I am working with my family’s ‘memory archive’ to tell stories about gender, class and national belonging. As many other authors have shown, a turn to family memoir and memory is one way of thinking at the margins about what disciplinary history obscures. It is a way of bringing new evidence to bear on both intimate experience and its importance for what we know about the past and present. My interest, following previous work on storytelling, is to challenge linear narratives of familial progress or loss, highlighting thatwhat is passed on is specific and multiple, contradictory and intersubjective. In piecing together my maternal grandma’s life, I have wanted to flesh out the significance of genre in the ways she told her own story, the embellishments my mum and my brother and I were bound to make. In pulling together a story arc for my maternal grandad, I work instead to compensate for stoic silence and the problem of representation in histories of masculinity. Throughout, I focus on the difference that storytelling genre makes both to how gender, class and nation are inherited, and to how we inhabit that inheritance in the present.

Programme

10:00-10:15 Welcome and introduction

10:15-11:30 Keynote lecture Clare Hemmings “The Genre of Inheritance: Dancing with Grandma” + Q&A

11:30-12:00 Break

12:00-13:30 Panel session 1: “How does literature work?”

  • Sofía Forchieri: “When Literature Turns Against Itself: The Work of Critique in
    Samanta Schweblin’s The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides”
  • Tashina Blom: “Protest Slogans Through The Ages: The Literary Analysis of
    Incendiary Rhetoric”
  • Andries Hiskes: “The Work of Literary Disruption: Seamlessness and Effort in
    Disability Narratives”
  • Q&A + panel discussion

13:30-14:30 Break

14:30-16:00 Panel session 2: “What work do we, literary scholars, do?”

  • Duygu Erbil: “Witnessing Academic Casualisation”
  • Sasha Richman: “Beyond text: James Alinder and Wright Morris’ photo-text
    collaboration”
  • Carmen Verhoeven: “Working Stories: Work in Progress on the Workplace Novel
    Today”
  • Q&A + panel discussion

16:00-16:15 Break

16:15-16:45 Roundtable

16:45-17:00 Closing remarks

Drinks!

Assignment

Readings:

Assignment for 1 EC:

  1. Read the text by Hemmings & listen to the podcast interview. Formulate a question that
    you could ask her in the Q&A session after the keynote lecture (i.e. formulate it so that
    you could actually ask it!) and send it to c.l.vlessing@uu.nl and kim.schoof@ou.nl.
  2. Make good notes during the PhD day and make sure to contribute a question or
    reflection to the roundtable discussion at the end of the day.
  3. Write a 500 word conference report, in which you a) reflect on what interested you most
    about Hemmings’ text, podcast interview & talk, and b) what you learned from one of two
    of the other talks with regard to the work that stories/literary scholars do.

Assignment for 2 EC:

  1. Read the text by Hemmings & listen to the podcast interview. Formulate a question that
    you could ask her in the Q&A session after the keynote lecture (i.e. formulate it so that
    you could actually ask it!) and send it to c.l.vlessing@uu.nl and kim.schoof@ou.nl.
  2. Make good notes during the PhD day and make sure to contribute a question or
    reflection to the roundtable discussion at the end of the day.
  3. Write a 2000 word essay, in which you a) reconstruct how Hemmings thinks about the
    work that stories do, b) discuss how one of the other PhD day speakers conceptualised
    the work of stories, and c) select a short story/novel of choice and analyse the work it
    does with the help of both Hemmings’ and the other speaker’s considerations