Kate Burling, “Shanties, Songs, and Strange Tongues: ‘Telling Spaces’ in the Narrative of Joseph Conrad”
My PhD project is broadly concerned with auditory aspects of Joseph Conrad’s narrative and their role in its ethical performance--a performance which Conrad considered crucial to his justification as a writer. With some notable exceptions, critics have tended to focus on the visual effects of Conrad’s narrative, but research into its acoustics and performativity is steadily increasing. My presentation will focus on a little-studied area of this field to consider how Conrad put popular songs, poems, and sea-shanties to work, and the roles they performed, in his narrative. I hope to demonstrate Conrad’s repeated practice of creating an alternatively-styled "telling space" of song within the body of a separately unfolding narrative, and of maintaining that space in the minds of his audience to guide or deepen--often in specifically ethical ways--our thinking about the stories and characters before us.
Caroline Pirlet, “Towards an Emotive Narratology: Or, a Story of Three Women--One Trying to Leave her Mark, the Other Unable to Put her Foot Down, and the One Who Could Be More ‘Natural’”
Cognitive narratology has thus far largely circumvented the issue of the role emotions play in narrative understanding. In the hope of creating synergetic effects between cognitive and affective narratology (to borrow Patrick Colm Hogan’s [2011] term), this paper sets out to explore whether emotions in response to literature play a prominent role in directing readers’ understanding of narratives. To that end, I begin by outlining some of the ways emotions generally function and establish emotion as a "natural" feature of human thought and action, and then apply this account to narrative understanding. Subsequently, in a close reading of James Joyce's short story "Eveline," I demonstrate the centrality of emotion in "natural" decision‑making by readers and fictional characters alike, as well as readers' narrativization process. The analysis also shows how readers' affective engagement with a character (sympathy vs. empathy) can change their assessment of the fictional other, and thus how the story is narrativized. To conclude, the heuristic value of readers’ emotional engagement with a text is incorporated into Monika Fludernik’s cognitive, reader-oriented "natural" narratology--thereby, I argue, making it even “more ‘natural.'”
