Emma Kafalenos (Washington University in St. Louis) and James Phelan (Ohio State) will lead a panel on the novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Emma Kafalenos will argue that the sequence in which information is received matters even more in life than in fiction; James Phelan will explore the interrelations among the plot of the past action, the plot of Tony Webster's effort to tell his tale, and the audience's efforts to configure and reconfigure both plots. Attendees are invited to read the novella in advance and join in to an active, audience-based discussion.
Emma Kafalenos teaches comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Narrative Causalities (2007) and was the guest editor of Narrative 9.2 (2001), a special issue on Contemporary Narratology. Her work on narrative and narrative theory, often in relation to music, painting, photography, and cinema, has appeared in numerous journals including Comparative Literature, 19th-Century Music, Narrative, and Poetics Today.
James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at the Ohio State University, the editor of Narrative, and co-editor of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series at Ohio State University Press. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and articles on narrative theory, the most recent of which are Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Teaching Narrative Theory (co-edited with David Herman and Brian McHale), and Practicing Narrative Theory: Four Perspectives in Conversation (co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol).
