cfp.english.upenn.edu

We welcome paper proposals on narrative scale in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction, film, or visual media for the 2011 International Conference on Narrative. We are specifically interested in essays exploring the relationship between narrative representation and what the selection of scale brings to view or obscures. For example, what is made legible if we imagine literary history in terms of blunt dates (like the annular study) rather than in terms of broad conceptual markers (like modernity)? Or what is the relationship between evolution as metaphor bounded by narrative and scientific evolutionary theory? Particular areas of interest might include:

Narrating minutiae
Narrating geopolitics
Short story as form
Big books
Literary historical periodicity
Interpretive methodologies
Interdisciplinarity (e.g. science and literature)
Comparativism
Global politics and/or ethics
Spatiality, globalization
Historiography
Evolutionary time
Messianic time and/or rupture
Metaphor, figuration
Metafiction, fabular

Please email 300-word abstracts to Katie Muth (krmuth@artsci.wustl.edu) by 25 October, 2010.

Panel organizers: Katie R. Muth and Dustin Iler, Washington University in St. Louis. The 2011 International Conference on Narrative will be held from April 7–11 at Washington University in St. Louis. For details, see http://narrative.wustl.edu/.