GCSC Keynote Lecture: "Narrative Hermeneutics, Ethics of Storytelling, and Counter-Narratives of Illness" with Prof. Dr. Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku)
- https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns/veranstaltungen/vortraege/gcsc-keynote-lecture-narrative-hermeneutics-ethics-of-storytelling-and-counter-narratives-of-illness-with-prof-dr-hanna-meretoja-university-of-turku
- GCSC Keynote Lecture: "Narrative Hermeneutics, Ethics of Storytelling, and Counter-Narratives of Illness" with Prof. Dr. Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku)
- 2026-05-19T15:30:00+02:00
- 2026-05-19T18:00:00+02:00
In Kooperation mit IPP (Isabella Engberg) & Literarischem Zentrum Gießen (LZG)
This talk discusses how narrative hermeneutics contributes to narrative theory, narrative ethics, and research on illness narratives. Narrative hermeneutics approaches narratives as cultural practices of sense-making that provide interpretative resources for agents who navigate their narrative environments. The talk articulates the ethical potential of literature that emerges from recognising how literary works can provide us with new interpretative resources and open up new possibilities of being. It also presents a framework for evaluating the ethical potential and dangers of various narratives. The latter part of the talk discusses counter-narratives of cancer and Covid-19 as examples of how literature can provide readers with new interpretative resources that have ethical and existential relevance.
Credit for the picture Maria Grönroos
// Prof. Dr. Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She runs the projects “Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency” (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals” (Research Council of Finland, Proof of Concept, 2025-2026). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2019-2020) and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019-2020, spring 2023), and she is member of Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, memory studies, and medical and health humanities. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (2023, Oxford University Press), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018, Routledge), and the special issues of Memory Studies (“Cultural Memorial Forms”, 2021) and Poetics Today (“Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom”, 2022). She has also published a novel, Elotulet (2022, The Night of Ancient Lights, Die Nacht der alten Feuer, published in German in 2024).