Workshop "The Travelling Methods of Narratology. How to Bring together Humanities and Social Sciences Tools for Narrative Analysis"
Workshop The Travelling Methods of Narratology. How to Bring together Humanities and Social Sciences Tools for Narrative Analysis
This 1-day workshop, led by Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Finland), focuses on key elements in a narratological toolkit for analyzing narratives across media and narrative environments, particularly in the varying everyday contexts for storytelling. Narratological concepts, such as voice or focalization, have been successfully applied also outside the realms of fictional literary narratives, which originally functioned as the empirical basis for coining those concepts. They have also been used together with narrative analytical methods targeted for live interaction such as positioning analysis, further elaborating on the ways of narrative meaning making, helping to turn narrative studies more towards the forms of narrative communication instead of mere content analysis. Since narratives as social action proliferate our lives today from social media to political decision making it is important to understand how storytelling creates and suggests meanings.
This workshop introduces the concepts of voice and positioning and their use in narrative analysis. Voice is understood as the discursive origin of speech, but also as the core of personal expression and the nexus for ideological interpellation, therefore enabling many crossovers between subjectivity and ideology. Positioning analysis on its part discloses storytelling always involving what is told (level of the story), the situated acts of the telling (level of interaction) and the relations to what is culturally and societally expected (level of identity and normative presumptions). These levels of positioning interact and they all need to be taken into consideration to fully understand narrative as a key mode for social interaction.
The participants of the workshop will identify voices and positionings in several types of texts and interpret their functions within various media and narrative environments. The examples will vary from personal to public uses of narratives and from social media to institutional settings. Particular questions addressed will include the attribution of other minds, the uses of vicarious narratives and the questions of narrative ownership.
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Prof. Mari Hatavara is Chair Professor of Finnish Literature at Tampere University, Finland. She has published extensively on interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, narrative minds and voices, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. She specializes in the analysis of narrative modes, voices and positionings across fictional and non-fictional narrative environments, also with the help of computational approaches to natural language processing. Hatavara is coeditor of The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (2015), and special issues on Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts (Style 2017), Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media (Partial Answers 2019), Real Fictions. Fictionality, Factuality and Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Storytelling (Narrative Inquiry 2019) and Narrative and Experience: Interdisciplinary Methodologies between History and Narratology (Scandinavian Journal of History, 2022). She is the consortium PI for the project Political Temporalities. Narrating Continuity and Change in the Finnish Parliament from the Cold War to Covid-19 (funded by Research Council of Finland). |