Working with Stories. Selected papers from the 2nd ENN Conference 2011Editorial NoteThe 2nd conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN) took place at the University of Southern Denmark's campus in Kolding on March 9-11, 2011. Some 100 scholars of narrative from more than 20 nations met here, and around 70 presentations were given. The title of the conference was Working with Stories. Narrative as a Meeting Place for Theory, Analysis and Practice. The aim was to contribute to the ongoing development of trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives on narrative studies. We therefore called for papers which explored transdisciplinary aspects of narrative theory and narrative conceptualization, and the result was a great variety of topics extending from corporate communication to ballet, from contemporary literature and cinema to ancient Greek poetry. It was decided by the steering committee of the ENN to make it possible for the delegates to publish their presentations through three different channels. This issue of the Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (ACJN) is one of these channels. The present collection opens up with three papers focusing on conceptual and theoretical issues: Sylvie Patron (Paris) discusses to what extend different theories of narration can account for fictional narratives before 1850; Bohumil Fořt (Brno) approaches realist narratives by focusing on their relation to the specific field of knowledge articulated by the sciences and humanities; and Joshua Parker (Istanbul) introduces the concept "resonance" as a way of approaching multimodality and the relations between narrator, character-discourse and reader. Hereafter follows two articles which make new approaches to ancient Greek literature: Jo Heirman (Amsterdam) by focusing on the role of space in poetic works of the period; Iwona Wieżel (Lublin) by considering Herodotus' Histories in the light of contemporary theories of natural narratives. Enrica Zanin (Strasbourg) throws light on the complexities of ethics and uses an early modern version of Oedipus Rex as her test case. Anne Rüggemeier (Giessen) looks into a couple of contemporary autobiographical works where focus is on somebody else's lives - e.g. the family's. In the final two articles, attention is paid to audio-visual narratives: Sebastian Armbrust (Hamburg) analyzes storytelling strategies in serial television drama and Sebastian Domsch (Munich) tests narrative concepts in relation to video games. Another selection of papers with focus on unnatural narratology and/or transmedial narrative will appear as a volume in the Narratologia series published by de Gruyter (editors: Jan Alber (Freiburg) and Per Krogh Hansen (Kolding)), and an Internet collection consisting of papers and PowerPoint presentations has been published at http://www.narratology.net/node/86. Kolding, October 2011 Chairman of the European Narratology Network |
