Spring conferences 2015

On 17 April, I spoke at the Fourth European Narratology Network Conference: Modelling Narrative Across Borders in the Belgian city of Ghent. In fact, I presented two papers. The first paper, "To Leave Your Kindred and Your Father's House" was an analysis of life writing about border experiences by young Dutch Christians that I wrote together with Krina Huisman. The second paper, "The Structured Narrative Interview", written together with Campus Orléon's Dr Floor Basten, introduced a new interview method that we developed, based on research on narrative and storytelling. It is always pleasant to spend time with fellow narratologists and to meet old acquaintances. As one of them said, one evening during the conference: this network of European narratologists is almost like family. However, the great thing about academia is, of course, that unlike families (or, depending on your family, maybe this is also much the same), there is always an influx of bright young people with new ideas.

Earlier this year, on 29 January, I had already spoken about this interview method and my work on narrative career counselling (also done together with Krina Huisman) at the 2015 LACE Winter School "Uses of Narrative. New Developments in Narrative Theory", organised at the University of Groningen. This talk was very well received and it was nice to exchange thoughts with a very clever group of PhD and Master students  working on narrative and storytelling.

I will speak about a totally different topic at another conference this year, the very promising (judging from the program, at least) Ethics of Storytelling.Historical Imagination in Contemporary Literature, Media and the Visual arts at the University of Turky (Finland). I am immensely pleased to be part of the wonderfully titled "Resisting Narrative, Narratives of Resistance" session, where I will present my ongoing research on three strongly intertextual novels: The Long Awaited by Abdelkader Benali, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie and The Tin Drum by Günter Grass - three novels that are, as I will explain in my presentation, indeed very much narratives of resistance as much as they resist narrative itself.