"Narrative and the Novel/the Novel as Narrative" symposium is hosted by the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia
SATURDAY May 16th, 2015
School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales
Keynote Speaker: John Frow, University of Sydney
The novel as a distinct genre of prose emerged in the period of modernity. From the eighteenth century, marked by scholars as the period of the ‘rise of the novel’, to the late twentieth century, during which the trope of ‘the death of the novel’ gained cultural traction, the novel has sought to both draw upon and distinguish itself from other narrative genres, from history, biography, memoir, and travelogues, to film, television, and digital storytelling.
Starting with the premise that the constitutive features of the novel are its narrativity and its fictionality, this symposium will address both theoretical and historical approaches to the following issues:
– In what ways does the novel interpenetrate with other genres of narrative (in print and other media), and what is distinct to the form?
– If the novel (“the younger sister of romance”) is said to have found generic identity as realism, how can recent scholarly attention on its fictionality help us rethink its relation to both modernism and our contemporary period of ‘reality hunger’ and autofictions?
250 word proposals to be sent to paul.dawson(at)unsw(dot)edu(dot)au by April 1st.
Organized by Paul Dawson and Elizabeth King, in conjunction with the UNSW Narrative and the Novel reading group.
(https://www.facebook.com/groups/UNSWNarrativeandthenovel/)
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