#Narrative2017 Preview

I've just arrived in Lexington, KY, for 3.5 days of conference papers at Narrative 2017: the 32nd annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The first one, in 1986, was headlined by Wayne Booth and Seymour Chatman, and "Major Speakers" at subsequent conferences included Arthur Danto, Mieke Bal, Scott McCloud, and F. R. Ankersmit (in 2009) - just to name a few major figures I've blogged about in recent years. Clearly, I am late to this party, but it starts again in the morning, so here's a quick preview of this year's action.

My personal "get list" includes thirty specific presentations that look promising, but tonight I'm just going to list TEN of those - partly to make you guys jealous that you're not here, but mainly as a teaser. Hurry back and hopefully you'll learn a few more details as soon as I can post again. Hopefully, I'll be posting about some of these:

“The Self-Organizing Plot”
Karin Kukkonen, University of Oslo  

“Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories”
Emma Kafalenos, Washington University in St. Louis  

“Making Sense: Out of Our Seats, Out of Order, and Out of Time”
Amy Cook, Stony Brook University  

“Fictionality in Speech Representation”
Laura Karttunen, University of Tampere  

“The Rhetoric of Metafiction and Metalepsis”
Richard Walsh, University of York

“Fiction, Fictional, and Fictionality”
Emily R. Anderson, Knox College  

“Narrative and the Philosophy of As If”
Mark Currie, Queen Mary University of London  

“Narrative Recursion”
H. Porter Abbot, UC Santa Barbara  

“Rigor and Imprecision in Narrative Studies”
Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago  

“The Art of Narratological Analysis”
Roy Sommer, University of Wuppertal 

Along with these ten, the 2017 Wayne Booth Award is being given to Marie-Laure Ryan, with papers being presented in honor of her seminal contributions to Narrative Theory. There's also a dance on Saturday night, believe it or not. I'll probably ghost that to blog here, but don't rule out a surprise boogie video in Sunday's post. (One never knows what the future might hold!) At any rate, stick around and I'll share what I can, as I can.

I wonder which papers and presenters will meet or exceed my hopeful expectations?

Stay tuned...