14-16 February 2019, University of Turku 

14 FEBRUARY, THURSDAY

15-16 REGISTRATION (the lobby in front of the Janus hall, Artium building)

16.00-16.05 OPENING OF THE SYMPOSIUM (Janus hall)
Hanna Meretoja, Eneken Laanes

16-17 KEYNOTE

Chair: Hanna Meretoja

Mark Freeman: What Have We Wrought? Narrative and Its Dangers

17.15-18.45 PARALLEL SESSIONS I–IV

I Hermeneutics of the Temporal and Transformative Self (seminar room V105)

Chair: Brian Schiff

Jens Brockmeier: Juggling How Many Balls at Once? On Autobiographical Simultaneity

Jan Tlustý: Narrative Identity, Hermeneutics, and Ethics

Raquel da Silva: “There Are Many Mirrors and Many Curtains Between What I Am Today and What I Was Then”: Exploring Dialogical Positioning During Self-Transformation of Former Politically Violent Militants

II Posthuman and Postapocalyptic Narratives (seminar room E121)

Chair: Markku Lehtimäki

Bo Pettersson: The Uses of Animal and Plant Fables

Jouni Teittinen: Speculative Memories: Narrating the Present in Post-Apocalyptic Literature

Juha Raipola: Re-Envisioning Grand Narratives as Stories of Imagined Communities

III Autobiographical Writing(seminar room E117)

Chair: Avril Tynan

Yu-Hua Yen: The Narrative Integrity of Narrating Selves: The Case of Fictional Autobiographies

Klára Soukupová: Write about Love, not Politics! Construction of Identity in Autobiographical Narratives

Maarit Leskelä-Kärki: “Message from the Middle of a Crater”: Uses of Narratives in Women Writers’ Diaries

IV Politics of Narrative (seminar room E221)

Chair: Siobhan Kattago

Jonas Mirbeth: When We Read Mao: Non-Western Influences in May 68 Discourse and its Academic Reception Today

Jurga Jonutyte: Social Outcast or Heroic Fighter or Maybe Neither?

Jitendra Singh: Political Narratives and the Politics of Narrative

19.15 RECEPTION (Turku City Hall, address Aurakatu 2)

15 FEBRUARY, FRIDAY

10-12 KEYNOTES (Janus hall)

Chair: Eneken Laanes

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi: Stuck in the Past: The Narrative Shape of Convenient Histories

Greta Olson: Why We Need Narrative Research for a Nuanced Analysis of Political Trends?

12-13 LUNCH

13-14.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS V–VIII

V Storytelling and Critical Theory (seminar room V105)

Chair: Bo Pettersson

Markku Lehtimäki: From Self-Fashioning Subjects to Storytelling Animals: The Changing Focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics

Sigurd Tenningen: Recollecting the Past: Literary Narratives and the Archaeological Imagination

Kaisa Ilmonen: Uses of Storytelling in Theorizing Identities: Case Intersectionality

VI Narrative, Memory and Space (seminar room E121)

Chair: Merja Polvinen

Mikko Mäntyniemi: “She is a Child of the Dune Sea!” Narrative Identity and Phantasmagorical Landscape in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus

Siri Hempel Lindøe: Jonas Dahlberg’s “Memory Wound” as Iconoclasm: An Attempt to Understand the Potential and the Problems with Breakage and Engraving of the Landscape as a Way to Remember the Victims of 22 July

Pekka Kilpeläinen: Narratives of Traumatic Cultural Memory: Haunting, Posthumanism and Animism in Daniel Black’sThe Sacred Placeand Bernice L. McFadden’s Gathering of Waters

VII Mediating and Translating Narrative and Memory (seminar room E117)

Chair: Maria Mäkelä

Caroline Williamson Sinalo: Memory, Translation and Media Narratives of Conflict Exploring the Case of Burundi

Marion Letellier: From Translating Storytelling to Reshaping the Translator: The Example of The World and Other Placesby Jeanette Winterson (1998)

Taylor Annabell: The Memory Work of Young Women on Social Media Involving Birthdays and Celebrations

VIII Narrative Medicine and Illness Narratives (seminar room E223)

Chair: Sarah Holdren

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Emma Frances O’Connor: Beating Illness Into Shape: An Exercise in Applied Narratology

Anna Ovaska: (The Uses and Abuses of) Engaging with Narratives of Pain

Megan Milota: Cultural Negotiation in Narratives of Manic Depression: Karkas, Storybank, and PsychoseNet

14.30-15.00 COFFEE

15-15.45 ROUNDTABLE on Instrumental Narratives (Janus hall)

Hanna Meretoja, Maria Mäkelä, Greta Olson & Merja Polvinen.

16.00-17.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS IX–XII

IX Holocaust and Literature (seminar room V105)

Chair: Eneken Laanes

Avril Tynan: The Narrative Orphan: Rewriting the Self; Rewriting the Past

Elina Arminen: Finnish SS-volunteer in the Finnish Literature: the Cultural Memory and Abeyance

Helena Duffy: The Silence of the Mothers: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck (2007)

X War, Memory, Identity (seminar room E121)

Chair: Kaisa Ilmonen

Dina Abazovic: Narrative Gaps in Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Adrian Oktenberg’s The Bosnia Elegies

Charles Armstrong: DRESDEN CHINA: Fractured Memory Narratives in Ciaran Carson’s poetry

Anne Kirstine Munk Christiansen: The Impossibility of Homecoming in George Saunders’ “Home”

XI Migration and Testimonies (seminar room E117)

Chair: Marta Laura Cenedese

Anna Vuorinne: White Pictures of Black People? Comics on Migration Reflecting Narrative Imagination, Visual Representation, and Agency

Aura Lounasmaa, Cigdem Esin & Crispin Hughes: Anonymity and Representation in Visual Life Stories from the Jungle

Harriet Hulme: Between Fiction and Testimony: Exploring an Ethics of Re-Narration in Refugee Tales(2016) and Shatila Stories(2018)

XII Reading and Wellbeing(seminar room E221)

Chair: Hanna Meretoja

Cristina V. Bruns: Self-centered Reading: Strengthening Selfhood and Agency through Fiction

Päivi Kosonen & Eevastiina Kinnunen:Narrative, Reading and Wellbeing – The Potential of Reading Metanarrative Fiction

19 CONFERENCE DINNER (Restaurant Pinella, address Vanha Suurtori 2)

16 FEBRUARY, SATURDAY

10-11 KEYNOTE (Janus hall)

Chair: Hanna Meretoja
Jakob Lothe: Narrative, Memory and Identity: Leni Riefenstahl, Edith Notowicz, W. G. Sebald, Jenny Erpenbeck

11-12 ROUNDTABLE: New Nordic Contributions to the Study of Narrative and Memory (Janus hall)

Chair: Siobhan Kattago
Molly Andrews, Colin Davis, Eneken Laanes, Hanna Meretoja & Hans Ruin

12-13 LUNCH

13-14.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS XIII–XVI

XIII Theorizing Memory (seminar room V105)

Chair: Colin Davis

Brian Schiff: Conceptual Shell Games

Thomas Van de Putte: The Contemporary Inhabitants of Oswiecim (Auschwitz): An Interactional Approach to Collective Memory

Per Roar: Stumbling Blocks: Stories Too Big for the Everyday

XIV Master and Counter Narratives: Refugee Narratives (seminar room E121)

Chair: Maarit Leskelä-Kärki

Marta Laura Cenedese: “Writing the Memory of the Colonial Archive”: Italian Identity, Cultural Narratives, and Postcolonial Society

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni: “A Nation that Does Not Remember”: Alternative Temporalities and Spatialities in Yan Geling’s Storytelling

Helle Marie Andresen: Refugee Narratives and Identity: An Analysis of Breachby Popoola and Holmes

XV Dangers of Narratives (seminar room E117)

Chair: Megan Milota

Ada Schwanck: Selling Love Stories at the Human Rights Market: A Critical Approach to the Uses of the Documentary Out of Iraqin LGBT Refugee Advocacy

Abdelbaqi Ghorab: Against Memorization: The Historiographic Metafiction and the Interrogation of National Memory in J. M. Coetzee’s Foeand Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, Contre-Enquête

Sarah Holdren: Preterm Motherhood: An Analysis of the Role of Infant Feeding in Non-Normative Birth Stories

XVI Storying Lives: Pedagogical and Literary Perspectives (seminar room E221)

Chair: Aura Lounasmaa

Mirva Heikkilä: Voices of Finnish Pre-Service Teachers’ Professional Agency in Terms of Research Skills

Laura Karttunen: Fictional Designs for Lives: Riikka Pulkkinen’s Iiris Lempivaaran levoton ja painava sydän

Ajaysinh Chauhan: Cāraṇī Oral Narratives and the Reassessment of Historical Facts

14.30-15 COFFEE

15-16.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS XVII–XX

XVII Political Narratives (seminar room V105)

Chair: Jens Brockmeier

Molly Andrews: “The Wall Inside the Heart”: Narrating East German Identity

Josefin Graef: Memory Politics, Narrative Politics, or the Politics of Identity? A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration in the Context of Extremist Violence

Michael L. Zukosky: The Political Potential of Multigenerational Life Narratives: Exploring Productive Tensions between History and Memory

XVIII French Perspectives on Storytelling (seminar room E121)

Chair: Marta Laura Cenedese

Anaïs Fusaro: Me, Myself and my Memory: The Ego-History of Ivan Jablonka

Tim Farrant: Storytelling, Forms and Ethics in France, Daudet to Houellebecq

Marieke Mueller: Narrative, Memory and Identity in Contemporary French Autofiction: Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis

XIX Nordic Perspectives on Memory and Identity (seminar room E117)

Chair: Jouni Teittinen

Nanny Jolma: Constructing the Reflective Nostalgic Narrative and the Memory of the Past in Bo Carpelan´s Berg

Elise Nykänen: Writing from the Land of Melancholia: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and the Case of Arctic Hysteria

Anna Kuutsa: Narrating the Gender in Maria Jotuni’s Arkielämää

XX Collective Identities(seminar room E221)

Chair: Eevastiina Kinnunen

Dima Samaha: Storytelling and Memory in Lebanese Post Civil-War Fiction Novels

Anna Sivula: Heritage Lost? Collective Identity Work of Local Heritage Communities in Municipal Mergers

Sahdev Luhar: Cultural Memory and the Shaping of Identity

16.30 CLOSING DISCUSSION (Janus hall)

Organisers: Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Nordic Summer University, Nordic Council of Ministers); University of Turku; SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory; research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (Academy of Finland, 2018-2022). The image is from artist Hanna Geara.