Fourth NEWW November meeting
NARRATION, GENDER, IRONY
As a follow-up of previous NEWW conferences about female narration (Bochum, May 2009), and more specifically about narrative techniques used by 19th-century German female authors (Nancy, June 2010), we intended to organize a meeting where female narration and irony could be discussed and compared the irony of male narrators.
This seemed to be an important item for our research. Vera Nünning, in her introduction to the Bochum conference, had shown which kinds of strategies English women novelists used when it came to describing female experience. In Nancy, different contributors illustrated these for German novelists (such as Louise von François). Irony was clearly one of those strategies.
An important aspect is also that this "female irony" has not always been understood as such by contemporary readers (cf. for instance the incipit of Mme Benoist's novel Célianne and its rewritings by contemporary journalists; Jane Austen as translated in French by Mme de Montolieu).
However difficult to realize, we would need means to determine how to recognize supposed irony as used by narrative instances. It is considered that electronic tools might be helpful both for tracing irony in narrative texts, and for studying the role irony played (plays) in literary communication. This will be discussed during this 4th November meeting, which, this year, takes place on 3 December. The subject of this meeting has been decided in collaboration with members of the SATOR: the Société pour l'Analyse de la Topique Romanesque, which focuses on computer assisted research on narrative topoi, and with colleagues of the Huygens Institute, The Hague.
PhD-students (Dutch or non-Dutch) working on irony and/or narration are invited to send proposals, before 30 September. They will be asked most probably to provide the organizers with a number of relevant (potentially ironic) fragments of the texts they are studying. Ideally, these fragments will be treated before the meeting's taking place. In case of interesting outcome (positive or negative), a collective presentation in an international conference might be decided.
Participation of:
- Madeleine Jeay (McMaster University Canada)
- Stéfan Sinclair (id.)
- Daniel Maher (University of Calgary Canada)
Interested? Contact organizers:
SvD, August 2010
- Conferences > NEWW November meetings > 2010