NEH Summer Seminar 2008

Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction

Pablo Picasso, Large Bather with a Book (1937)

June 16--July 25, 2008

Director: Professor James Phelan

Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio

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Application Information and Instructions [Word Version]

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Welcome!
Thank you very much for your interest in the NEH Summer Seminar on Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction that I will be directing at Ohio State from June 16 to July 25, 2008. I regard the three previous NEH seminars I directed as highlights in my career, so I am looking forward with eager anticipation to this one: there are few things as intellectually satisfying as a six-week discussion of the subject one loves with fifteen other highly motivated teachers and scholars.

Scope and Approach of the Seminar

 "Narrative understanding"; "narrative explanation"; "narrative as a way of thinking"; “narrative as self-construction”: these phrases are now common currency in the conversations of literary critics, historians, philosophers, social scientists, therapists, legal scholars, and even some scientists and medical professionals, as their disciplines reflect on the ubiquity of storytelling (representing characters and events in a temporal and typically casual sequence)  and its power to capture certain truths and experiences in ways that other modes of explanation such as statistics, descriptions, summaries, and abstract analyses  cannot.  The consensus about the power of narrative invites investigation into its form and into our ways of producing and consuming it: what is it about character, plot, and ways of telling that make narrative such an important way of organizing and explaining experience and knowledge?

This seminar will explore the answers to this question provided by a rhetorical theory of narrative and by a range of fictional and nonfictional narratives themselves. The seminar will have two major units: (1) the exploration of rhetorical theory and its conception of the connection between rhetoric and ethics; (2) the placement of rhetorical theory in relation to other branches of narrative theory, including other approaches to ethics, feminist narratology, and cognitive narratology.  Throughout both units, we will turn to the narrative texts not only to apply the theories but also to challenge them.  Indeed, one of our principles will be that narrative theory should follow the lead of narrative artists not dictate to them.  One issue that we will examine from multiple perspectives is the rhetoric and ethics of unreliable narration.