The Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX) and Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University will organize a joint workshop on narratives and experience in history this autumn. The workshop is continuation for the interdisciplinary collaboration in the theme issue “Narrative and Experience” , published in the Scandinavian Journal of History in January 2022.
The workshop brings together scholars from different fields to an interdisciplinary exchange on the application of narrative approaches to historical texts and sources. What can narrative approaches offer methodologically to historical research, and vice versa, what can attention to historical constitution and contextualization of narrative models offer to the research fields? How can narrative text analysis be used to uncover historical experience or other historically changing phenomena?
The workshop programme includes four European keynote speakers and ten other invited talks. We welcome colleagues interested in these themes to participate in what will hopefully be two days of intensive discussion and methodological development. It is also possible to listen to the talks via an online link provided for those registered.
Registration Here .
Programme
Monday, October 31st
10.00-10.15
– Opening words by Professor Pirjo Markkola & Professor Mari Hatavara
10.15-11.45
– Chris Lorenz: Analyzing Narratives and Experience in History – some reflections on the relationship between history and narratology
– Marina Grishakova: Asynchrony and delay: human time and narrative experience
– Chair Mari Hatavara
11.45-13.00
– Lunch
13.00-14.30
– Dorothee Birke: Historicizing the present: The chrononarratological approach and a reading of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This
– Alison Rowlands: Narrative resolution? Making sense of narratives, experiences, and identities in witch-trial records from early modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany
– Chair Raisa Toivo
14.30-15.00
– Coffee
15.00-16.30
– Sari Katajala-Peltomaa: Narrating the experience – experiencing the narrative: The miraculous in medieval canonization processes
– Maria Mäkelä: Experientiality or exemplarity? Diachronic narratology and the case of free indirect discourse
– Reetta Eiranen: Experiential narration of national landscape in nineteenth-century letters
– Chair Sami Suodenjoki
18.00 –
– Dinner (for the speakers)
Tuesday, November 1st
10.15-11.45
– Mari Hatavara: Vicarious historical minds: Analyzing mind representation in historical interviews
– Ville Kivimäki: Trauma and the narratives of the nation: Collective scripts in overcoming experiences of violence in wartime Finland, 1939–45
– Hanna Meretoja: Narratively mediated experience: Rethinking the actual and the possible
– Chair Marja Jalava
11.45-13.00
– Lunch
13.00-14.00
– Ilona Pikkanen: Maxims and metaphors as a means of narrative persuasion in history writing
– Iida Pöllänen: Race, narrative, and (literary) history
– Chair Matti Hyvärinen
14.00-14.30
– Coffee
14.30-15.30
– Marja Jalava: Continuity as a temporal grand narrative in Finnish historiography
– Matti Hyvärinen: Master and counter-narratives in parliamentarians’ oral history interviews
– Chair Mari Hatavara
15.30-16.00
– Concluding discussion and future plans
More about the event
In historical research, the concept ’narrative’ can be understood in different ways. Historiography in itself can be analyzed as narrative but also texts produced in the past, the sources, can be interpreted as narratives. Equally, the understanding of what narrative is or what are the features to study when studying narrativity, varies remarkably. While recent narratology emphasizes experientiality as the core of any narrative, the narrativist readings of historiography have typically drawn on a plot centered understanding of narratives.
In studying historiographical texts as narratives, the assumption is that the presentation – and perhaps even the creation – of historical knowledge entails narrative sense making operations. When studying source texts as including narrativity, the narrative features of the text as historically situated in the past become highlighted. In relation to experience, historiography contributes to societal and cultural frames of interpretation for people’s experiences. Then again, the narrative analysis of sources can, for instance, be a way of studying what kind of narrative means and scripts were utilized and produced in past societies in the construction of individual as well as collective experiences.
For these reasons, it is important both to recognize the many meanings of narrative and narrativity in history and historical writing, as well as to study how narrative studies and historical research may best support each other and advance theory and methodology in both fields.