Professor
1 August 2016-31 July 2017
Office: Atalpa 311
Tel. +358 (0)40 190 1565
Email: mari.hatavara@tuni.fi
Research interests
My research interests revolve around narrative studies and include mind representation, (unnatural) narrative communication, ekphrasis, fictionality, methodological exchange between different disciplinary traditions of narrative theory and analysis, and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. Lately, I have been working on testing the validity of literary-narratological methods in the analysis of documentary, nonfictional texts such as an online museum exhibition and politicians’ memoirs and interviews.
I am consortium Principal Investigator for the project “The Literary in Life” which reconsiders how literature reflects, explores and modifies social life. The project analyzes fiction, poetry and cases of new media texts in order to map the traffic between the poetic and the everyday, between the artistically designed and the incidentally occurring. In order to study the forms and functions of literature and life intertwined, the project asks 1) how the literary interacts with the communicative in everyday social interaction, 2) how literary experimentation revolts against and remodels dominant cultural values and discourses, and 3) how literature creates structures and discursive possibilities for individuals to express and to share emotion and affect. The consortium, with its threefold emphasis on the social (U Tampere), the experimental (U Jyväskylä) and the affective (U Helsinki), covers vital aspects on the traffic between life and literature. Together, the three universities contribute to the multidisciplinary effort of understanding the human mind in action.
Homepage (School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies)