2025

Monday 3 February at 14-16
Tampere University, City centre campus, Linna -building, Room K103 and Zoom (Link)
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar, University of Groningen

Entering Through the Right Ear: Narrative and the Mind

What do we talk about when we talk about narrative? What do we talk about when we talk about (the) mind? In this lecture, I will propose working definitions of both terms, and attempt to open up the worlds of knowledge within which academic and folk debates around the nexus of narrative and the mind are embedded. My hypothesis will be that while our minds are predisposed to storify experience, the mind itself is also fundamentally storified. Therefore, we need, alongside our narrative competency – i.e. the ability to storify our life experiences – a narrative literacy: the capacity to critically reflect on how our mind creates stories, and stories create our mind. I will finish my lecture with discussing the relevance of my findings for applied narratology: how can they inform the bringing together of theories of narrative and storytelling practices?

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar is co-founder and one of the academic directors of the Netherlands Winter School on Narrative. He has worked with narrative in a variety of capacities, both as an academic at universities in Tunisia and the Netherlands, and as a freelance organizational consultant. Currently he is a senior lecturer for the Arts, Cognition and Criticism programme at the University of Groningen. He is actively involved in and publishes about the establishment of applied narratology: a bridge between theory and practices of narrative. Recent work includes Narrative Values, the Value of Narratives (De Gruyter 2024, co-edited with Barend van Heusden), a special issue on applied narratology in the journal Narrative Inquiry (2024, co-edited with Laura Karttunen and Anna Ovaska), and an upcoming special issue on the same topic in Narrative (2026, co-edited with Genevieve Liveley and Andrea Macrae).