Time: Friday November 6 2026, 10:00–12:00 (EET)
Place: TAU Linna K104: Väinö Linna -Sali
The event will be streamed via Zoom (Link, Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)
Abstracts & Speaker Bios:
Dorothee Birke:
Bookish Social Media in the Light of Narrative Theory: Challenges and Opportunities
The last ten years have seen the rise of a new reading culture, in which social media and digital platforms (such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and reddit) are used to connect with other readers, exchange book recommendations and perform reader identities. While studying these sites provides a wealth of information on reading as an everyday practice, a narrative scholar may also be disappointed to find that sustained readings of specific texts, which could tell us how flesh and blood readers are responding, for example, to narrative perspective, plot patterns or temporal structures, are comparatively scarce. More generally, at first sight, the bookish social media provide slim pickings for narratologists trained in close reading and thematic analysis. This talk is a personal exploration of the challenges, limits and opportunities involved in examining bookish social media; I will give an overview over some the main approaches and reflect on the extent to which my own approach to these phenomena has been informed by narrative studies.
Dorothee Birke is Professor of Anglophone literatures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and works on both the contemporary and the eighteenth-century British novel. She is interested in the question of how narrative presents in and responds to particular media ecologies and their material, economical and social configurations. Her engagement with narrative theory began with her PhD dissertation Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative (published in 2008). Her second book, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice (published 2016) then asked how novels in different periods have explicitly and implicitly promoted particular ideas and ideals about reading as a changing practice. Many of her current interests have developed from this project: most prominently, her work on how practitioners on social media platforms such as BookTok and BookTube represent and perform their practices and identities as readers of narrative fiction. She also continues to be interested in paratext, in representations of the digital in contemporary fiction and in more broadly in reception also in other media, particularly the theatre. Dorothee’s articles have been published in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Style, Journal of Popular Culture, and Language and Literature. Currently she serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
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Ruth Page:
Memetic Stories in TikTok: A case study in SORA 2 videos
Memetic stories are a widely used but under-theorised narrative format that proliferate in the ‘imitation publics’ (Darvin, 2022) of TikTok. In this paper, I set out a framework studying memetic stories (Georgakopoulou and Page, forthcoming), which builds on the small story paradigm and mediated narrative analysis. I focus on a case study of 60 SORA 2 memes and their comments (n=600) to explore how AI-assisted tellership enables the construction of hyper-real taleworlds and is contested as a source of in- and out-group positioning within the comment threads. The case study illustrates that even with the most innovative forms of distributed narrative agency, familiar patterns of narrative interaction take place through which the facets of narrative tellability are debated and reworked.
Ruth Page is Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has written several books including Narratives Online: Shared Stories and Social Media (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction (London & NY: Routledge, 2012). Her publications have explored narratives and multimodal communication in a wide range of mediated contexts. She was the lead researcher for the ESRC funded project: Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People: https://influencerstories.bham.ac.uk/, which examined mental health narratives from influencers in TikTok and produced a range of resources to help educators, policy makers, parents and carers and young people. She is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou on memetic storytelling in TikTok (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan). She regards herself as an intellectual magpie, bridge-builder and enjoys learning about the ways storytelling is evolving in our fast-changing digital landscape.