11.2. Maria Mäkelä: "Authors of The Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field"

This talk is a part of the Narrative Studies Seminar

Time: Tuesday 28 January 11 February 3:15 pm (EET); Place: Pinni B4113 or Zoom (Link). (Meeting ID: 668 4700 7494 Passcode: 045076)

 

Authors of The Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field

The 21st century story economy, prompting everyone to tell their story, puts a new strain on literary authors. They need to cope in the literary field transformed by digitalisation, in an environment where storytelling is considered a strategy and a business model. Personal stories of transformation and survival constitute narrative capital. Narrative capital is further entangled with digital capital, the ability to make use of, for example, the affordances of social media.

The talk outlines theoretical and methodological foundations for literary research that would combine the study of (1) the loss of autonomy of the 21st-century literary field (cf. Bourdieu 1992) and (2) the narrative ethos of contemporary authors as storytellers who need to naviagate rhetorically and ethically between different storytelling platforms, from social media and personal interviews to literary fiction. The suggested approach draws from both the sociology of literature and the rhetorical theory of narrative. The talk also serves as an introduction to the newly launched research project Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (AUTOSTORY, Research Council of Finland 2024–2028, consortium PI Mäkelä).