Lindsay Holmgren on LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Episode 26 of the Project Narrative podcast features Lindsay Holmgren discussing LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story first published in 1973 and frequently anthologized ever since. Dr. Holmgren brings the perspective of her work on narrative and economics to the story and we also discuss some striking features of the narration. Here’s the link:
Rita Charon on “Puppy” by George Saunders
Episode 25 of the Project Narrative podcast features Rita Charon discussing “Puppy” by George Saunders, a story included in his 2013 collection Tenth of December. Prof. Charon frames the discussion by referring to Saunders’ friendship with David Foster Wallace and their shared interest in pivoting away from what they saw as a dominant aesthetic of Postmodern irony toward one which made room for nonironic evocations of tenderness, sympathy, and other human emotions. In the discussion itself, she links the affective dimensions of Saunders’s story to his techniques and his thematizing of class differences. The discussion is available on the following link:
A Conversation about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Episode 24 of the PN podcast features Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen discussing Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Special attention is given to Poe’s play with the words “I” and “eye,” to the psychology of the character narrator, and to voice. The podcast is available here:
Salman Rushdie’s “The Firebird’s Nest” in PNP ep. 16
In Episode 16 of the Project Narrative Podcast, Aman Garcha reads and discusses Salman Rushdie’s 1997 short story, “The Firebird’s Nest.” Among other issues raised by the story, Garcha discusses how Rushdie handles issues of individual agency and choice. The podcast is available at:
https://podcast.osu.edu/
Everyday Racism
In Episode 15 of the Project Narrative Podcast, Simone Drake discusses with Jim Phelan two oral narratives by an African American woman, Scotia Brown, in which she tells about her experiences with “everyday racism.” Scotia’s narratives and Simone’s work with them are part of larger project entitled Black Women’s Lives Matter: Learning from Stories of Everyday Racism that Simone, Robyn Warhol, Lisa Zunshine from the University of Kentucky, Jack Turman from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, and Jim Phelan from the Ohio State University are collaborating on.
Everything Everywhere All at Once: Money, Choice, and Simultaneity
A new Project Narrative talk will take place on Thursday, February 16, 2023, at 3:30 PM (EST) by Professor Amanpal Garcha. The talk will show that the history of economics and the history of narratives about decision-making can help us understand our present moment’s fascination with multiverses. The first part of the talk will outline some ways that, since the early nineteenth century, changing conceptions of economic value have corresponded to changing formal features in the narration of choice. The second part will use this history to explain important aspects of Everything Everywhere All at Once: the film’s narration of the Quans’ financial difficulties, its representation of their immigrant identities, and its assertion that the multiverse is a consequence of modernity’s expansive possibilities for deciding among different options, all of which seem simultaneously available.
Zoom Meeting Information:
https://osu.zoom.us/j/
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Password: 838658
Project Narrative Podcast on Stand-Up Comedy
In episode 14 of the PN podcast you can listen to Jared Gardner read and discuss Chris Gethard’s stand-up comedy show, “Career Suicide.” The podcast also features audio clips of Gethard’s performance.
Project Narrative Podcast with Leigh Gilmore
In episode 12 of the PN podcast Leigh Gilmore reads and discusses “Neck” by the Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell. This narrative is the first chapter of O’Farrell’s 2017 memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.
https://podcasts.apple.com/mt/
Project Narrative Podcast: Frederick Aldama on “Continuity of Parks”
This month’s podcast features Frederick Aldama, discussing Julio Cortazar’s “Continuity of Parks.” Jim Phelan and Aldama touch upon narrative discourse, as well as issues of immersion, affect, ethics, and metafiction.
Is Everything Really Awesome? The Lego Movie as a Dystopian Parody
The Centre’s research team, composed of Valentina Markasović, Jelena Pataki, Zvonimir Prtenjača and Ljubica Matek, offers a visual and verbal analysis of The Lego Movie as a significant popcultural text, and not just a media product. The film is both a dystopia and a parody of the dystopian genre in its representation of the dystopian tropes. It also functions as a critique of the contemporary consumerist society with its focus on uniformity, conformity and non-critical consumption.
Project Narrative Podcast
All our members interested in matters of narratology and narrative analysis can listen to interesting and enlightening conversations with the most prominent experts in the field of narrative studies on the Ohio State University’s Project Narrative podcast, which is available here: https://podcast.osu.edu/projectnarrative/
Project Narrative is a cluster of faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students who work on narrative and narrative theory. The Project aims to promote state-of-the art research and teaching in the field of narrative studies.
Race and Coming of Age Superhero Comics, TV & Film
The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative hosted their third Core Faculty Lecture by Dr. Frederick Aldama on Friday, 9 April 2021. The talk is titled “Race and Coming of Age Superhero Comics, TV & Film,” and it offers a sneak-peak into Aldama’s forthcoming Race and Coming of Age Superhero Comics, TV, & Film—a book that focuses on different types of worldbuilding as shaped by and through a series of coming of age characters of colour. Aldama unpacks how a series of bildung comic books create differently inflected ethnoracial pauses that wake reader-minds to the dazzlingly dynamic kinesis of consciousness of a panoply of teen protagonists of colour.
Courtesy of Project Narrative, the recorded talk is available here.
Professor Frederick Luis Aldama is a Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at The Ohio State University. He is the 2019 recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He is the award-winning author, co-author and editor of 40 books. In 2018, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the International Latino Book Award and the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work. He is editor and co-editor of eight academic press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes in comics (Amazon Prime) and co-founder and director of SÕL-CON: Brown & Black Comix Expo. He is founder and director of the Obama White House award-winning LASER: Latinx Space for Enrichment & Research, as well as founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as faculty affiliation in the Department of Film Studies and the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His children’s book, The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie, was published in June 2020. He is currently working on an animation adaptation of The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie, his graphic novel Labyrinths Borne, documentary films on Latinx comics and Latinx TV, two books on Latinx TV and two books on global comics, and curating nine different book series, including the trade press Latinographix with OSU Press.
Medieval Popular Culture: Life Stories
The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative, a cluster of faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students who work on narrative and narrative theory, hosted a Core Faculty Lecture by Core Faculty Member Dr. Karen Winstead on Friday, 12 March 2021.
Dr. Winstead’s talk titled “From Margaret the Dragon Slayer to Margery Kempe: Narrating Women’s Lives in 15th–Century England” explores how the fifteenth century was remarkable for its depth and range of narrative invention. Dr. Winstead looks at some of the extraordinary new ways that fifteenth–century authors developed to narrate life stories. Her focus is writings about women, from the legendary Saint Margaret, dragon slayer, to Margery Kempe, entrepreneur, mother of 14, visionary and traveler. She shows how narratology can help us appreciate the way lives were constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in late medieval England. You can expect the unexpected, from runaway prologues to proto fan fiction to virtual realities.
Courtesy of Project Narrative, the recorded talk is available here.
Karen Winstead is professor of English at The Ohio State University, where she is also the director of Undergraduate Studies for the English department and a Core Faculty member of Project Narrative. Her research interests include medieval literature, popular culture, medievalism, narrative, life-writing, gender and sexuality. She has published four monographs: 15th–Century Lives, The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 1: The Middle Ages, John Capgrave’s 15th Century, and Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. She has also translated and edited medieval lives of various female saints, and she has published essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe and appropriations of the Middle Ages in film and contemporary novels. Her teaching interests range from medieval literature to contemporary film and popular culture. She regularly teaches the Survey of British Literature to 1800, Special Topics in Women and Literature (“Medieval Women”), Special Topics in Film and Literature (“Monsters Without and Within”), Special Topics in Popular Culture (“Vampires”) and other topics in medieval literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2016 and 2019, she won the English Undergraduate Organization’s Professor of the Year award, and in 2020, she won the English Graduate Organization’s Professor of the Year award.
