ENN8 Conference

ENN8 "Limits of Narrative" Conference - Schedule

For conference attendees:
To find out when your presentation will take place, please scroll down or download the schedule on the right hand side under Downloads.

* Please note that the welcome reception and concert will not be held at the university, but at Insel, Wiesenstraße 6, 42105 Wuppertal. Please plan for a change of location.

Detailed Schedule for Monday

Opening and Keynote Lecture

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: auditorium 32 (K.11.23)

14:00-15:30: Monika Fludernik
Increases and Decreases in Narrativity: The Grey Area Between (Experiential) Narrative and Narrative Report

Panel 1 - Inner Limits of Narratives: Narratives and their Gaps

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: Senatssaal (K.11.07)

16:00: Bohumil Fořt
Gaps and Narrativity: Strategie and Functions
16:30: John Pier
Interdeterminances and Inferencing

17:00: Marco Caracciolo
Minding Gaps in Video Game Narrative

Panel 3 - Narrative and Generative AI: Theories, methodologies, practices

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: K7 (K.11.15)

16:00: Stefan Iversen, Pernille Meyer, and Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen
Human-Machine Narration. A Paradigm for Understanding GenAI Storytelling
16:30: Bartosz Lutostański
From Fiction to Simulation: Rethinking Rhetorical Narratology From the Perspective of AI-generated Stories
17:00: Andreea Ritivoi & Rod Piza
"Co-authors?" New Narrative Possibilities in AI-enhanced Environments

Panel 4 - Authors Against the Story Economy

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: K5 (K.11.20)

16:00: Maria Mäkelä
Authors against the Story Economy
16:30: Ansgar Mohnkern
Proust, Against Narrative

17:00: Ville Hämäläinen
Complex Narratives Against Compelling Stories: Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s Det europæiske forår, and the Limits of the Ethics

Panel 5 - The Limits of Self-Narratives

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: K8 (K.11.10)

16:00: Larissa Muravieva
Introduction
16:30: James Harker
After Autofiction: Rachel Cusk’s _Parade_ (2024)
17:00: Daniela Henke
At the Boundaries of Autobiography and Fiction. On ‘Autofiction’ and its Dynamics between Individualization and Politicization (tentative title)

Panel 7 - Causal and Emotional Understanding of Narrative

Monday, September 29, 2025; Room: K3 (K.12.18)

16:00: András Bálint Kovács
The Limits of Cinematic Narration
16:30: Catalina Iricinschi
Narrative Weak-Links: Causality in Complex Networks of Narrative Events

Detailed Schedule for Tuesday

Panel 1 - Inner Limits of Narratives: Narratives and their Gaps

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: Senatssaal (K.11.07)

09:00: Eyal Segal
How Stories Work by Manipulating What We Don’t Know: Gaps as the Generators of Narrativity
09:30: Carmen Lăcan
The role of gaps in character identity construction
10:00: Andrey Agratin
Open-ended Narratives in a Diachronic Perspective

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Ondřej Sládek
Gaps in Narrative from the Perspective of Czech Structuralists
11:30: Stefania Irene Sini
Figurative gaps in poetry according to Yury Tynianov
12:00: Romana Kališová
Gaps in the Narrative of the Modernist Poetry. Its Function and Ways of Interpretation.
12:30: Valery Timofeev
When the Gaps Matter: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Vs. The Town of N by Leonid Dobychin

13:00: Lunch Break

Panel 2 - Beyond Tellability. The Limits of Narrative in the Representation of Everyday Life

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K2 (K.12.20)

10:30: Coffee Break

11:30: Matthias Grüne, Antonius Weixler
Introduction
12:00: Gabriele Wix
Capturing the minutiae of daily life. Friederike Mayröcker
12:30: Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj
Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Form: Narrative Techniques in Flash Non-Fiction

13:00: Lunch Break

Panel 3 - Narrative and Generative AI: Theories, methodologies, practices

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K7 (K.11.15)

09:00: Alex Georgakopoulou
"No, I don't think you mentioned that before": Story-telling and memory-building with ChatGPT
09:30: Joshua Parker
Do AI Products Want to Tell Stories?
10:00: Aigars Ceplitis & Sabrina Durlin-Jones
Sora AI and the Dispersed Author: Algorithmic Negotiations in the Post-Anthropocentric Age

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Ziyang Feng
Algorithmic Ghostwriting: Relational Authorship, Epistemic Justice, and the Fluid Topologies of Human-AI Narrative Collaboration
11:30: Gero Guttzeit
From the Death of the Author to Critical Aesthetics of AI: Generative Narratives

Panel 4 - Authors Against the Story Economy

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K5 (K.11.20)

09:30: Natalya Bekhta
Storytelling at the Limit: Narrative Fiction in Contemporary Ukraine
10:00 Katrijn Van den Bossche & Janine Hauthal
Historiographic Metafiction Against the Story Economy in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (2023)

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Tero Vanhanen
Telling the Wrong Story: Authenticity, Relatability, and Queerness in Dennis Cooper’s Frisk
11:30: Samuli Björninen
On-and-offline authors of story economy: Using one's platform while staying off social media
12:00: Pieter Vermeulen
Parataxis and/as Scrolling: Literary Upmarket Fiction and the Values of Juxtaposition

Panel 5 - The Limits of Self-Narratives

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K8 (K.11.10)

09:00: Diána Mosza
The role of self-perception and images in two autofictional nouveau-roman (Georges Perec: W ou le souvenir d'enfance, Marguerite Duras: L'Amant
09:30: Christian Baier
Blurring Boundaries: Fact, Fiction, and the Limits of Self-Narration in Cho Nam-Joo’s "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982"
10:00: Yi Cheng
The Unreliable Self-narration in The Pastoral Symphony of André Gide

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Michal Mrugalski
Killer Autofiction. Terrorists-Belletrists and the Propaganda of the Deed in the Romanov Empire
11:30: Ivan Delazari
Trust Limited: Suspended Authorship and Narratorial Takeover in (a) Ghostwritten Self-Narrative
12:00: Irena Vladimirsky
Limits of Self-representation in the Diaries of the Russian-Jewish Gold Entrepreneur Yakov Frizer (1869-1932)

13:00: Lunch Break

Panel 7 - Causal and Emotional Understanding of Narrative

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K3 (K.12.18)

09:00: Erzsébet Lamár
What makes us scared? A few remarks on the problem of interpretive casuses and impossible narratives
09:30: Lajos Mitnyán
Casual Order and Human Destiny: The Phenomenology of Narrated Life in László Tengelyi's Philosophy
10:00: Erzsébet Szabó
Probability, necessity, reversal

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Daria Baryshnikova
Form Follows Feeling: Emotional Truth and Experimental Structure in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates
11:30: Mozdeh Sameti
The Potential Disruption of Casual and Emotional Coherence in Diegetic Drama
12:00: Inna Livytska
Narrative Scaffolding and Rhythmic Emotional Dynamics

13:00: Lunch Break

Panel 8 - Cross-Genre and Cross-Media Transferability of Narrative Categories: Possibilities and Limits

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: K4 (K.12.16)

09:00: Tomas Waszak
Metalepsis as a touchstone of narrativity. An intermedial case study
09:30: Louis Rouille
Varieties of metafictions
10:00: Jasmin Bieber
Unreliability and Infrastructural Meaning-Making in Storytelling Podcasts

10:30: Coffee Break

11:00: Abolfazl Horri
Translating Feminine Voice Across Languages: A Narratological Analysis of Three Persian Translations of To the Lighthouse
11:30: Radmila Mladenova
The Hijacked Monomyth or How Racism Structures Collective Imaginaries
12:00: Marie Fiévé
Narrative We-Voice, Reliability and Moral Agency: Forced Entertainment's Stage Adaptation of Ágota Kristóf's Novel The Notebook
12:30: Tien Phat Nguyen
Cinematic and Theatrical Narrators in All About Eve by Ivo van Hove (2019): An Intermedial Approach to Multimodal Narrative on Stage

13:00: Lunch Break

Participatory Round Table

Tuesday, September 30, 2025; Room: auditorium 32 (K.11.23)

14:00: Participatory Round Table

Chair & Organizer: Dr. Carolin Gebauer (University of Wuppertal, Germany)

Invited speakers:
Prof. Dr. Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University, Belgium)
Dr. Aigars Ceplītis (RISEBA University of Applied Science, Latvia)
Prof. Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College London, UK)
Dr. Maria Mäkelä (University of Tampere, Finland)
Prof. Stefania Sini (University of Eastern Piedmont Vercelli, Italy)
Prof. Roy Sommer (University of Wuppertal, Germany)
Prof. Ondřej Sládek (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)

Since the ENN started with its opening conference in Hamburg in 2009, narrative research has changed significantly. New challenges, from policy narratives on climate change and sustainability to post-truth discourses and narrative propaganda accompanying the war against Ukraine, have prompted new theories of narrative com. The role of narratives, and narrative framing, has come under scrutiny, too, and storytelling practices on digital media raise ethical concerns. Finally, AI looms large over our text-oriented disciplines, changing the nature of writing and reading. How should narrative research respond to these challenges, and what is the future role of networks like ENN? How can the onboarding of younger generations of researchers be facilitated, and how could the ENN be developed further? Finally, how will the changes in publishing, accelerated by AI, affect established formats like books and journals, and what does that mean for the future of time-consuming projects like dissertation theses? The discussion of these questions will be kick-started by a round table discussion between the invited speakers, followed by a Q&A session involving the entire audience.