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 5 - 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 Mohkern
  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 6 - 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 9 - 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: Senatssaal (K.11.07)

10:30: Coffee Break

• 11:00: Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj
  Life, Extraordinary Form: Narrative Techniques in Flash Non-Fiction
   
• 11:30: Giovana Zamboni Rossi
  Limits of Narrative: Everyday Life and the Inner World in Lygia Fagundes Telles
   
• 12:00: Henk Vynckier
  George Orwell's “English Scene”, 1939-1949: Recording Britain in Pictures and the Festival of Britain
   
• 12:30: Gabriele Wix
  Capturing the minutiae of daily life. Friederike Mayröcker

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 5 - 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 6 - 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 Baeier
  Blurring Boundaries: Fact, Fiction, and the Limits of Self-Narration in Cho Nam-Joo’s "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982"

• 10:00: Neruda Woodhams Bertozzi
  Neither/nor: creative license, generic hybridity, and the relation between Self and the biographical Other in Anna Funder’s creative (non?)fiction

10:30: Coffee Break

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

13:00: Lunch Break
 

Panel 9 - 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 10 - 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:
  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

Detailed Schedule for Wednesday

Keynote Lecture

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: auditorium 32 (K.11.23)

• 09:00-10:00: Françoise Lavocat
  Fiction without Narrative?

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

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: Senatssaal (K.11.07)

10:00: Coffee Break

• 10:30: Márta Horváth
  Silences and omissions in social novel. How Narrative Gaps Shape Ideological Engagement
   
• 11:00: Martin Lindner
  Narrative (Un-)Reliability: Epistemic Gaps in Narratives and the Limits of Ethical Representation
   
• 11:30: Cora Övermann
  Hiding the Data: The Narrative Effects of Deferred Information in Contemporary Novels
   
• 12:00: Věra Koukalová
  The Trickster as Liminal Agent: Exploring Gaps in Narrative and the Dynamics of Disruption

12:30: Lunch Break

• 13:30: Maciej Mazur
  Unveiling Storyworld Affordances: A New Perspectives on Narrative Gaps and Literary Description
   
• 14:00: Pawel Tomczok
  The Fluid Limits of Alternate Histories – Gaps, Negations and Paratexts

 

Panel 2 - Beyond Tellability. The Limits of Narrative in the Representation of Everyday Life (Kopie 1)

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: K2 (K.12.20)

12:30: Lunch Break

• 13:30: Hans Färnlöf
  The Story of my Life as Absence of Storytelling - Generating Mechanisms in Madame Bovary
   
• 14:00: N.N.
   
• 14:30: N.N.

Panel 6 - The Limits of Self-Narratives

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: K8 (K.11.10)

10:00: Coffee Break

• 10:30: Nicole Basaraba
  What are the limits between grand narratives, small stories, and micro self-narratives in the digital age?

• 11:00: Martin Dege
  Self-Narrative as Self-Betrayal: Identity Production in Late Capitalism

• 11:30: Emil Egenbauer
  The Aporia of Narrative Subjectivation: David Lynch’s Hollywood Trilogy and the Limits of Self-Narration

• 12:00: Fryderyk Kwiatkowski
  Splitting the Self: Epistemic Gaps and the Limits of Narrative Identity in "Severance" (2022 -)

12:30: Lunch Break

• 13:30: Odile Heynders
  Investigative Writing: Self-narrative as History
   
• 14:00: Richard Marotta
  The Narrative of Resistance and Healing in the Indigenous Australian writers, Sally Morgan and Alexis Wright
   
• 14:30: Daniel Mandel & Marie Klatt
  Performing (non)memories. Communicative Strategies in Oral History Interviews
   

Panel 8 - Limits of Narrative - Medieval Perspectives

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: K7 (K.11.15)

10:00: Coffee Break

• 10:30: Coralie Rippl-Uhlenhut & Rabea Kohnen
  Introduction
   
• 11:00: Caroline Emmelius
  Inbetween Narration and Description: Monstrous Wonders in 16th Century Print
   
• 11:30: Franziska Putz
  Adding Tales to the Equation - Exploring the Narrative Potential of Late Medieval and Early Modern Reckoning Books
   
• 12:00: Björn Klaus Buschbeck
  Beyond Telling a Story: On the Role of Narrative in Late Medieval Prayers and Devotions on the Passion of Christ

12:30: Lunch Break

• 13:30: Elisabeth König
  Non-Narrativity as a Necessity. The Vorau Manuscript 276 and its Multiple Circles of RecipientsNN

• 14:00: Elisabeth De Bruijn
  Framing the Narrative. Authorial Reflections and the Early Canonization of Medieval German Romances

• 14:00: Claudia Doering
  Limits of Narrative in Christine de Pizan's Cité des Dames

• 14:30: Eva von Contzen
  Summaries and the Limits of Narrative in Medieval Literature

• 15:00: Coralie Rippl-Uhlenhut & Rabea Kohnen
  Summary and Perspectives
   

Panel 9 - Causal and Emotional Understanding of Narrative

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: K3 (K.12.18)

10:00: Coffee Break

• 10:30: Yasaman Ghafaryan Shirazi
  Narratives and Emotional Intelligence in Development: An Integrative Review
   
• 11:00: Valentina Hoffren
  Theorizing from the Body: Rethinking Feminist Narratology Through the Concept of Embodiment
   
• 10:00: Gabriele Lis
  Between Normal People: Social irrationality and persistent plot patterns
   

Panel 10 - Cross-Genre and Cross-Media Transferability of Narrative Categories: Possibilities and Limits

Wednesday, October 1, 2025; Room: K4 (K.12.16)

10:00: Coffee Break

• 10:30: Stephan Brössel & Florian Freitag
  Beyond the Limits of Narratology: Narrativity in Theme Parks
   
• 11:00: Peter Hühn
  Exploring and Testing the Limits of Cross-Generic Narratology
   
• 11:30: Hannah Fasnacht
  On the Possibility of Narrative Content in Instrumental Music
   
• 12:00: Stephan Mühr
  Narratives of the Infinite: Legitimate or not?