For several years, researchers, many based at the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, have been investigating the abundance of artifacts in contemporary media that consist of multiple and seemingly disjointed narratives. Jutta Zimmermann, André Schwarck, Cord-Christian Casper, Kerstin Howaldt, Emmanuel Tristan Kugland, and others have been organizing meetings, workshops, and projects to develop a theoretical framework that can address this interesting narrative structure.
At the 2017 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Lexington Kentucky, André Schwarck, Liz Bahs, and Corinne Bancroft met over a book called The History of Love (Nicole Krauss). They discovered that they share an enthusiasm for literature that juxtaposes distinct narrative strands. André Schwarck was a founding member and key organizer of the multi-narrative research group at CAU. Meanwhile, in the U.K., Liz Bahs wrote her own poetry as she studied the polyphonic and polyvoiced nature of contemporary poetry sequences. At the same time and across the ocean, Corinne Bancroft traced the outlines of a novel genre called the braided narrative, where authors twine together distinct, often conflicting narrative threads. Since Lexington, these scholars have continued to collaborate to research the delightful, troubling, and mysterious aspects of the multi-narrative.
Affiliated Researchers
Liz Bahs is a Teaching Fellow of English Literature and Creative Writing at University of Surrey, UK. She completed her doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017 with a thesis titled, On the Threshold: The Polyphonic Poetry Sequence. The focus of her poetry and her research is narrative form and lyric progression in contemporary polyvocal / polyphonic poetry sequences. She is a two-time Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences (USA) where she was Writer-in-Residence (2018 & 2019). Recent poetry includes a collection, Stay Bones, (2019), and a poetry pamphlet, Greyhound Night Service, (2018). She writes poetry reviews for Frogmore Press and blogs at: whenyoureadtome.blogspot.co.uk.
Corinne Bancroft is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a dissertation titled “A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence” which traces how American authors focus on child characters as instruments for narrating violence, and how these children’s voices call adult characters and actual readers toward a heightened sense of social responsibility. She recently published “The Braided Narrative” in the October 2018 issue of Narrative. Her other publications appear in Style and Cognitive Semiotics.
Domenico A. Beneventi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Université de Sherbrooke. His research interests and publications focus on Canadian and Québécois literatures, urban writing, gender and queer studies, and representations of marginality in the city. He is co-editor of Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below (University of Toronto Press, 2018) and of La lutte pour l’espace : ville, performance, et culture d’en bas (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2017). He was guest editor of a Special Issue of Canadian Literature on the theme of “Queer Frontiers” (#224 Spring 2015) and was co-editor of “Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada” (Guernica, 2004). He is the Director of the VersUS research centre at Université de Sherbrooke.
Cord-Christian Casper has studied English and German in Cambridge and Kiel. His dissertation at the University of Kiel (2017) has traced the representation of political radicalism in early modernist political fiction. His current research project investigates nonhuman knowledge in Nature Writing. Further research areas include modernist language theory, New Materialism, visual culture, and comics studies. Recent publications are “Radical Politics at the Margins of Modernism” (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) and “The Hard, Definite, Personal Word” (Wien: Lit, 2017). He is the co-founder and publisher of Closure: the Kiel University E-Journal for Comics Studies.
Kerstin Howaldt studied English Philology, Romance Philology and German Literary and Media Studies at the University of Kiel. Since 2015, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Erfurt where she was given a Christoph-Martin-Wieland-dissertation-scholarship (2015-2018). Since October 2018, she is a research associate at the Chair of English Literature. Her PhD project explores the production of eventfulness in 20th century British farce. An article which investigates the spatio-temporal dimension of eventfulness in Dave Eggers’s novel A Hologram for the King was published in August 2019 in the edited volume Timescapes of Waiting. Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral (Brill). Further research interests include New Materialism (particularly climate-change theatre), Comics Studies and Multi-Narratives. At the 2019 ISSN conference in Pamplona, she presented her paper “Affected Paper-Narratives. Annotating and Crossing Out Stories in Julian Barnes’s The Only Story.
Emmanuel Tristan Kugland has studied English, Philosophy, and Pedagogics. He is currently a PhD candidate at Kiel University. In his research, he focusses on authorial narration and the representation of history in fiction.
André Schwarck received his PhD with a dissertation on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Würzburg, 2012) which analyzes the novel’s interplay of temporal, modal and generic qualities. In Lexington (2017) he gave a paper titled “‘Awaking to the Reality of the Tiger’: Reality Effects in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi”; in Montreal (2018) he was a panel co-organizer of“Multi-Narratives: A Framework“. He is a founding member of research group on multi-narratives, his current research interest in narrative studies focuses on fictionality. Most recent publication: “‘Useless, off-beat information!’: Knowledge and Successiveness in Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney.” Literature and Knowledge. Ed. Antje Kley and Kai Merten. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2018.
Evan Van Tassell is a PhD Student in English at the Ohio State University, studying experimental narrative techniques in contemporary media. His research focuses on multiplicity in print and visual texts; rhetorical approaches to narrative; and new media and multimodal fiction.
Jutta Zimmermann is Professor of North American Studies at Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. In her dissertation on postmodern Canadian metafiction she has analyzed the different forms of metafiction and the uses to which they are put by Canadian authors in the second half of the 20th century. Her second book focuses on forms of dialogue in 19th century American realist novels. Readings of Howells, James, and Wharton show how dialogues are used to negotiate gender roles and to ultimately destabilize conventional notions of femininity and masculinity as shaped by the sentimental literary tradition on the one and the scientific evolutionary discourse on the other hand.