Symposium of PALA’s
Narrative Special Interest Group
27-28 April, 2006,
Birmingham,
UK.
Plenary
Speakers:
Professor David Herman, Ohio State University,
US
Professor Michael Toolan,
University of Birmingham,
UK
Professor Sue Thomas, de
Montfort University,
UK.
Structuralist narratology claimed
to transcend concerns with media. Alongside this, stylistically-oriented
narrative analysis has traditionally privileged spoken and written modes of
narrative. Granted, multimodality, or the reliance on more than one
semiotic channel for conveying communicative content, is inherent in the
face-to-face narrative communication in everyday interaction, where people
draw on a range of visual, verbal, paralinguistic, and other cues to make
sense of each other. However, the rapid development and increasing use
of new media technologies suggest the need to revisit the relations between
multimodality and narrative. The purpose of this symposium is to foster
further work on multimodality and its impact on narrative production and
processing in a variety of storytelling contexts.
The symposium aims to generate
conversation that explores the following
questions:
- How does the
changing landscape of communication challenge the way we define, understand
and use narrative?
- What is the
relationship between narrative theory and
multimodality?
- How far do
classical and postclassical narrative frameworks account for texts that are
multimodal or are transformed across media?
- How can methods of
narrative analysis help us understand how multimodal narratives function in
specific contexts?
- Do the new
electronic media afford unprecedented opportunities for multimodality in
narrative contexts?
Other topics might
include:
- Narrative and
transliteracies
- The relationship
between cultural context and multimodality
- Diachronic
variation in transmedial narrative
- The privileging of
particular media (digital, oral, written) in theories of
narrative
- Use of new
technologies to analyse narrative in different
modes
The symposium is hosted by UCE, at
Margaret
Street in the centre of Birmingham, UK. The programme will contain a
corporate workshop on teaching narrative using multi media, and offer an
optional master class with the National Academy of Writing.
Conference web pages:
http://www.lhds.uce.ac.uk/english/?page=narrative-and-multimodality
Abstracts of no more than 300
words for papers or panels should be submitted to Dr Ruth Page ([log in to unmask]) no later than
5 January 2007. Each paper
should be 20 minutes, reserving 10 minutes for discussion.
All proposals must include the
title of the paper; presenter's name and institutional affiliation; mailing
address, phone and fax number, and email address.
Email submissions are preferred,
but abstracts may be sent via land mail to:
Dr Ruth
Page
School of
English
University of
Central England
Perry Barr, Birmingham
B42 2SU, UK.