Symposium “Reading and Studying Narratives of Trauma, Crisis, and Illness”

Registration for the symposium is open until 25th of September: https://nettskjema.no/a/355914

Symposium “Reading and Studying Narratives of Trauma, Crisis, and Illness”

The symposium will look into literature’s potential to facilitate emotional reader engagement, ethical reflection, and (individual/collective) processing of traumatic memory and takes the ‘embodied nature’ of trauma and illness narratives as its point of departure. As trauma research has shown, traumatic experiences reshape both body and brain of an individual – and societies as a whole in the case of collective trauma (Van der Kolk 2014; Madigan 2020; Neria and Ataria 2016). In line with ELLA’s philosophy, this symposium will pay attention to:

1. Language as the means both through which readers access texts and react to texts.
2. How literature and languages (understood both as means of communication and as aesthetic-stylistic approaches to narratives) contribute to not only educating the mind in a narrow sense, but also the heart – that is, the deeply embodied, enactive, socially embedded, and affective nature of the human mind-body (Colombetti 2014).

Highlighting the crucial relevance of emotions both in reading and studying narratives of trauma, crisis, and illness, the symposium will also explore the concept of ‘sensuous knowledge’ developed by Salami (2020) as well as the notion of ‘collective affective ownership’ advanced by El Tayeb in Hanhardt et al. (2020, 59).

The symposium stresses a comparative perspective and brings together presentations on textual case studies and contextualised class teaching experiences that address both the individual side and the social/collective side of trauma, crisis, and illness narratives.

You can find the full program here.

Annika Mörte Alling (HiØ) – Wladimir Chávez (HiØ) – Johanna Chovanec (University of Vienna) – Anje Müller Gjesdal (HiØ) – Yasemin Hacioglu (UiS/Volda) – Natalia Igl (HiØ) – Olga Michael (Independent Scholar, Cyprus) – Rémi Armand Tchokothe (University of Vienna) – Elin Nesje Vestli (HiØ).

Natalia Igl – Associate Professor in German Literature and Culture, Østfold University College

natalia.igl@hiof.no | +47 696 08 544

Rémi Armand Tchokothe – Tenure-Track Professor in Comparative Literature with a Focus on African Literatures, University of Vienna

remi.tchokothe@univie.ac.at | +43 1 4277 43252