Project Narrative

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Gerald Prince discuss Guy de Maupassant’s 1884 story, “La Parure,” or “The Necklace” in English. Prince reads the 1924 translation by Ernest Boyd. Gerald Prince is professor of French and Francophone studies in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prince is one of the preeminent scholars of his generation in the fields of narratology and of 20th and 21st century French literature. Prince’s books include Métaphysique et technique dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Sartre, A Grammar of Stories, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, A Dictionary of Narratology, Narrative as Theme, Guide du Roman de Langue Française (1901-1950), and Guide du Roman de Langue Française (1951-2000). In 2013, Prince received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Fritz Breithaupt discuss a segment from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities. That segment is entitled “The Two Strange Children,” and it was translated by George Barry in 1885. Elective Affinities was Goethe’s third novel, published in 1809. Fritz Breithaupt is Professor of German in the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic studies, and also Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his other duties at Penn, Breithaupt directs the Experimental Humanities Laboratory. In the course of his career, Breithaupt has produced a substantial and highly influential body of work in both German and English across the fields of Germanic studies, empathy studies, and narrative studies. Three of his books include: Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung (in English, Beyond Images: Goethe’s Politics of Perception), The Dark Sides of Empathy, and The Narrative Brain. Breithaupt’s most recent book is on the first-time experience and transformative experience, which has been published in German but not yet in English.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jonathan Culler discuss Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” which was first published in Liberty Magazine in 1934, and then included in her 1936 collection, The World Over. Jonathan Culler is the class of 1916 Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. Culler has been one of the most distinguished and productive literary and critical theorists of his generation. Among his 11 single-authored books are: the 1975 volume, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by an MLA member in that year; the 1982 volume, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, which lucidly explicated the then still emerging movement called deconstruction; and the 1997 book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into more than 25 languages. Throughout his career, Culler has conducted extended engagements with narrative, narrative theory, and lyric theory, and in 2015, he published Theory of the Lyric. Among Culler’s many recognitions are his elections to several distinguished scholarly groups, including: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001; the American Philosophical Society, 2006; and the British Academy, 2020. The International Society for the Study of Narrative has selected Culler as the winner of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for 2026.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Alison Booth discuss Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” first published in the New Review in 1972 and then republished in her 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Alison Booth is the Brown-Forman Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to narrative theory, Booth has expertise in the digital humanities, Victorian fiction, women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, travel writing, and biography. For nearly a decade, Booth served as the Faculty Director of the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, currently called the Digital Humanities Center, and in 2005, she served as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Booth’s books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, How to Make it as a Woman, and Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Booth’s projects in digital humanities include Collective Biographies of Women, an extensive database built from an online bibliography of more than 1,250 such collective biographies.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Maria Mäkelä discuss a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” published in Spanish in 1956. Mäkelä will be reading the English translation by Paul Blackburn, published in  Cortázar’s translated collection End of the Game and Other Stories, published in 1978. Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Head of the degree program in Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Mäkelä’s work in narrative theory has ranged widely across fictional and non-fictional narratives, literary narratives, non-literary narratives, and many other things. With Paul Dawson, Mäkelä co-edited The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. Currently, Mäkelä is the Consortium Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Research Council of Finland, Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st Century Literary Field. Mäkelä is also a stalwart member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and served as the society’s President in 2019.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen discuss Omar El Akkad’s “Factory Air,” first published in Guernica Magazine in March 2019 as part of their special issue on climate fiction. Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the Rise of Science and Fiction at Aarhus University in Denmark. Zetterberg-Nielsen’s research is driven by the question of why and how we engage with fictional stories. Zetterberg-Nielsen focuses on fictionality theory, the history of the 18th Century novel, and the intersections between the two. She has published widely on these topics in venues such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Style, and The Living Handbook of Narratology. Zetterberg-Nielsen has received the prestigious Nils Klim Prize, given by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research to a scholar from or in a Nordic country under the age of 40, who has made outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. Zetterberg-Nielsen has also received a number of research grants that have enabled her to establish the Center for the Rise of Science and Fiction. Zetterberg-Nielsen collaborates closely with many scholars in the International Society for the Study of Narrative, which among other things have resulted in the co-edited volume, Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes discuss excerpts from her memoir in verse, Ordinary Hazards, published in 2019. Ordinary Hazards has been banned, and this episode will touch on that aspect of Grimes’s experience with the book but initially will focus on the book itself, the story Grimes tells, and how she tells it. Born and raised in New York City, Grimes began composing verse at the age of six and has been writing ever since. Grimes’s output is impressive for both its quantity and its quality, but among her notable titles are Bronx Masquerade, Jazmin’s Notebook, Talkin’ About Bessie, Dark Sons, The Road to Paris, Words with Wings, and the New York Times bestseller Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. Among Grimes’s many notable honors are the Coretta Scott King Award, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award for her “substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children,” the ALAN Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Adolescent Literature, and the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award. Jim Phelan and Nikki Grimes connected through Ashley Hope Pérez, who knows Grimes through the Unite to Read project, a three-year initiative at the Ohio State University funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. “The Unite to Read project seeks to combat book bans, engage the public in defending and reading banned books, and unite diverse stakeholders in amplifying access to literature and ideas.”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Rhona Trauvitch discuss “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu, first published in the August 2012 issue of the online journal Lightspeed, and then included in Liu’s 2016 collection entitled The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor at Florida International University, specializes in cross-disciplinary analogical reasoning, particularly at the intersection of literature and STEM. Trauvitch directs Florida International University’s Science and Fiction Lab, whose mission is to build bridges between research and teaching in STEM fields and in the humanities. Her work in the lab has been supported by Humanities Initiatives Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most recently by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Trauvitch’s own research and teaching have been devoted to exploring how fictionality can be used to enhance non-scientists’ comprehension of science, including especially difficult to comprehend concepts in science. Trauvitch is the author of a forthcoming book, Fi-Sci: Avatars of Science and Fiction, which demonstrates her model in action. Trauvitch has also co-edited a forthcoming special issue of Style on the interrelations of fiction and science.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jan Alber discuss “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler, first published in The New Yorker in 1995, and then included in Robert Olen Butler’s 1997 volume entitled Tabloid Dreams: A Collection. Jan Alber is a Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Culture at the University of Giessen in Germany. Alber has done pioneering work in the study of unnatural narratives and unnatural narratology, with his 2016 book, Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama, a major contribution to that subfield of narrative studies. Alber has also done important work on empirical approaches to narrative, on postmodern and post-postmodern narrative, on narrative ethics, on the relations of narrative theoretical approaches to each other, and on many other subjects. A past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, Alber has shown himself to be an excellent collaborator and interlocutor with other scholars, both in his published work and in his interactions at conferences. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alber worked with Jessica Jumpertz and Deborah de Muijnck to organize over Zoom a series of lectures about narrative and the pandemic. Alber, Jumpertz, and de Muijnck then co-edited the essays in a volume called Pandemic Storytelling, which appeared earlier this year.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Catherine Belling discuss “Laundry” by Susan Onthank Mates, originally published in Mates’s 1994 collection, The Good Doctor. Catherine Belling is Associate Professor of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Belling teaches in the MA program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. She directs the medical students, medical humanities seminars, and teaches in the four-year Clinical Ethics Curriculum and Bioethics Graduate Scholars Program. Belling is a two time winner of prizes from the Society for Literature Science and the Arts. Her 2010 essay in Narrative, “Narrating Oncogenesis,” won the Schachterle Prize for Best Essay by an Untenured Scholar, and her 2012 book, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria, won the 2013 Kendrick Book Prize. Belling served as editor-in-chief of Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018. Her current book project has the working title, Morbid and Disturbing: Medicine and Horror and Horror in Medicine.