Project Narrative

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Suzanne Keen discuss John Cheever’s 1960 short story, “The Death of Justina.” Suzanne Keen is a Professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Keen wrote the book on narrative empathy, Empathy in the Novel, which came out in 2007 and opened up a rich and wide ranging debate about the affective dimensions of reading fiction and their consequences for the lives of readers when they’re not reading. Keen’s most recent contribution to that critical conversation is Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader. Keen has written several other books, including Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination, and the widely adopted textbook, Narrative Form. In addition to her work on the novel and narrative theory, Keen has published a volume of poetry, Milk Glass Mermaid, and individual poems in numerous literary magazines.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Christopher González discuss Junot Díaz’s 2024 flash fiction, “The Books of Losing You.” Christopher González is a graduate of The Ohio State University. He is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University, and González has also just begun a term as the Chair of his department. His areas of expertise include 20th century American literature, Latinx literary and cultural production, multiethnic literatures of the United States, film, comics, and narrative theory. González is the author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books including Reading Junot Díaz; the International Latino Book Award-winning Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film & TV, co-authored with Frederick Aldama; the Perkins Prize Honorable Mention Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature; and his 2024 memoir, Big Scary Brown Guy.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Dorothee Birke discuss Ali Smith’s short story, “Text for the Day,” from her 1995 collection, Free Love and Other Stories. Dorothee Birke is professor for Anglophone Literatures at the University of Innsbruck, and her many areas of expertise include the history of the novel, reading and book culture, memory studies, and narrative theory. Birke is the author of two books, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel and Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity, and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels. Among Birke’s numerous articles, she has won the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s annual prize for best essay in the journal for an article co-authored with Birte Christ, Ellen McCracken and Paul Benzon for Narrative, “Paratexts and Digital Narrative.” Birke is currently the second vice president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Brian McAllister discuss Juliana Spahr’s 2005 poem, “Gentle Now Don’t Add to Heartache.” Brian McAllister is Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. McAllister’s areas of expertise include modern and contemporary literature, poetry studies, environmental literature, econarratology, and rhetorical narratology. Among other topics, McAllister has published essays on Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Edwin Morgan. He served as the guest editor of the 2014 special issue of Narrative on narrative and poetry. McAllister also has an essay forthcoming in the October 2024 issue of Narrative: “Landscape Rhetoricity: Narrative, Ecology, and Topographic Form.”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Daphna Edrinast-Vulcan discuss Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story, “The Fly.” Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. Her main areas of scholarly interest are modernism and the modernist novel, Joseph Conrad, Mikhail Bakhtin, philosophy and literature, ethnography and literature, historiography and fiction, and literature and psychoanalysis. Erdinast-Vulcan is the author of many influential publications, including Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: Writing, Culture, and Subjectivity, and Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jakob Lothe discuss Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?” Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Oslo, where he taught from 1993 to 2020. Some of Lothe’s publications include Conrad’s Narrative Method, Narrative in Fiction and Film, and Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust. Lothe is currently completing a monograph entitled Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film. Lothe also led a research group dedicated to narrative theory and analysis at Norway’s Center for Advanced Studies in Oslo during the 2005-2006 academic year. Under Jakob’s leadership, the group produced three volumes of essays: Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre; Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading; and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Lothe has also edited or co-edited several other books about the short story, about narrative ethics, about the future of literary studies, and more.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Brian Richardson discuss Ilse Aichinger’s short story, “Spiegelgeschichte,” translated to English as “Mirror Story,” originally published in German in Austria in 1949. Brian Richardson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. Richardson has long been a stalwart member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and served as the Society’s President in 2011. Richardson has done extensive and influential work on modernism, postmodernism, drama, and narrative theory. Some of Richardson’s most influential publications include Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which launched “unnatural narratology” as an approach to narrative, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Essays on Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges, co-edited with Jan Alber, and his forthcoming book The Reader in Modernist Fiction. Richardson was also the prime mover behind the publication of the widely adopted collaborative book entitled, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, co-authored by Brian, David Herman, Robyn Warhol, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Jim Phelan.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Dorothy Hale discuss the first chapter of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, which was published as a novel in September 1903 after its previous appearance as a serial narrative in the North American Review. Dorothy Hale is a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has held the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English. Hale has made important contributions to two fields within the larger territory of narrative studies: the Anglo-American novel and the theory of the novel. Hale is the author of Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present, which won the Narrative Society’s Perkins Prize for the Best Book on Narrative, published in 1998. Hale is also the author of The Novel and the New Ethics, published in 2020. In addition, Hale has done prodigious work as an editor and an authorial guide in the volume, The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000.

In this special crossover episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Matt Seybold, executive producer and host of The American Vandal Podcast, discuss chapter eighteen of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is also the founding director of the Media Studies, Communications, & Design program at Elmira College, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications, notably the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Mark Twain Annual.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Sarah Copland discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s 2005 short story, “ohtakemehomelord.com.” Sarah Copland is Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada and a former Visiting Scholar at Project Narrative. Copland works on literary modernism and on narrative theory, with particular attention to rhetorical narratology. Copland has published important essays on modernist prefaces, on the form of the short story, on politics and form, and on narrative ethics. Jim Phelan worked with Copland on her essay, “The Ideal Narratee and the Rhetorical Model of Audiences.”