In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Eyal Segal discuss Sholem Aleichem’s short story, “Baranovich Station.” Eyal Segal is an independent scholar based in Tel Aviv. He has published articles on narrative closure, beginnings and endings, temporal experimentation in narrative, narration in the modernist novel, the poetics of Kafka, and on the Tel Aviv School of Poetics and Semiotics. These essays have appeared in a range of journals and other outlets, including Poetics Today, the journal Narrative, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Amy Elias discuss Lemony Snicket’s 2004 short story, “The Lump of Coal.” Amy Elias teaches and writes at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she holds the title of UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English. Elias is also the director of UT’s Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts. Elias’s areas of expertise include narrative theory, contemporary literature and culture studies, and humanities advocacy, as well as the arts of the present. Elias founded the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, or ASAP. Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, which won the Perkins Prize in 2002. Elias has also edited or co-edited several books, including Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin; The Planetary Turn: Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century; and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Aaron Oforlea discuss James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” published in Baldwin’s 1965 short story collection of the same title. Aaron Oforlea is an Associate Professor of English at Washington State University and is an alumnus of the Ohio State University. Oforlea has cultivated significant expertise in the domains of African American literature, folklore, and rhetoric, as well as in narrative theory, medical humanities, film studies, and masculinity studies. In 2017, Oforlea published James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity, which was honored in 2018 with the College Language Association’s Award for Creative Scholarship. In addition, Oforlea has contributed scholarly articles in the fields of folklore, rhetoric, and literature.

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.