Project Narrative

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Marta Figlerowicz discuss the first chapter of D.O. Fagunwa’s novel, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, “The Author Meets Akara-Ogun.” The novel was originally published in Yoruba in 1938, and it was translated by Wole Soyinka in 1982. Marta Figlerowicz is the Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. Figlerowicz’s scholarly interests include 20th and 21st century American, Brazilian, British French, Polish, and West African literature, as well as the novel, new media, translation studies and narrative theory. Figlerowicz has recently become co-editor of the journal Narrative, along with the guest on the July 2025 podcast episode, Kent Puckett. Figlerowicz’s books include Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character, Spaces of Feeling: Affects and Awareness in Modernist Literature, and a translation of the work of Polish critical theorist Maria Janion, entitled The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader. Figlerowicz is currently working on a project entitled, It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Trans-Cultural Knowledge. In 2024, Figlerowicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work on that project.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Gary Weissman discuss Shalom Auslander’s short story, “Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown,” originally included in the 2005 collection Beware of God. Gary Weissman is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the School of Communication Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Weissman also is an Affiliate Faculty member in the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Judaic Studies. He is the author of Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, and The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature. Weissman has also written many essays on how the Holocaust has been represented in literature, scholarship, photography, and film, and in addition to being a scholar and teacher of graphic and animated narratives, Weissman is himself a skillful cartoonist.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Kent Puckett discuss the 1817 edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Kent Puckett is Professor and Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. Puckett’s areas of expertise include narrative theory, the novel, critical theory, film, and 19th century British literature and culture. Puckett’s books include Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel and Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction, which won the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative for the best book published in 2016. Puckett is also the author of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945, and The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems. Jim Phelan has also now passed the editorial torch for the journal, Narrative, to Kent Puckett and Marta Figlerowicz.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Kelly Marsh discuss Caryl Phillips’s short piece of life writing, “Growing Pains: A Life in 10 Chapters,” first published in The Guardian in August, 2005. Kelly Marsh is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, and her areas of expertise include narrative theory and global fiction in English since 1950. Marsh is the author of The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy, and of essays on Roddy Doyle, Helen Fielding, Marina Carr, Mary McCarthy, and others. Marsh is also an award-winning teacher and a storied member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, where she has recently been elected as Second Vice President of the Society.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Stefan Iversen discuss a story generated by artificial intelligence; more specifically, the story comes from the system operated by OpenAI, in response to the prompt: “please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. Iversen directs the PhD program in Art, Literature, and Cultural Studies. Iversen’s many areas of expertise include narrative and narrative theory, rhetoric, Danish literature, and digital media. Iversen has done important and influential work in unnatural narratology, rhetorical approach to fictionality, and rhetoric in the public sphere. His recent books include Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media, co-authored with Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Carsten Stage. Publications also include the co-edited collection, Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited, and the forthcoming book in the Ohio State series on the theory and interpretation of narrative, Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric: Experimental Fictionality on Digital Platforms.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Daniel Punday discuss Charles Yu’s 2020 short story, “Problems of Self-Study,” which you can access here to read along with the podcast. Daniel Punday is Professor of English at Mississippi State University, where he specializes in contemporary American literature, digital media, and literary theory, especially narrative theory. Punday’s books include Narrative after Deconstruction, Five Strands of Fictionality, Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology, Writing at the Limit. The Novel in the New Media Ecology, Computing as Writing, Playing at Narratology, and most recently, Infrastructure in Video Games. Punday has also been a major contributor to the International Society for the Study of Narrative: he served as president; he organized two annual conferences himself, one with his colleague at Mississippi State, Kelly Marsh; Punday also served for several years together with Lindsay Holmgren as a liaison between the society and its other conference organizers.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and David Richter discuss Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Theft,” originally published in 1929 and republished in 1935. David Richter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College of the City University of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center. Richter is an expert on The Bible, on 18th century British literature and culture, and on narrative and critical theory. His single authored books are Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel, and Reading the Eighteenth Century Novel. Richter’s edited books include Falling into Theory, The Critical Tradition, and Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Richter has also written essays on biblical narrative, detective fiction, irony, film, and many other subjects.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Robert Caserio discuss Elizabeth Bowen’s 1945 short story, “I Hear You Say So.” Robert Caserio is Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Studies, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Caserio has multiple areas of expertise, but perhaps most relevant for this episode of the podcast are his deep knowledge of twentieth century literature and of narrative theory. His 1999 book, The Novel in England, 1900–1950: History and Theory, was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative, given annually for the best book in narrative studies. More recently, Caserio has published The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900-1950, and he has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel and co-edited The Cambridge History of the English Novel.

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.