Online Lecture on Pandemic Storytelling: Ansgar and Vera Nünning and James Phelan
Donnerstag, 06.05.2021, 19.00 Uhr
Ansgar Nünning (GCSC) & Vera Nünning (University of Heidelberg): Pandemic Stories as Crisis Narratives: Competing Narratives of the Coronavirus Pandemic as an Epistemological Crisis and a Crisis of Forms of Life
Abstract
Taking its cue from the question “Crisis compared to what?“ posed by the anthropologist Janet Roitman, the contribution will provide some preliminary hypotheses about the competing narratives that have been disseminated about the coronavirus pandemic and the Covid-19-crises. Arguing that pandemic stories can be conceptualized as crisis narratives, we will make an attempt to clarify what kind of crisis, or crises, we are currently witnessing when dealing with competing narratives of the coronavirus pandemic. We will explore whether the latter can be understood less as just a health crisis but rather as a catalyst of a cluster of different crises, or as a ‘deep crisis’ with various dimensions and layers. Taking into consideration the contagious nature of narratives (Robert Shiller), we will argue that the competing crisis narratives surrounding the corona pandemic constitute not just an ‘infodemic’ but a fully-fledged epistemological and normative crisis and a crisis of prevailing forms of life.
Bios
Ansgar Nünning has been Professor of English and American Literature and the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University in Germany since 1996 and the founding director of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) since 2006. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Stockholm for his distinguished contributions in the field of literary and cultural studies as well as for his leading role in the reformation and internationalisation of doctoral education. He has published widely on English literature, literary and cultural theory, narratology, and crisis narratives. He is the author of a number of textbooks, has edited several standard works, including the Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie (5th edition 2013), and is (co-)editor of ten academic book series and of the peer-reviewed journal GRM: Germanisch-Romanische-Monatsschrift.
Vera Nünning is professor of English philology at Heidelberg University, where she also served as vice-rector for international affairs. She has published books on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, and (co-)edited 25 volumes on British literature, culture and narrative theory. She has been guest professor at the Universities of Zaragoza (2006), Lisbon (2009), Helsinki (2010) and Bergamo (2011). From 2009 to 2019 she served as vice-president of the German consortium of the German-Turkish University in Istanbul. Among her recent works are Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Winter 2014), and Key Concepts for the Study of Culture: An Introduction. (WVT 2020, with Margit Peterfy and Philipp Löffler). She was a fellow in two Institutes of Advanced Studies and is associate editor of three book series and the international journal English Studies.
James Phelan (Ohio State University): Donald J. Trump’s Storytelling, May 12—June 7, 2020; or, Can His Saying Make Things So?
Abstract
This talk examines U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s storytelling over 27 days in spring 2020 in order to explore the ways in which his performances threatened to destroy the genre of nonfiction political narrative in the United States. The analysis of these 27 days is framed by a Preface, written from the perspective of January 2021 after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by those who believed Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election—an attack indicating that Trump had almost succeeded in destroying the genre.
By the spring of 2020, Trump had all but eroded that genre’s foundations in referentiality, and his Republican supporters in Congress, in right-wing media, and in the electorate had allowed him to operate on the principle that “my saying makes things so.” The events of the spring of 2020, however, especially those accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the greatest resistance to that principle, because the virus was an extratextual reality that was indifferent to Trump’s rhetoric. The talk is itself an unfolding narrative, as it traces Trump’s storytelling about the pandemic, voting by mail, Barack Obama, and, toward the end of the period, about George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed. This thick description of Trump’s performances does not end with a definitive judgment about the fate of the genre of nonfiction political narrative, but instead offers insights into the nature and relentlessness of Trump’s attack on that genre that in turn shed light on his Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election.
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Bio
James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University, teaches and writes about narrative theory, the medical humanities, the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present, and nonfiction narrative. His research has been devoted to thinking through what it means to conceive of narrative as rhetoric, even as his individual books have focused on specific aspects of that conception. He has written about style in Worlds from Words(1981); about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots (1988), about a rhetorical approach to a range of narrative techniques and their consequences in Narrative as Rhetoric (1996); about character narration in Living to Tell about It (2005); about judgments and narrative progression (again) in Experiencing Fiction (2007); about literary history and ten American novels in Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel (2013); about the larger project of rhetorical poetics in Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017), and about his concepts of mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components of narrative in a dialogue book with Matthew Clark, Debating Rhetorical Narratology (2020).
Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, recently ranked #1 in the category of “Literature and Writing” by googlescholar. Phelan co-edits, along with Katra Byram and Faye Halpern, the Ohio State University Press book series, The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.
In 2013, Phelan was awarded an honorary degree from Aarhus University. In 2016, he was elected a member of the Norwegian Academy Science and Letters. In 2021 he was named the winner of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.