I launched the Narratology Lab in September 2025 in the hopes of creating a community of Toronto-based scholars and writers interested in narrative theory. It grew out of my former Narrative Theory Reading Group, which ran throughout the pandemic and went on hiatus in 2024. Interested participants can join the monthly meetings (every third Wednesday of the month, 4:30-6:00, in person) to discuss readings related to a specific concept or issue in narratology.

But I also hope that the group can serve as a more informal forum for narratological discussions and collaborations, including organizing events or conference panels. All this in the future!

To join the Lab’s mailing list or for information about the upcoming meetings, please contact me by email.

UPCOMING MEETINGS

February 25, 2026. Topic: Denarration

Our topic for the next meeting is “denarration,” requested by Rachel. Our theory reading will be Brian Richardson’s article “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others.” Narrative, Vol. 9, No. 2  (2001), pp. 168-175, alongside two two micro-narratives, Sasha Bissonnette’s “POV” and Daniil Ivanovich Kharms’s “The Red-Haired Man,” as well as a slightly longer, much more difficult text, Samuel Beckett’s “Worstward Ho.” If you can’t get to (or get through) the Beckett, no worries—the shorter texts will serve.

I recommended two (very) short films, both of which use devices superficially similar to denarration but illuminatingly different in technique and effect: Charles Vidor’s 1929 The Bridge (an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek”) and Cynthia Kao’s 2016 Groundhog Day for a Black Man.

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PAST MEETINGS

September 2025: Topic: Free Indirect Discourse (FID)

Our first session, on September 24, focused on free indirect discourse, a perennial favourite that remains quite difficult for many students to identify, describe and use analytically in close readings, and difficult for anyone to teach. The readings for our first session were Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s “Free Indirect Discourse” and Daniel Gunn’s “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma” alongside Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden-Party.”

October 2025: Topic: Present-Tense Narration

Our second session was on October 29. The topic was Present-Tense Narration and the various puzzles and problems this common but deceptively weird form of narration presents for readers and theorists alike. These puzzles and problems are on full display in our narrative reading, Robert Coover’s short story “Going for a Beer” (2011), chosen by Isidora. We read it alongside the Introduction from Carolin Gebauer’s book Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (2021) as well as the Introction to Armen Avenessian and Anke Henning’s Present Tense: A Poetics (2015).

November 2025: Topic: Story and Discourse (and Plot too, in the end)

Our third meeting was on November 26. We read Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson 1: Le meurtre” along with H. Porter Abbott’s chapter on “Story, Plot and Narration” from The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory (ed. Herman, 2007) and Meir Sternberg’s article on “How Narrativity Makes a Difference” (2001).

December 2025: December 17, 1:30-3:00pm

For our last meeting of 2025, we discussed intermedial adaptation, specifically Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens” and its adaptation as part of the anthology film London Unplugged (dir. Nick Cohen) (the relevant part begins at 1:16:34). As a theoretical companion, we’ll read Jørgen Bruhn’s essay “Dialogizing Adaptation Studies: From One-Way Transport to a Dialogic Two-Way Process” from the collection Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (Bloomsbury 2023), pp. 69-88. This is not a narratology paper per se, but Bruhn’s perspective helps attend to the ways in which an adaptation “translates” narrative techniques from one medium to another. Consider, for example, the way the short film adapts Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse, or shifting focalizers.

I was interested in considering adaptation itself as a critical interpretation, not “just” an artistic or creative translation. It is for this reason that I wanted to include the frame narrator (the runner who talks about her association of Kew Gardens with her father). To what extent is this “addition” a novel addition, and to what extent might it be viewed as the film’s bringing out of elements already concealed in Woolf’s text? There are several other aspects to Cohen’s film that reward such questioning, including the materiality of Woolf’s text in its own adaptation (i.e. the woman on the subway reading “Kew Gardens”) and the presence of “Woolf” herself as a character in the film narrative. There is a surprising amount of richness to the adaptive choices in this short film, and many of them encourage new critical attention to aspects of Woolf’s story.

January 21 2026. Topic: Discordant Narration (i.e. Evaluatively Unreliable Narration)

We read Dorrit Cohn’s “Discordant Narration” (Style 34.2 (2000): 307-316), along with Susan Orlean’s “Shiftless Little Loafers” and Ian McEwan’s “Dead as They Come.”