Narratology Lab

I launched the Narratology Lab (or rather “Lab”) in September 2025 in the hopes of creating a community of Toronto-based scholars and writers interested in narrative theory. It grows 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, 4:10-5:30, 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

January 2026: Wednesday January 21, 4-5:30.

Topic and readings TBD.

In addition to our monthly meeting, January brings other events of possible interest to lab members.

First The Narratology Lab welcomes Prof. Helena Whalen-Bridge (Law, National University of Singapore) for a talk on “Narrative Observations on Environmental Personhood,” Wednesday January 7, 2026, 5-7pm (location on St George campus to be shared after registration here)

Abstract: One strategy used to address environmental issues in legal forums has been to assert legal personhood for aspects of the environment. Without legal personhood, a claimant would not be able to assert rights and demand protection in formal dispute resolution. Legal analysis of this issue focuses on whether a claimant can justifiably be said to contain sufficient aspects of personhood that entitle them to protection. However, to the extent that aspects of the environment, such as a river, are being conceptualised as persons entitled to health and protection, narrative analysis can offer insight into implicit meanings within personhood. What activities were animals such as bugs and rats up to in Medieval ecclesiastical law, and what does their treatment in those courts suggest about how personhood was understood at that time? How do we think of aspects of the environment in contemporary law, and what is the narrative explanation for why successful assertions of personhood have centred around rivers?  This paper examines the narrative heart of legal personhood and suggests how narrative impacts the use of personhood to protect the environment.

January 8-11, 2026: Narrotology Lab members at the MLA conference in Toronto

There are several panels of narratological interest at this year’s MLA convention in Toronto, January 8-11. Isidora and I have co-organized a panel on “The Affordances of Frustrating Narratives,” with talks by Isidora, Marco Caracciolo and Simona Bartolotta; it runs on Thursday January 8, 3:30-4:45. I am also presenting as part of the official ISSN (International Society for the Study of Narrative) panel, whose theme this year is “The Afterlives of The Rhetoric of Fiction: Sixty-Five Years Later.” I’ll be presenting on using Wayne Booth’s theorizations of irony to teach unreliable narration, alongside talks by James Phelan, Sue J. Kim, Jessy Nyiri, and Siddarth Srikanth. This one takes place from 10:15-11:30 on Friday January 9. If you’re at the conference, drop by! Note that University of Toronto faculty and students can register for MLA for free.

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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.