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. We meet in person. Interested participants can join the monthly meetings (details TBD) 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!
In the meantime, our monthly meetings focus on a single narrative device, technique or problem with the help of one or a few theory readings (generally an article or chapter) and one (usually short) narrative text. The conversation is informal and allowed to range widely, exploring and even rambling territory related to the meeting’s stated topic. The main point is to share ideas and interests, so letting the conversation go where it goes is key.
Please email me to be added to the mailing list. The lab is open to scholars and students from across the Toronto area, plus visiting academics; you do not need to be UofT affiliated.
UPCOMING MEETINGS (scroll down for details about past meetings)
October 1, 2026, 4-6pm. Topic: non-events
Our first session of the new academic year will explore the topic of “non-events,” which are interesting not just for people like me who like plotless fiction, but also for narratology in general, since events and eventfulness are essential to narrative itself. Our theory reading will be Peter Huhn’s chapter on “The Eventfulness of Non-Events” from the volume Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, edited by Raphael Baroni and Francoise Revaz.
Our accompanying narrative text is “Morning, Noon and Night” from Claire-Louise Bennett’s inimitable novel Pond (2015). Other chapters from that book might have been more apt for our topic, notably “The Deepest Sea” which sadly isn’t accessible online, but our chosen text is nevertheless pretty darn entertaining… if uneventful.
October 20, 2026, time TBD. Special session with Professor Erin James, University of Idaho
We will hold a special session of the lab to discuss some aspect of econarratology with Erin James, who coined the term, and who will be visiting the Graduate English Speaker Series. In addition to being a leading theorist of narrative and the environment, Erin is also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, which puts into practice many of her commitments to community, storytelling and the environment. Details to be posted soon…
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PAST MEETINGS
September 24, 2025: Topic: Free Indirect Discourse (FID)
Our first session 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 29, 2025: Topic: Present-Tense Narration
Our second 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 26, 2025: Topic: Story and Discourse (and Plot too, in the end)
Our third meeting focused on 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 17, 2025: Topic: Intermedial Adaptation
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.”
On January 7, the Narratology Lab also hosted a talk by Prof. Helena Whalen-Bridge (Law, National University of Singapore) on “Narrative Observations on Environmental Personhood,” which took place before a substantial audience and prompted a lively Q&A.
March 4, 2026. Topic: Denarration
Our topic for the next meeting was “denarration,” requested by Rachel. Our theory reading was 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.”
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.
April 1, 2026. Topic: The Sense of an Ending
Our topic was “the sense of an ending,” or, more generally, the lure, promise, satisfactions and deceptions of narrative endings. We read Peter Brooks’s article “Freud’s Masterplot,” with the optional addition of Brooks’ introduction to Reading for the Plot (1985). The narrative reading, proposed by Isidora, was Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), whose endings (yes, plural) have caused significant debate.
May 19. Topic: Prolepsis
For our final meeting of the 2025-2026 academic year, our theory reading was Jim Phelan’s chapter “Analepsis / Prolepsis” from the 2016 collection Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, alongside a fictional narrative, “Safari,” by Jennifer Egan, first published as a standalone story in the New Yorker and then incorporated as a chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad. (I made the mistake of reading the chapter from the novel, which includes several prolepses that are not in the New Yorker version. Oops.)
DANIEL AURELIANO NEWMAN 