For the past two years, researchers from around Germany have investigated and discussed 'narrative liminality' in a network funded by the German Research Foundation. As part of their collaboration, they have explored and theorized the boundaries and interrelations between the symbolic forms of narrative, play, data, ritual, spectacle, and others. On October 10-12, 2019, this work culminated in a conference on the topic "Beyond Narrative: Literature, Culture, and the Borderlands of Narrativity," organized by American Studies Leipzig faculty and convened at Leipzig's University Library.
Members of the Narrative Liminality research network presented a number of talks at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative, held from May 30 to June 1, 2019, in Pamplona, Spain.
In April 2019, network members of the DFG research network on “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities” convened again in Leipzig for the third meeting and workshop. After an inaugural meeting in April 2018 and a second workshop focused mostly on conceptual and terminological work in October of the same year, this meeting was organized around two talks by external experts.
Members of the Narrative Liminality network will organize two panels on topics related to the network's work at the upcoming the International Society for the Study of Narrative's Convention in Pamlona, Spain, May 30 and June 1, 2019. The two panels will focus be:
"Between Narrative and Data" with three presentations:
"Half Data, Half Literature: Catalog Rhetoric as Narratively Liminal Form" (Sebastian M. Herrmann)
After an inaugural meeting earlier in the year, the DFG research network on "Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities" held its second workshop from October 25 to 27, 2018, in Leipzig.
Two participants in the network on Narrative Liminality, James Dorson and Regina Schober, recently curated a special issue of Studies in American Naturalism on 'data fiction.' Their introduction to the issue, published in 2017, is now publicly available.
Americanists from all over Germany convened in Leipzig on April 20 and 21 to inaugurate a Research Network on "Narrative Liminality." Funded by the German Research Foundation, the network serves to explore the boundaries and interrelationships between the symbolic forms of narrative, play, data, ritual, spectacle, and others. It is meant to test and advance the assumption that these forms are best understood as gradable rather than as binary, and that important cultural and symbolic work is done in the spaces where these forms meet, intersect, or overlap.