Presence - "Being there" in Fictional Worlds

The notion that literary works can draw their readers into storyworlds, giving them a sense of "being there" with the characters and experiencing the plights and pleasures that authors craft, has risen to new importance in recent years. The phenomenologically informed study of texts from antiquity to the present day (see Grethlein; Gumbrecht; Felski) has highlighted - once more - the importance of the experiential aspect of the literary work of art. Also narratology concerns itself with experience of human and animal characters and narrators, drawing on psychology, the neurosciences and philosophical debates (see Fludernik; Herman; Caracciolo and Kukkonen eds.; Kuzmičova). No longer dismissed as mere escapism, the capacity of a literary work of art to gain "presence" has turned into a new subject of inquiry.

 

9.15-9.30 Welcome (Minerva E221)

 

9.30-11.00 Keynote

Satire and Embodiment: Allegorical Romance on Page and Stage in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain

 

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

 

11.30-13.00 

 

Panel I (E221)      Chair: Merja Polvinen

Toponyms as Prompts for Presencing Place – Making Oneself at Home in the Narrated City
Lieven Ameel and Terhi Ainiala (University of Helsinki)
Henry James and Margaret Harkness in the Story-World of 1880s London
Jason Finch (Åbo Akademi)
Presence of the Past: Remembering the Prose of Raija Siekkinen
Jarkko Oraharju (University of Turku)

 

Panel II (E223)       Chair: Hanna Meretoja

From Werther to Luntialla: The Epistolatory Novel and the Experience of Presence
Ana Margarida Abrantes (Catholic University of Portugal) 
What Isn’t Hermeneutics: Four Ways of Looking at Presence
Mike Frank (Bentley University) and Shana Attar (Harvard University)
Puzzle as a Presence Element: On the Transmediality of Solving
Matti Karhulahti (University of Turku)