European Studies | Florian Fuchs: “Do Narratives Have Autonomy?”

Florian Fuchs

This event has passed.

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L150
@ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
https://europe.wisc.edu/event/florian-fuchs-do-narratives-have-autonomy/

Dr. Florian Fuchs (Department of German, Princeton University) will deliver a lecture in Elvehjem L150 at 6pm on Wednesday, April 3, followed by a graduate student workshop in the Hagen Room at 11am the following morning. His talk will build upon his recently-published book “Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature.”

Short narrative forms such as fables, novellas, prose poems, or video artworks are often considered to be marginally altered snippets of the factual world. We consider them to be representations that provide renderings of our actual or potential realities, albeit in a slightly modified manner. – By drawing on different specimens of such short narrative forms from literature, philosophy, and art, this talk will offer a cross-check: Must we not rethink the status of short narrative forms as works we can freely access, counter, or ignore? Does a 30-page novella not evoke a completely different response than a 300-page novel? Can we, or better yet: must we thus ascribe short narrative forms with their own agential role in the world? And is does this, finally, ask us to reconsider short forms as having an ontological autonomy that the Western literary tradition has often failed to notice?

Dr. Fuchs’ visit was organized by Prof. Daniel Spaulding with the support of the Department of Art History, the Center for European Studies, and the Center for German and European Studies.