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Florian Fuchs, “Do Narratives Have Autonomy?”
April 3 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Sponsored by CGES, CES and the Department of Art History.
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. Florian Fuchs is a Permanent Research Scholar in the German Department at Princeton University. His work investigates the epistemologies of genre in literature, media studies, and the history of ideas. He received his PhD with distinction from Yale University in 2017 and most recently was a Research Postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence Research Group “Temporal Communities” at the Free University Berlin. He has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, and from the Dahlem Humanities Center.
A suggested (but not required) reading for the workshop the morning after the talk can be found here.