"NARRATIVE PRACTICES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: POLITICAL AND NARRATOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS"

Session organized by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, the MLA Convention, Toronto, Dec. 27-30, 1997. This session is open to all MLA members.

Even though the momentous events of 1989 have put an end to traditional ideological polarizations between East and West, "first" and "second" world, the current geopolitical scene is not a "particularly hospitable space for the cultivation of polyglossia, multilingualism, and the arts of cultural mediation," as the more optimistic among us have predicted. The post-Cold War era has freed the civic imaginary of the vestiges of competing grand narratives; but its "democratizing" and "decolonizing" effects have often been accompanied by processes of economic "globalization" and cultural "homogenization." The place of traditional grand narratives has been taken by lesser narratives of a nationalistic, ethnic, or tribal kind that promote invidious cultural distinctions and conflictive agendas. Therefore, the work of the cultural analyst and narratologist is needed today more than ever, in order to assess correctly the role that narration plays in the socialization of individuals, allegorization of new bureaucracies, and the articulation of national and ethnic interests. At the same time, the narratologist can emphasize the reformulative function that alternative narratives ("dissident," experimental, postcolonial, borderline, feminist) can play in the current post-Cold War restructuring.

We invite papers (8-10 pages in length) that explore the critical-mediative role of contemporary fiction in response to ethnocentric concepts of culture, the contribution of postmodern narrative epistemologies to a polysystemic concept of culture, or the development of nonconflictive (transactive) models of exchange in multicultural, "borderline" narratives. Focused on both the politics and poetics of contemporary fiction, these papers can raise questions concerning the efficacy of the new narrative agendas and strategies, the political credibility of narrative imagination in a post-communist/postmodern world, the effect of new technologies such as hypertext on narrative communication, and so on.

Please send 200-300 word abstracts or completed papers by March 15, 1997, to

Marcel Cornis-Pope
Department of English
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284-2005.
Tel. (804) 828-4530
Fax # (804) 828 2171
E-mail address: mcornis@vcu.edu