Once Upon a Time, You Lied: Narrative and the Moral Crisis (NeMLA 2024, Boston)
“There’s something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator,” Maria Semple.
The fiction Narrative is domineering; its effect depends on the impact of the emotions intended by the writer or generated by the reader. The narrative isn’t merely a storyline to narrate stories but rather a scope of the inner self, memories, and concealed emotions generated in the process. Through different techniques: footnotes, endnotes, nested narrative, layering, stream of consciousness, etc., narrators weave a web of events to lead the story in specific directions, but how ethical can that be? How can one find the integrity of these narrations in relation to variables such as mental health, social standards, economic status, and political disputes?
Be it Woolf’s Mrs. Dallway, McEween’s Briony, Ishiguro’s Stevens, Camus’ Meursault, Morrison’s Claudia, Atwood’s Offred, or others. This session will discuss and critique the narrator’s significance and role in facilitating or hindering the narration process from eliciting emotions. Where and when does the narrative moral crisis appear in the novels, and what triggers it?
This panel seeks (post)modern fiction contributions and how the authors develop or discard morality using the characters and assesses how the moral crisis in the novel can affect the readers.
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Please submit a 200-300-word abstract by Sep 30th NeMLA's portal, https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home
* More details about this panel (#20641): https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20641
* To browse the CPF: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP
https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html
Areej AlQowaifly