Under the heading of Narrative Rhetoric this seminar brings together seasoned and emerging scholars on the topic of the forms and functions of narratives when used to persuade, convince, unite or otherwise move people. Drawing upon different traditions and fields such as the adjacent but normally separated fields of rhetorical narratology, modern rhetoric and socio-linguistic narrative study, the seminar attempts to throw new light on what continues to be a manifest part of contemporary culture: the constructions, presentations and negotiations of individual or group-based identities as means to establish, reach or convince audiences.    The seminar aims to investigate some of the forms and functions of narrative in negotiations of identity and persuasion in diverse empirical data, picked across genres and media and across generic divisions such as the ones between vernacular, professional and aesthetical rhetoric, between fiction and non-fiction and between narratives as autonomous wholes and narratives as small stories, emerging in and dependent upon context. The objects of study range from non-fictive or fictitious autobiographical narratives such as conversion stories, testimony and anecdotes via political speeches and public debate across media platforms to more explicitly dialogical forms of identity narration in social media and in the small stories of everyday conversation.

No registration is required. The seminar takes place at Aarhus University, Building 1253, room 211 from 10.15-18.30 May 16.

Contact Stefan Iversen (norsi@hum.au.dk) for further information