Finding Meaning through Narrative after Post-Modernism

Department of English,
Baylor University
Co-Sponsored by the Baylor Institute for Oral History
Waco, Texas, 9-10 February 2001

How is meaning found and transmitted through narrative, through story-telling, in the wake of the post-modern project? How has storytelling in the past as well as the present changed and developed, responding to the loss of metanarratives that inform and define human culture?

Keynote Speaker:

Scott Russell Sanders, Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Wells Scholars Program at Indiana University at Bloomington, author of eight fiction works, including The Invisible Company, Fetching the Dead, and Wonders Hidden; nonfiction works (nine) include Writing from the Center, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, and Hunting for Hope. He has also written several children's books, and his writing appears in Harper's, the New York Times, and Best American Essays among many other publications. His writings especially address our relation to nature, issues of social justice, the character of community, and the impact of science on our lives.

Possible paper and/or panel topics:

Finding a language: Creating Universality through Narrative without a Common Myth * Moral Formation and Storytelling * Telling Old Stories in New Ways * Telling the Stories of our Lives * Meaning after Post-Modernism in the Stories Poems Tell * Reclaiming the American Oral Tradition * Effects on National or Global Culture(s) of the Loss of Metanarratives * Spiritual Journeys in Narrative * Local and Regional Histories * Binding the Generations through Storytelling * Storytelling and the Changing Canon * The Changing Text: Intersections of Narrative with Technology * The Child's Voice in Narrative * The Fantastic: Fairy Tales, Science Fiction, Magical Realism, and Narrative * Popular Culture, Technology, and the Stories We Tell * Education: Deconstructed Literature and the Post-Modern Student * Critical Approaches to Narrative after Post-Modernism * Narrative Form and the Transmission of Meaning * Narrating Faith in a Post-Modern Culture * Narrative and the Importance of Place

Mail or email abstracts (50-100 words) of papers suitable for a 20 minute presentation and/or panel proposals no later than 15 October 2000. Send to Rebecca Munro at the address below.