Mellon Dissertation Seminar

"Story in Theory"

Thanks to an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the enhancement of doctoral education in the humanities, with a three-year grant totaling $293,000, Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the Department of English within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been invited to direct a six-week Mellon Dissertation Seminar in the summer of 2009–one of only four such seminars funded nationwide this year. Called “Story in Theory,” the colloquium (to be convened again with new participants in the summer of 2011) will focus on recent developments in narrative theory. It is designed to aid students from across the humanities in the fuller realization of their thesis projects wherever their writing stands to benefit from a considered infusion of such scholarship. Including visits from outside critics in the field, and enrolling a limited number of doctoral candidates from other campuses as well, the course will run from June 22-July 31, 2009, and will provide a stipend of $4500 for each student participant as well as additional funds for research materials.

Narrative theory so successfully swept the disciplinary fields of the human sciences in the 1980s that it has aspired ever since to become a scientific discipline of its own–namely, narratology: the study of the essential structural ingredients of a narrative regardless of mode (fiction, testimony, autobiography, etc.) or medium (prose, film, comic strip, et. al.). Work in this vein has brought powerfully to light the hidden plot assumptions of the hard and soft sciences alike (the tacitly Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end, for instance, of concern to evolutionary biology or astronomy; the linked paradigms of agency, turning point, and closure in historical writing; the quasi-novelistic models of mystery and solution in legal jurisprudence).

One result for dissertation writers in the humanities is that students of everything from Elizabethan allegory through sci fi film to postmodern Anglophone fiction, realist painting to opera scores, may all have an interest in the potential critical yield from a deliberative use of narrative theory. Airing chapters of student work alongside an extensive syllabus running from Russian Formalism through structuralism to contemporary psychopoetics and cognitive narratology, the Mellon Seminar would seek to maximize this yield while also helping students develop a stronger narrative line in their own arguments.

UI applicants at the dissertation-writing stage should supply a brief prospectus for their thesis, a cover note mentioning what courses they may have taken already that involve narrative theory, and, most important, a short speculative proposal (a page or so in length) highlighting those aspects of the dissertation–provisional claims or residual questions–they expect might profit from further work and discussion in the area of narrative theory. Please direct inquiries to garrett-stewart@uiowa.edu; applications due by October 24, 2008, to cherie-rieskamp@uiowa.edu.