Narrative Talks

A couple of recent conferences with Brontë-related talks:

International Conference on Narrative
The Swissôtel Chicago, March 5-8, 2015

Ekphrasis, Portraiture, and the Limits of Character Description: Charlotte Brontë Meets Vincent van Gogh
Rebecca Rainof, The Catholic University of America

Charlotte Brontë’s Bilingualism
William A. Cohen, University of Maryland

“More than words had power to express”: The Unnarratable in Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Helen H. Davis, Wilkes University

Jane Eyre vs. Maggie Tulliver: The Difference a Victorian Fictional Autobiography Can Make
Heidi L. Pennington, James Madison University
How is Jane Eyre in Brontë’s novel different from Maggie Tulliver in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss? Each protagonist feels deeply for others, understands her world through narrative, and engages readerly sympathy for her social plight. But the manner of the two tellings—one a first-person, fictional autobiography (Jane Eyre), the other a third-person novel with internal focalization of multiple characters (Mill)—drastically alters the affective valence of reading Jane and Maggie. This paper demonstrates the productivity of analyzing Jane Eyre and other Victorian fictional autobiographies as fictional autobiographies; this literary sub-genre promotes a unique phenomenology of reading through its interweaving of conventions of fiction and conventions of reference, making it a valuable category of study for narrative theorists. Since Dorrit Cohn’s brief analysis of it in The Distinction of Fiction, there has been little work on the fictional autobiography as a sub-genre, and none that considers its narratological traits in the context of Victorian genre expectations. Expanding on Cohn’s theory, I argue that this sub-genre promotes in the reader a doubled reading stance with respect to the text. Through this doubled phenomenology of reading, the fictional autobiography engages readerly participation in the self-making processes of the main character while simultaneously evoking readerly investment in the emotional reality of the main character’s identity. Permanent gaps in the story and direct reader-address include the audience in the production of the protagonist’s self; these narrative strategies thus reveal that the fictional self’s affective actuality is constructed through the absence of any pre-existing identity. I compare thematically parallel but structurally (and affectively) distinct passages from Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss in order to demonstrate how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly suggests that even real-world identities are created in much the same way as are the identities of fictional characters. 

Contingent Perspectives: Restrospection and Futurity in Villette and Never Let Me Go
Ryan Fong, Kalamazoo College 

2015 International Conference on Social Science and Technology Education [ICSSTE 2015]
Sanya, China, April 11-12, 2015

The Lexical Characteristics of Jane Eyre
Liu Chunling
  Jane Eyre is a famous masterpiece of Charlotte Brontë. The novel’s literary achievement is immortal, especially the brilliant language. The description not only brings readers aesthetic pleasure but also hint the fate and emotion of characters. Charlotte’s original description forming a colorful picture makes Jane’s image more perfect and vivid and drives readers to search more for the beauty of the novel and the life. Moreover, Charlotte endows words with indefinite sense and deep connotation. This thesis aims to explore the lexical characteristics on the theory of linguistics.