Call for Articles
DIEGESIS 5.1, summer 2016

Topic: “Empirical Approaches to Narrative”
Special issue only in English with guest editors: Marisa Bortolussi, Peter Dixon, Roy Sommer

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: December 31st
Deadline for the submission of articles: September 30th

Empirical approaches to narrative explore how interpreters make sense of stories and employ a wide range of methods and techniques, from questionnaires and computer-aided analysis to physiological measurement and eye-movement monitoring. The core question is: how does narrative comprehension work, and what variables influence the cognitive processing of narrative material? Empirical narrative research also analyses how stories affect readers, viewers or, in conversational storytelling, interlocutors during and after the reception process. In order to promote the new interdisciplinary debate on empirical approaches to narrative, DIEGESIS invites paper proposals in English from psychology, linguistics, sociology, literary studies and related disciplines.

Topics include, but are not restricted to,

• gender and reading
• effects of literature, films and video games on readers’ lives
• mediating effects of empathy, identification, and emotion
• effects of text structure and text features on readers
• empirical approaches to cognitive poetics and stylistics
• memory and reading
• inferences based on analyses of text corpora
• empirical methodologies for studying any of the above issues.

DIEGESIS Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung

We invite abstracts in English of approximately half a page (DIN-A4) by December 31st, 2014 at the latest. Please send your abstract, along with a brief CV, to the editorial team of DIEGESIS: diegesis@uni-wuppertal.de. The editors and guest editors will decide on the acceptability of proposals by February 15th, 2015. Contributions have to be submitted by September 30th, 2015.

In addition, we always welcome REVIEWS of new works (i.e. works published in the last three to four years) in the field of narratology; we specifically welcome cross-disciplinary contributions in addition to contributions from those working in the fields of language and literature. Recommendations for reviews can be sent to the aforementioned e-mail address at any time; in your e-mail, you should name the book(s)
you would like to review and provide a brief overview of your academic career.

Furthermore, we would also like to invite suggestions for CONFERENCE REPORTS on any events in the field of narrative research. If you want to send us proposals for such reports please include brief information on the topic, venue, date, and organizers of the event as well as a short outline of your academic career.

About DIEGESIS:

DIEGESIS is the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to narrative research that provides free online access to full-text articles and reviews (www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de). The high standard of work published in DIEGESIS is ensured by a combination of competitive calls for papers and a peer review process.
DIEGESIS is published at the University of Wuppertal and in cooperation with the local Centre of Narrative Research (CNR) (www.zef.uni-wuppertal.de) by Matei Chihaia (Romance studies), Sandra Heinen (literature and media studies), Matías Martínez (German studies), Michael Scheffel (general literary studies) and Roy Sommer (English and American studies).