Project Narrative

The Ohio State University
The Ohio State University

The Project Narrative podcast is built on the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, a way in which we both seek to understand the world and to change it. The podcast features scholars of narrative in conversation about short narratives that engage in that work of knowing and intervening. In each episode, a scholar reads a narrative aloud and then discusses it with the host of the podcast, Jim Phelan, the director of Project Narrative. The conversations range across a wide array of topics: the guest’s reasons for selecting it; the sources of its appeal, including the pleasures it offers and the challenges it presents; the claims it makes about understanding some part of the world and about doing something as a result.

  1. 2 Oct

    Episode 59: Jim Phelan & Howard Sklar — Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Howard Sklar discuss Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First,” which was published in Malamud’s 1963 collection with the same title. Howard Sklar is a senior university lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki, where he also has the title of docent– equivalent to associate professor in the United States– in English philology. In addition, Howard holds the title of docent in literary studies with a special emphasis in Narrative Theory at Tampere University in Finland. Howard is the author of The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion, published in 2013, and the author of numerous essays on subjects ranging from affective responses to narratives, to narrative ethics, from Jewish-American literature, to representations of intellectual disability.

  2. 26 Aug

    Episode 58: Jim Phelan & Wai Chee Dimock — Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Wai Chee Dimock discuss Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a story first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Wai Chee Dimock is William Lamson Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at Yale University. She has written influentially about climate change, public health, and indigenous communities, and in much of her work, she has called attention to the interrelations between humans and non-humans. Dimock’s books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time from 2006, Shades of the Planet, and Weak Planet. Her 1996 book Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy was reissued in 2021. Dimock recently completed another book, Microbes and Machines: Repairing a Damaged Planet with Nonhuman Actors. From 2016 to 2021, Dimock served as editor of PMLA, and, in her retirement, she’s writing a Substack newsletter, Dog Stories, which features discussions of dogs in life and literature.

  3. 15 Jul

    Episode 57: Jim Phelan & Gerald Prince — Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (“La Parure”)

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Gerald Prince discuss Guy de Maupassant’s 1884 story, “La Parure,” or “The Necklace” in English. Prince reads the 1924 translation by Ernest Boyd. Gerald Prince is professor of French and Francophone studies in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prince is one of the preeminent scholars of his generation in the fields of narratology and of 20th and 21st century French literature. Prince’s books include Métaphysique et technique dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Sartre, A Grammar of Stories, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, A Dictionary of Narratology, Narrative as Theme, Guide du Roman de Langue Française (1901-1950), and Guide du Roman de Langue Française (1951-2000). In 2013, Prince received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.

  4. 19 Jun

    Episode 56: Jim Phelan & Fritz Breithaupt — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Two Strange Children”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Fritz Breithaupt discuss a segment from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities. That segment is entitled “The Two Strange Children,” and it was translated by George Barry in 1885. Elective Affinities was Goethe’s third novel, published in 1809. Fritz Breithaupt is Professor of German in the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic studies, and also Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his other duties at Penn, Breithaupt directs the Experimental Humanities Laboratory. In the course of his career, Breithaupt has produced a substantial and highly influential body of work in both German and English across the fields of Germanic studies, empathy studies, and narrative studies. Three of his books include: Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung (in English, Beyond Images: Goethe’s Politics of Perception), The Dark Sides of Empathy, and The Narrative Brain. Breithaupt’s most recent book is on the first-time experience and transformative experience, which has been published in German but not yet in English.

  5. 15 May

    Episode 55: Jim Phelan & Jonathan Culler — Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Jonathan Culler discuss Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” which was first published in Liberty Magazine in 1934, and then included in her 1936 collection, The World Over. Jonathan Culler is the class of 1916 Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. Culler has been one of the most distinguished and productive literary and critical theorists of his generation. Among his 11 single-authored books are: the 1975 volume, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by an MLA member in that year; the 1982 volume, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, which lucidly explicated the then still emerging movement called deconstruction; and the 1997 book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into more than 25 languages. Throughout his career, Culler has conducted extended engagements with narrative, narrative theory, and lyric theory, and in 2015, he published Theory of the Lyric. Among Culler’s many recognitions are his elections to several distinguished scholarly groups, including: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001; the American Philosophical Society, 2006; and the British Academy, 2020. The International Society for the Study of Narrative has selected Culler as the winner of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for 2026.

  6. 24 Apr

    Episode 54: Jim Phelan & Alison Booth — Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Alison Booth discuss Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” first published in the New Review in 1972 and then republished in her 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Alison Booth is the Brown-Forman Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to narrative theory, Booth has expertise in the digital humanities, Victorian fiction, women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, travel writing, and biography. For nearly a decade, Booth served as the Faculty Director of the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, currently called the Digital Humanities Center, and in 2005, she served as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Booth’s books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, How to Make it as a Woman, and Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Booth’s projects in digital humanities include Collective Biographies of Women, an extensive database built from an online bibliography of more than 1,250 such collective biographies.

  7. 26 Mar

    Episode 53: Jim Phelan & Maria Mäkelä — Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” 

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Maria Mäkelä discuss a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” published in Spanish in 1956. Mäkelä will be reading the English translation by Paul Blackburn, published in  Cortázar’s translated collection End of the Game and Other Stories, published in 1978. Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Head of the degree program in Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Mäkelä’s work in narrative theory has ranged widely across fictional and non-fictional narratives, literary narratives, non-literary narratives, and many other things. With Paul Dawson, Mäkelä co-edited The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. Currently, Mäkelä is the Consortium Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Research Council of Finland, Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st Century Literary Field. Mäkelä is also a stalwart member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and served as the society’s President in 2019.

  8. 7 Mar

    Episode 52: Jim Phelan & Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen — Omar El Akkad’s “Factory Air”

    In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen discuss Omar El Akkad’s “Factory Air,” first published in Guernica Magazine in March 2019 as part of their special issue on climate fiction. Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the Rise of Science and Fiction at Aarhus University in Denmark. Zetterberg-Nielsen’s research is driven by the question of why and how we engage with fictional stories. Zetterberg-Nielsen focuses on fictionality theory, the history of the 18th Century novel, and the intersections between the two. She has published widely on these topics in venues such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Style, and The Living Handbook of Narratology. Zetterberg-Nielsen has received the prestigious Nils Klim Prize, given by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research to a scholar from or in a Nordic country under the age of 40, who has made outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. Zetterberg-Nielsen has also received a number of research grants that have enabled her to establish the Center for the Rise of Science and Fiction. Zetterberg-Nielsen collaborates closely with many scholars in the International Society for the Study of Narrative, which among other things have resulted in the co-edited volume, Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited.

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About

The Project Narrative podcast is built on the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, a way in which we both seek to understand the world and to change it. The podcast features scholars of narrative in conversation about short narratives that engage in that work of knowing and intervening. In each episode, a scholar reads a narrative aloud and then discusses it with the host of the podcast, Jim Phelan, the director of Project Narrative. The conversations range across a wide array of topics: the guest’s reasons for selecting it; the sources of its appeal, including the pleasures it offers and the challenges it presents; the claims it makes about understanding some part of the world and about doing something as a result.

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