In the second conference of our recently established research network Transfictional and Transgeneric (University of Bremen – University of Coimbra), we deal with the question of contradiction, dissonance and discrepancy on an aesthetic level.

In the conference we will ask how texts of different kinds and media (such as novels, poems, plays, short stories, but also films, music and other audiovisual narratives) use the notion of contradiction and dissonance on the levels of form and content (e.g. histoire and discours, story and plot).

The dissonances in question may, for example, arise:

• from the unusual, contradictory combination of image and text and/or sound; making it difficult to grasp the meaning of a narrative;
• by the blending of different levels of the narrative itself, as happens, for example, in metaleptic texts.

At the level of genre, papers could, for example, address:

• discrepancies between generic conventions of form and content: e.g. expectation vs. subversion and contradiction in tragedy, sonnet or detective novel, and the subversion of these (unwritten) rules within the text itself.

Other possible questions for the conference could deal with the ways in which (seemingly) contradictory stories are told:

• e.g. different perspectives on a story offered by different characters, creating contradictory, perhaps even incommensurate views (with M. Bachtin, e.g. notions of “dialogue” and hybridity);
• discrepancies between the expressions of characters, narrators, sounds, and images;
• discrepancies/contradictions between extradiegetic and intra- or metadiegetic levels or, for example, between a play and its paratext, such as stage directions.

The conference will take place at the University of Bremen from Oct. 30 to 31. 2025.
Organizers: Julia Brühne (Bremen), Gabriella Mendes (Coimbra)
Abstracts of min. 200 and max. 300 words should please be sent until June 30 to: transficionality@gmail.com

Resumed bibliography:
ALBER, J., B. Richardson & H. S. Nielsen (eds). A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013.
BRAY, A., A. Gibson & B. McHale (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge, 2012.
FLUDERNIK, M. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode” In Style 37, n. 4. Pensylvania: Penn State University Press, 2003.
RYAN, M-L. “Transfictionality across Media” In Theorizing Narrativity edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 385-418. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2008.
TODOROV, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1975.
WOLF, Werner. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993.