What is Socionarratology?
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York present “What is Socionarratology?” with Philipp Felsch (Humboldt University), Florian Fuchs (Princeton University), Marc Ortmann (Humboldt University), and Sarah Rivett (Princeton University).
During this event our speakers presented talks on their shared research in the sociology of the literary and the literariness of social sciences: Florian Fuchs and Marc Ortmann provided an introductory talk, “Towards a Socionarratology,” Sarah Rivett presented “Story as Survival,” and Philipp Felsch “A Brief History of Narrative Reason.”
About the presentations:
Florian Fuchs and Marc Ortmann: “Towards A Socionarratology”
In this introductory talk, Fuchs and Ortmann offer a brief history of research into the narrative structures of society and into how societies reflect on narrating themselves. They show how over the past decade, a new interdisciplinary field of research has begun to (re)emerge at the intersection of literary studies and social sciences. This field that they call “socionarratology” goes beyond a mere revival of sociology of literature or the omnipresence of ‘storytelling’ in cultural debates. Socionarratology aims to integrate adjacent academic disciplines toward an understanding of how narratives shape social dynamics and how literary forms, genres, and practices interact with social processes on the micro and macro level.
Sarah Rivett: “Story as Survival”
This talk compares two U.S. American authors commonly associated with points of literary origin: Washington Irving as an inaugural voice of United States national literature and Leslie Marmom Silko, a foundational author of its counternarrative in the Native American literary renaissance. The figure of the raven from both The Book of Genesis and Indigenous creation stories flies in and out of each author’s oeuvre. These ravens reveal how each author constitutes narrative time and adjacent concepts of narrative space. For Irving, stories are histories’ playful remainders, standing outside of chronological time. As if speaking back to this formulation in her epigraph to Ceremony, Silko cautions against reading stories reductively as entertainment: stories are survival, she explains, not just for American literature but for humanity itself.
Philipp Felsch: “A Brief History of Narrative Reason”
For years, we have been witnessing the rise of what, for lack of a better term, could be called narrative reason. From marketing (“brand storytelling”) to the humanities, from the sciences (“narrative medicine”) to historiography (“critical fabulation”), storytelling has become one of the most powerful resources for cultural meaning-making and legitimacy. The talk addresses the question of how this development came about.
“What is Socionarratology?” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA). Additional funding was provided by the the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York.
Professor Philipp Felsch is Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University in Berlin. His latest books in English are The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990 (2021), How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption (2024) and, forthcoming this fall, The Philosopher. Habermas and Us.Professor Philipp Felsch, Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University in Berlin
Dr. Florian Fuchs teaches in the German Department at Princeton University. His research spans literature, art, and media from the 16th to the 21st century. He is the author of Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (Zone Books: 2023) and co-editor and co-translator of History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell UP: 2020).Dr. Florian Fuchs, Research Scholar & Lecturer, German Department at Princeton University
Dr. Marc Ortmann is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin. As assistant to Professor Andreas Reckwitz, he works in the fields of sociological theory, cultural sociology, and the sociology of imagination. After completing his dissertation, for which he received an award for the best doctoral thesis in sociological history (2024), on the relationship between sociology and literature, he is now researching the narrative structures and social imaginations of late modernity.Dr. Marc Ortmann, Postdoctoral Researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin
Professor Sarah Rivett is Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011), Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), and a current book project entitled Raven’s Flight: Placing Alaska in American Literature.Professor Sarah Rivett, Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University
Event Information
September 30, 2025, 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Deutsches Haus at NYU 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
Organizer(s): Deutsches Haus at NYU and the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York