XX Annual Humanities
Summer School – 2017
Personal Narrative as Living History
Lomonosov Moscow State University
June 27–30, 2017
The ability—opportunity, right, and even obligation—to “tell one’s own story,” to give shape and social representativeness to one’s individual “I” is fundamental to modern society, its (our) quest to make sense of itself/ourselves. First-person narratives are produced by the most varied of subjects in the most varied of genres and contexts, using the most varied of cultural codes and media. They are disseminated orally, through the printed word, visual images, sound, or in combinations thereof—in film, on radio, online. Storytelling—in whatever form it may take—generates the energy to fuel living history as it creates itself before our eyes.
Human narratives are the soil worked by all the disciplines, without exception, in the humanities and social sciences: history, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. Significantly, the tools for analyzing the world employed by the different disciplines in their multiple approaches and methodologies share, at their core, much in common; they are, in their respective ways, variations of discourse analysis.
The Summer School in the Humanities 2017 will explore the past, present, and future of academic study of the personal narrative; it will probe the instruments, ethics, and limits of this research field, and provide participants an introduction to “state of the art” work in the field today.
The Humanities Summer School’s work is structured as a series of discussions and thematic roundtables conducted by leading specialists from the USA and the Russian Federation. Our working languages are Russian and English.
University-level faculty and graduate students who endeavor to apply for selection to participate in the XX Humanities Summer School are invited to submit their applications to discours@philol.msu.ru or philol.discours@gmail.com (with Summer School-2017 in the subject line) before April 25, 2017.
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