AnonymClassic team members Beatrice Gründler (PI), Matthew Keegan, Johannes Stephan, and Isabel Toral participated in the Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Pamplona/Spain from May 30 to June 2, 2019, which gathered scholars of narrative studies from different disciplinary angles. Our panel under the title “Before Factuality/Fictionality History and Narrativity in Premodern and Early Modern Arabic Literary Tradition” was chaired by Johannes Stephan.

Our group formed the only Arabist panel. Furthermore, it was among one of the very few that engaged with non-Western and premodern literary traditions. In comparison to many contemporary narratological and rhetorical approaches, our contributions altogether stressed the importance of historicizing fictionality, rethinking it as a literary mode and a pragmatic category beyond European literatures, as well as relating it to the ongoing reformulation of philological activity in the digital age.

Recap by Johannes Stephan