Organised by Beatrice Gründler (EXC 2020, Research Area 3: "Future Perfect") and Johannes Stephan (Freie Universität Berlin, "Kalila and Dimna - AnonymClassic", ERC).

Event in collaboration with the ERC project Kalila and Dimna – AnonymClassic.

This international conference is the final part of a series of events that invites discussions on how to engage with the concept of narrative framing in premodern Arabic literature and adjacent literary traditions. The aim of the conference is to develop a comprehensive definition of «framing narratives» beyond a merely descriptive perspective, and to interrogate its function within literary history and theory. In literary theory, the Arabic tradition serves as the most popular example for frame narratives. Besides the well-known Arabian Nights, notably through its European reception, many other frame narratives have passed from various languages into and through Arabic, among them the Book of Sindbad and Kalila and Dimna. Such frame narratives serve both as models for other literary projects ­– premodern and modern – in different traditions and as a point of departure for analytical concepts in literary theory. The activity of framing a narrative or embedding tales into a larger narrative framework of an anthological, encyclopedic or biographic nature are more than elegant or entertaining literary devices. Narrative Framing is rather to be seen as a means to understand, define or contextualize human oral and written communication as well as an activity of erecting relationships, not only between textual units and narrators, but also between perspectives, works, persons, and diverging temporalities. The thematic scope of our conference, therefore, will not be confined to a particular (premodern) genre or a specific narrative form. Rather by emphasizing the activity of “framing”  broadly as one of many ways of doing literature, the conference shall spur discussions on how to adequately analyze and understand narrative and non-narrative interactions within Arabic textual culture and between Arabic and adjacent traditions such as Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, and Castillan prior to the 19th century. 

The conference will be held as a hybrid event in English.

Contact: johannes.stephan@fu-berlin.de

Programme

Thursday, 18 November

Welcome and Introduction

09:30-10:00 | Beatrice Gründler, Johannes Stephan (Freie Universität Berlin)

10:00-11:15 | Panel I Competing Temporalities

Chair: Isabel Toral

Wen-chin Ouyang (School of African and Oriental Studies London): Coincidence and Entanglement: Wonder and Framing in The Thousand and One Nights

Enass Khansa (American University of Beirut): Interrupting Scholarly Lineage: Ibn Shuhayd’s Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons

11:15-11:45 | coffee break

11:45-13:00 | Panel II The Semantics of Embedding

Chair: Pegah Shahbaz

Guy Ron Gilboa (Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv): The Serpent's Tale and Lost Inscriptions

Zina Maleh (Université de Genève): Narrative Levels and Implausible Stories: Three Uses of the Frame in Tanūkhī’s Faraj baʿd al-shidda

13:00-14:30 | lunch break

14:30-15:45 | Panel III Framing Functionalities

Chair: Wen-chin Ouyang

Ulrich Marzolph (Universität Göttingen): A Phenomenology of the Middle Eastern Frame Tale

Pegah Shahbaz (University of Toronto): Frame Narrative and its Function in the Persian Bilawhar wa Būdhasf

15:45-16:15 | coffee break

16:15-17:45 | Online Keynote (in Arabic)

Said Yaktine (Université Mohamed-V de Rabat): The Frame Story and the Narrative Response in Kalīla wa-Dimna / القصّة الإطار والجواب السردي في كليلة ودمنة

19:30 | dinner for participants

Friday, 19 November

10:00-11:15 | Panel IV The Politics of Narrative Framing

Chair: Enass Khansa

Isabel Toral (Freie Universität Berlin): Framing and Conversion: The Rhetorics of Framing in the Arabic Budhasaf wa-Balahvar (Barlaam and Josaphat)

Rachel Peled (Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid): Framing Narrative as a Socio - Political Device in the Hebrew Version of Barlaam and Josaphat, Kalila and Dimna,and The Tales of Sendebar: A New Perspective

11:15-11:45 | coffee break

11:45-13:00 | Panel V Reframing Translations

Chair: Jan van Ginkel

Rachel Scott (Royal Holloway, University of London): Framing Arabic Frame Tales for New Audiences in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Theodore Beers (Freie Universität Berlin): Scripture as Frame in Naṣr Allāh Munshī's Kalīla and Dimna

13:00-14:15 | lunch break

14:15-15:30 | Panel VI Framing Across Genres

Chair: Theodore Beers

Richard van Leeuwen (Universiteit van Amsterdam): Ḥajj Accounts as Framed Narratives: two Examples of the 17^th Century

James White (University of Oxford): Frames and Framing in Nafthat al-maṣdūr (The Expectoration of the Consumptive) by Ibn Maʿṣūm al-Madanī (d. 1120/1708-09): A Once Lost Anthology on Migration and Homesickness

15:30-16:00 | coffee break

16:00-17:30 | Final Discussion

with Jutta Eming and Simon Godart (Freie Universität Berlin)

19:00 | dinner for participants