Catherine Gunther Kodat (English) and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Comparative Literature) presented papers at an international conference on Contemporary Narrative Theory: The State of the Field, held Oct. 23-25 in Columbus, Ohio. The conference, organized by Rabinowitz and James Phelan, brought together 27 prominent theorists in the field of narrative studies from the United States, Canada, Israel, England and China, including Wayne Booth, J. Hillis Miller, Linda Hutcheon, H. Porter Abbott, James Phelan, and Robyn Warhol.
Kodat's paper, "What Spartacus?," drawn from her ongoing research on Cold War culture, examined the post-war popularity of the Spartacus as both narrative and figure. Rabinowitz's paper, "They Shoot Tigers, Don't They?," offered a new theory of narrative counterpoint, using it to generate a revisionist reading of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Longer versions of all the papers-with additional contributions from such critics as Seymour Chatman and Gerald Prince-will be published in The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, co-edited by Rabinowitz and Phelan.
