Symposium 16.-18.10. The Return of Moral Didacticism?

In October 2025, the research project AUTOSTORY: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (funded by the Research Council of Finland) and SELMA Centre will co-organize a three-day symposium “The Return of Moral Didacticism?: Authority, Ethos, and Instruction” at the University of Turku, Finland.

The role of didacticism in the literary field is changing. In the last few decades, this has been particularly noticeable in the relationship between moral didacticism and authorial ethos, understood as the author’s ethical and experiential positioning both inside and outside literary works. In media, especially on social media, the lines between authority, authorship and expertise by experience become indistinct as the predominant frames of reading treat literature as an occasion for moral positioning and a source of information and instruction. The increased employment of sensitivity readers, the importance of diverse representation, and alertness to social justice issues have resulted in a widely shared perception that literature has become more overtly didactic and principled. Moreover, the didactic aims and moral stances of the work are more closely tied to how the author is perceived.

This symposium aims to explore how changing attitudes toward authority and authorship influence didactic aims and elements in narrative. Today, a work of literature – its ethics of representation and tone of voice – is strongly likened to its author in reception and marketing. This development in the contemporary literary field exposes the author to moral and political debate within the public sphere, taking the form of ethos negotiation. What consequences does this have for literary didacticism? How do authors construct didactic and moral authority in their rhetoric? As contemporary ethical concerns are often tied with questions of identity, representation, and story ownership, the contemporary perception of moral didacticism is connected to the increased relevance afforded to authorial ethos in the literary field.

The symposium keynote will be given by James Phelan, Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University, USA. He is the author of several books on narrative theory, including Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell about It (2005), Experiencing Fiction (2007), Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017), Debating Rhetorical Narratology (2020; with Matthew Clark), and Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx (2022). He has also been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and he co-edits, along with Katra Byram and Faye Halpern, the Ohio State University Press book series, The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

Programme:

Thursday, 16 October (Cal1, Calonia)

10.15–11.45
Opening of the Symposium
Session 1: The Return of Didacticism in Contemporary Fiction
Chair: Maria Mäkelä

1. Markku Lehtimäki: Beyond the Infodump: The Forms and Purposes of Didacticism in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
2. Elise Kraatila: Teachable Futures: Parsing the Epistemic Standards of Didactic Climate Fiction

Lunch Break

13.15–14.45
Session 2: Authority and Moral Didacticism
Chair: Merja Polvinen

1. Kai Mikkonen: Authorial Performance and the Moral Message in Thackeray
2. Teemu Ikonen: ”In spite of my tendency towards the didactic”: Authorial Power,
Responsibility, and Uneasy Scenes of Reading in Four Institutional Monologues by George Saunders
3. Liisa Merivuori: Testimony and Truth: Authorial Ethos and Literary Ethics in Iida Rauma’s Hävitys

Coffee Break

15.30–17.00
Session 3: Authors of the Story Economy and Transmedial Ethos
Chair: Samuli Björninen

1. Maria Mäkelä: Édouard Louis, Poetics of the Explicit, and Class Consciousness as Narrative Capital
2. Joosua Lehtinen: “You are speaking for people whether you like it or not”: Ocean Vuong’s Transmedial Ethos, Reception, and Representation
3. Ville Hämäläinen: “Writing a book is a machine that transforms crap into content”: Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s Ambiguous Ethos and Didacticism

**

Friday, 17 October (Aava, Arcanum)

10.15–11.45
Session 4: Authorial Positioning and Didacticism in Contemporary Literature
Chair: Kaisa Ilmonen

1. Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Twan Tromp: “Mandatory reading for the Dutch”: Narrative Authority of a Refugee Writer
2. Elise Nykänen: From Implied to Empirical Authors: The Case of Ann-Helén Laestadius’s Stolen
3. Hanna Lahdenperä: Subtle as a Sledgehammer: Intention, Ethics, and Narrative
Manipulation in Katarina Frostenson’s Later Prose

Lunch Break

13.15–14.45
Keynote
Chair: Markku Lehtimäki

James Phelan: Didacticism, Rhetorical Poetics, and Colson Whitehead’s The
Underground Railroad

Coffee Break

15.30–17.00
Session 5: Narrative Medicine
Chair: Viola Parente-Čapkova*

1. Hanna Meretoja: Metanarrative Cancer Fiction: Narrative Awareness and Embodied Knowledge
2. Laura Karttunen: Perspective Taking in Narrative Medicine: How Does Springboarding through Creative Rewriting Work, Exactly?
3. Anna Ovaska: Didactic Uses of Unreliable Narration: The Case of Pain and Disbelief

**

Saturday, 18 October (Aava, Arcanum)

10.15–11.45
Session 6: Biblical Rhetoric and Moral Didacticism
Chair: Tero Vanhanen

1. Howard Sklar: Between Moral Didacticism and Counter-Narration: A Modern “Midrashic” Reading of the Biblical Book of Esther
2. Greger Andersson: Moralistic Interpretations of Biblical Narratives
3. Oiva Ristimäki: Calvinistic Ethos and Simulation in George MacDonald

Lunch Break

13.15–14.45
Session 7: Ethos Puzzles in Contemporary Fiction
Chair: Markku Lehtimäki

1. Merja Polvinen: Authors, Readers, and (De)Composition
2. Tero Vanhanen: New Adult Education: Eroticism and Didacticism in Contemporary Romance
3. Samuli Björninen: Unreliable First-Person Narrators as Conveyors of Authorial Ethos in Contemporary European Fiction

Closing of the Symposium