About ENN8
The 8th Conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN8), organized by Matías Martínez and Michael Scheffel, was held at the Center for Narrative Research (CNR), University of Wuppertal (Germany), from September 29 to October 1, 2025, under the title “Limits of Narrative.” The conference welcomed scholars from twelve European countries as well as the United States, South Korea, and China to discuss a fundamental question in contemporary narratology: What are the limits of narrative, and how can we identify and define them?
The conference addressed this problem from a variety of perspectives. It featured 72 presentations organized into eight thematic panels. Discussions focused on the boundaries between narrative and other literary genres and discourse types, the possibilities and constraints of storytelling across different media, and the cognitive processes through which recipients construct coherent stories from necessarily incomplete representations. Other contributions explored the limits of tellability, historical transformations of narrative forms, and the challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence. Further questions concerned the role of narrative in constructing personal and collective identities, the social expectations and pressures associated with storytelling, and the ethical and political implications of narrative representations of reality.
The results of the ENN8 Conference are documented in three sections on this website:
The Special Issue DIEGESIS vol. 15, no. 1 (2026) contains scholarly articles based on papers presented at ENN8. These contributions have been developed into full-length research articles and subjected to the journal’s regular peer-review procedure. They address central theoretical and methodological questions raised by the conference theme and offer new perspectives on the conceptual, medial, cognitive, and cultural limits of narrative. Together, they demonstrate how a critical examination of narrative’s boundaries can contribute to refining established narratological categories and developing new approaches to narrative phenomena.
The section “ENN8 Conference Proceedings” brings together a selection of papers delivered at the conference. It makes a broader spectrum of the conference presentations accessible to an international readership. The proceedings thus complement the Special Issue by documenting the range of current research on the limits of narrative and providing a basis for further scholarly exchange.
Finally, the “ENN8 Preconference Doctoral Seminar” section includes dissertation abstracts from the ENN8 Preconference Doctoral Seminar, organized by Janine Hauthal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), Julian Hanebeck, and Roy Sommer (both University of Wuppertal, Germany). At ENN8, 21 doctoral students took the opportunity to present and discuss their dissertation projects on the first day of the conference.
Taken together, these contributions reflect the conference’s aim of combining theoretical reflection with international scholarly exchange. They also demonstrate that investigating the limits of narrative does not necessarily mean restricting the field of narratology. On the contrary, a more precise understanding of what narrative can and cannot do may provide the foundation for its further development.
We would like to thank all speakers and participants for their contributions to ENN8 and the stimulating discussions that made the conference such a productive event. We are also grateful to the European Narratology Network, the University of Wuppertal, and the German Research Foundation (DFG), as well as the other institutions and sponsors whose generous support made the conference possible. Finally, we thank the authors and reviewers, the e-publishing team of Wuppertal’s university library, and the editorial team of DIEGESIS for their work in preparing this publication.
