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Paper short abstract

This paper will explore how late 17th-century French fairy tale writers engaged with a controversial and pressing socio-intellectual question of the time: the degree to which a person’s thoughts could affect the material nature of their bodies, and potentially the nature of the world around them.

Paper long abstract

The idea that a person’s imagination played a key role in determining the quality of their physical health was a concept that dominated western culture from Antiquity until the mid 1600s when Descartes advanced the theory of substance dualism. Dualism maintained that mind and body are not joined in a single entity, but rather are completely, ontologically distinct. Considered radical at first, the idea quickly achieved hegemony to the point that those who refused to subscribe to it risked censorship, imprisonment, and even capital punishment because the idea that a person could affect the material environment through thought alone indirectly threatened the authority of both church and state. If people could manifest sickness or health, and even alter the nature of the world around them in accordance with their thoughts, then what incentive would one have to succumb to the authority of a priest or a king, let alone God? While late seventeenth-century novels and plays responded to dualism by featuring characters who either lack imagination or whose imaginations lead them to appear ridiculous, fairy tale writers took a different tact, exploring complex philosophical questions about the imagination’s tangible effects and the degree to which the imagination could (and should) remain under an individual’s control. This paper will explore how the fairy tales that the countess de Murat penned toward the end of her life reprise Renaissance humanist beliefs about the power of the imagination and experiment with what society might look like if holistic attitudes were the norm.

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Paper short abstract

This paper brings together disability studies and ecocriticism to illuminate how Sébastien Laudenbach’s 2016 filmic adaptation of the Grimms’ “Maiden without Hands” engages us to think about disability and the environment in ways that empower the heroine.

Paper long abstract

In 2016 the animator Sébastien Laudenbach produced an exquisite film adaptation of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ “The Maiden withouth Hands,” in which a father is tricked by the devil into having to amputate his daughter’s hands. Laudenbach’s animation style complements his depiction of the handless maiden who is always already complete and empowered, and whose prosthetic hands—gifted to her at a princely court—only impede her ability to survive in nature. In a Télérama interview, Laudenbach discussed his desire to empower his heroine, able to “cultiver son propre jardin” or “cultivate her own garden,” quoting from Voltaire. “Garden” takes on both literal (she cultivates the garden to sustain herself and her child) and figurative meaning in the film. For Helena Federer, Voltaire’s expression has been understood as “a positive call for community action despite uncertainty or evil” (31-32). This paper will explore the implications of Laudenbach’s representations of nature and cultivating one’s garden in the film as it relates to the ways in which the disabled heroine is able to negotiate between, in Matthew Cella’s words, “a ‘habitable body’ and ‘habitable world’” (575). It brings together disability studies and ecocriticism to illuminate the ways in which Laudenbach’s film engages audiences to rethink disability and the environment.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how South Asian folk narratives—originating in oral traditions such as Panchatantra, tribal folktales, and regional epics—are reimagined in contemporary media including comics, television serials, and animation.

Paper long abstract

South Asian folklore constitutes one of the richest narrative reservoirs in the world, spanning classical compendia like the Panchatantra and Jataka Tales, regional oral epics such as the Alha and Pandavani, and countless tribal and village folktales. These traditions have historically traveled across linguistic, literary, and performative registers, demonstrating a long-standing fluidity between oral and written modes. In recent decades, however, their circulation has expanded into new domains of print and digital media, raising important questions about continuity, transformation, and commodification.

This paper examines how Indian and South Asian folk narratives migrate across media, focusing on three axes: (1) their textualization in print forms such as colonial folklore collections and post-independence children’s literature; (2) their visual retelling in comics like Amar Chitra Katha and televised epics on Doordarshan, which popularized mythological and folkloric motifs for mass audiences; and (3) their reanimation in digital platforms through animation series, YouTube retellings, and mobile storytelling apps. By analyzing representative examples across these media, the paper highlights how narrative motifs—talking animals, divine interventions, heroic battles—are reshaped for new audiences and cultural economies.

Ultimately, the paper situates South Asian folk narratives within global conversations on folklore and media, showing how Indian traditions illuminate the intersections of storytelling, technology, and cultural identity under the FNLM umbrella.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the entanglement of narrative and nature through the lens of sensory ecology, focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s "The Mines of Falun" and its illustrated adaptation by artist Natalie Frank, whose synesthetically-informed paintings destabilize a whole host of binary distinctions.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the entanglement of narrative and nature through the lens of sensory ecology, focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s "The Mines of Falun" (translated by Jack Zipes) and its 2023 illustrated adaptation by artist Natalie Frank. Hoffmann’s tale stages a descent into the mineral depths of the earth, where the boundaries between the natural and supernatural, the living and the dead, dissolve. The mine becomes a narrative space shaped by elemental forces—earth, water, and time—where identity is reconfigured through contact with the non-human world.

Informed by her experience of "extreme synesthesia," which ties "together numbers, letters, colors, opera and dance with painting, as well as narrative in literature," Natalie Frank's illustrations reimagine this descent as a multisensory encounter. Her visual language—marked by vibrant color, texture, and emotional intensity—translates Hoffmann’s narrative into a sensorial ecology, where perception itself becomes a mode of storytelling. This paper argues that Frank’s synesthetic imagery destabilizes binary distinctions between nature and culture, human and non-human, surface and depth. In doing so, it offers a visual narrative that examines non-binary nature-cultural assemblages and the ways in which narrative is shaped by, and shapes, the living world.

By reading Hoffmann’s tale alongside Frank’s illustrations, this paper proposes that "The Mines of Falun" becomes not just a story about nature, but a story told through nature—through its textures, rhythms, and sensory intensities. It invites us to consider how narrative might function as a commons of perception, where ecological and aesthetic experiences converge.