The lecture will explore the concepts of coercive narratives and narrative causality as represented in Terry Pratchett’s novels Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad. A speculative fiction model of a textualised world provides a clear framework for analysing how texts influence the human mind at multiple levels, from spelling and phonetics to narrative clichés. The lecture will demonstrate strategies of resisting propaganda: identification, interruption, and refusal -- as depicted in Pratchett’s works. It will also include a comparative linguocultural and lexicographic analysis of translations of coercive narrative fragments into Slavic languages.
Yevheniia Kanchura is Head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Zhytomyr Polytechnic State University (Ukraine), where she teaches literature and translation studies https://ztu.edu.ua/teacher/189.html.
She is also Deputy Head of the Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her research focuses on postmodern fantasy, comparative literature, and translation studies, with particular attention to the methodology and terminology of fantasy studies and models of secondary worlds. In 2023, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub (Trinity College Dublin) as part of the Pratchett Project.
The event will take place on May 14 at 1:00 PM in the Krėvė Auditorium.