“The narratives of the world are numberless,” Roland Barthes stated in his famous introduction to the structural analysis of narrative in 1966. “Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. ... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.”In the years that have passed since Barthes’ seminal essay, scholars in the humanities and the social sciences have devoted considerable effort to exploring the roles and functions of narrative in human history and behavior. They have done so not only with regard to literature and other epic modes of expression, but also in the areas of psychology, cultural studies, communication studies, cognitive sciences and sociology.In recent times, trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives on narrative studies have drawn increasing interest. The purpose of this conference is to contribute to this ongoing development by welcoming papers which explore and reflect the transdisciplinary aspects of narrative theory and conceptualization.Papers focusing on the following subjects will be of special interest to the conference:    * Comparative surveys of narratological concepts across disciplines.    * Use/misuse of narratological concepts in uncommon narrative environments.    * C onceptualization and analysis of multimodal narratives.    * Conceptual development with interest in unnatural narratives and antinarrative strategies.Keynote speakers (see abstracts below):    * Jan Alber, Freiburg University: “The Unnatural Across the Fiction/Non-Fiction Divide”    * Cynthia M. Grund, University of Southern Denmark: “Narrative and Music”    * Lars-Christer Hydén, Linköping University: “Narrative and Medicine”    * Matti Hyvärinen, Tampere University: “Traveling concepts of Narrative”    * Susan Lanser, Brandeis University: “Toward an Intersectional Narratology: Negative Plotting and Feminist Inquiry“    * Wolf Schmid, Hamburg University: “Selection and concretization of elements in verbal and filmic narration as seen from the perspective of Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist film theory ”