Koppy, Kate

My paper at CBCM18 presented literary analysis of textiles in the Old Norse Völsungasaga and the twentieth-century Mexican novel Como agua para chocolate and argued that narrative textiles were a platform for women’s voices in patriarchal societies. All too often scholars of literature and history 1 have paid little attention to these textiles, treating them as interludes between more critical moments of advancing plot or dismissing them as the product of women’s domestic work. But, the same tools and technologies that are part of ordinary fiber craft can also be tools of narrative transmission. Narrative textiles are sometimes works of art and sometimes everyday objects. Whether they are used regularly, reserved for special, or mounted for viewing, they contribute to the use of narrative to build and maintain community identity. At CBCM 2020, I would like to present the database portion of this project, including the information technology research necessary to create it and some early analytical results. This project marries the traditional forms of humanities scholarship— the conference presentation and the solo-authored article—with the collaborative methodologies of the digital humanities—a public, open-source database—to further analyze textile production as a platform for women’s voices. The work is both interdisciplinary and comparative—textiles in the database range in date from the ancient world to the modern and include both fictional textiles presented in literature and textiles described in the historical record or extant in archives and museums.

Kate Koppy is an Assistant Professor (ntt) of Humanities at the New Economic School (Moscow, RF). Her teaching and research focus on the interactions between narrative and community, with a particular interest in the ways marginalized voices make themselves heard. Her scholarly monograph Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them  shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States.

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