The Seminars
Antisocial Nasser Mufti and Lily Saint with Audrey Jaffe, Rivky Mondal, Zach Samalin
The novel has always been understood to be a representational form that is first and foremost social. One salient instance is the novel’s ability to create the formal possibilities for the “horizontal comradeship” of political communities like the nation. Another is the novel’s tendency to naturalize kinship through the marriage plot. More recently, some have argued for the novel’s “world building” and “world making” potential (often in a heroic key). But in what ways might the novel be antisocial? What approaches to the novel might illuminate its antisociality, and could such isolationism offer a space for a critique of the social? What does one make of the fact that reading a novel is generally a solitary act? What does one make of antisocial characters? Or of the frequently antisocial authors who invent them? If a novel can help imagine community, might it also help imagine isolation, exile, and solitude? What insight might novels offer that don’t yield to the stifling pressure of community, especially now that so many “social” communities are expressly dependent on our virtual imaginaries? Can the antisocial novel offer alternative approaches to anthropocene living? Might it even be able to imagine an ethics of the inhospitable? And how does antisociality modulate in the novel, with the very social categories of race, class, and gender? These are all both formal and historical questions. For antisociality is integral to the history of the novel. After all, the first modern novel is about a man who thinks he is stranded on an island.
Co-Intelligence Richard Jean So and Aarthi Vadde with Nina Begus, Elizabeth Callaway, Jonathan Cheng, Dennis Tenen, Melanie Walsh
The writing of fiction represents one possible, if particularly controversial, application of new generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT. Novelists such as Sheila Heti, Ken Liu, Robin Sloan, and Vauhini Vara are among the more notable writers who have used large language models (LLMs) and commented upon their role in the creative process. Their interactions with LLMs are increasingly being understood – in scientific and business circles – as a type of co-intelligence: the use of machines to augment or enhance a set of capacities typically identified as exclusively human, like literary creativity. This seminar brings together scholars of the novel and researchers in “cultural AI” to theorize and discuss the consequences of co-intelligence for contemporary fiction and creative writing. Does co-intelligence give us new purchase on critical concepts essential to the study of the novel, such as originality, authorial intention, andindividuality? Is co-intelligence a form of skilling or deskilling for the literary arts and how might it shape new styles, forms, and publishing environments for the novel? The seminar welcomes critical, ethical, historicist, and affordance-based perspectives on co-intelligence to complicate simplistic and polarized takes on the rise of AI.
Decolonization María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and Yogita Goyal, with Asha Nadkarni, Renee Hudson, Jarvis McInnis, Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro and Anna Thomas
As the genocidal war in Gaza makes clear, we are not yet beyond colonialism, though a majority of formally colonized places are now postcolonial nations. Indeed, Israel’s military and its U.S. and European backers would like the world to forget that Palestine remains occupied by a settler state, and that defense of Palestine is, however deplorable the means, an anti-colonial struggle. At the same time, calls to “decolonize this place” proliferate in universities (implying everything from divestment in fossil fuels, debt relief, and alternative knowledges systems), Black Lives Matter movement (implying the defunding of police and the end of racial profiling), and North American Indigenous social movements (implying respect for Indigenous sovereignty over First Nation territories and the return of stolen land). These scenarios—Palestine, university class rooms, anti-racist movements, blocking of oil pipelines—are incommensurate, yet calls to decolonize all the places abound. In this seminar, we invite participants to contemplate the various genealogies of decolonization, and to think seriously about the legacy of this term, made popular during the anticolonial movements of the post-WWII era. What do we mean when we use the term today? How might we forge productive dialogue across several geopolitical sites, mindful of convergence and difference?
The starring role assumed by the novel has long been recognized in postcolonial analysis. From Edward Said’s insistence on the inextricable relation between the novel and colonialism, to George Lamming’s insistence on the discovery of the novel by the West Indian writer as a momentous event comparable to the history of slavery and indenture, decolonization and the novel must be thought of together. Today, as the call to decolonize assumes various guises, we invite thoughtful reflections on the history, politics, and aesthetics of novels that take up colonial violence and forms of resistance.
Heteroglossia Tim Bewes and Merve Emre with Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Marta Figlerowicz, Chloë Kitzinger, Maya Kronfeld, Kent Puckett, Curtis Browne
The fundamental formal condition of the novel, says Mikhail Bakhtin, is “the speaking person and his [or her] discourse.” This claim is the basis of the novelistic relation to language that Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia,” meaning that the language of the novel is always the language of someone else. This seminar revisits Bakhtin’s concept in the light of current concerns and preoccupations in novel studies. How sustainable is the idea of a distinctly “novelistic” use or conception of language? What does this idea mean for the novel’s relation to ideology and the role of the critic? Isn’t heteroglossia, as the withdrawal of the novel from ideological certainty, implicated in the proliferation of perspectives that characterizes today’s political landscape? Does Bakhtin’s work hold up in the face of calls from all sides for a return to realism? In an era of existential precarity, including the new temporal horizon posed by climate change, how should literary studies approach the perpetual deferral of finality that Bakhtin attributes to the novel?
Labor Janice Ho and Nicole Rizzuto with Andy Hines, Benjamin Kohlmann, Kaneesha Parsard, Sonali Perera, Anna Zalakosta
Ian Watt famously associated the emergence of the English realist novel with the rise of the middle classes. This seminar considers how crises in labor during colonial and neocolonial modernity reshape our understanding of the novel as a form broadly conceived to center on, and enshrine, the inner life of the bourgeois individual. By focusing our discussion on labor and novelistic form, we question the institutionalization of novel studies as a humanistic discipline undergirded by a stable and sustainable profession. We ask how the labor casualization created by accelerating fossil capitalism, globalization and free trade, and the corporatization of the university and institutions of publishing shape novelistic procedures, on the one hand, and approaches to reading the novel, on the other. How do the gendering and racializing of care work, education, and social and biological reproduction manifest in formal terms in novels from the Global South and Global North? How might working-class and anti-colonial initiatives bend realist, naturalist, modernist, and contemporary aesthetic practices and principles? How might transnational genealogies of proletarian, socialist, and subaltern writing alter our understanding of the histories and forms of the novel?
Multispecies Sophie Esch and Amit Baishya with Bishnupriya Ghosh, Apala Bhowmick, Azucena Castro, Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim
What novel languages are needed for animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms and their interactions to be audible, visible, and tangible in literature? This seminar is interested in the presence and representation of multispecies entanglements and a variety of nonhuman beings in novels. Multispecies entanglements can offer alternative or utopian versions of living together symbiotically, an aspect that has become a central focus in representations of the Anthropocene. But multispecies interactions can also be conflict-ridden and violent, as different needs and forms of being collide. In this seminar, we consider how the novel has represented the ambivalence of multispecies entanglement as material-semiotic events. This seminar discusses multispecies representations from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Nostalgia Kata Gellen and Saskia Ziolkowski with Natasha Gordinsky, Barbara Halla, Julia Hori, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Stiliana Milkova Rousseva, Allison Schachter
In recent years, nostalgia has garnered increasing prevalence as a critical concept. Badia Ahad-Legardy, Svetlana Boym, Mark Fisher, Peter Fritzsche, and John J. Su have reevaluated the role of nostalgia as a modern feeling in connection with temporality, memory, history, futurity, utopia, and critique, and others have explored its place in the discourses of (post)imperialism, (post)colonialism, and (post)humanism. This seminar explores these concepts in concert with questions about the novel, in a range of linguistic and national traditions. Nostalgia, which Boym calls a “historical feeling,” draws attention to the novel’s flexibility in representing, layering, and contrasting different time periods to offer political challenges, despite the sentimentality often associated with the term. Nostalgia, then, is not necessarily a regressive retreat into the past or a lost world, but a crucial engine of critique.
Novella Jed Esty and Kate Marshall with Jennifer Fleissner, Morgan Day Frank, Zoë Henry, Avni Sejpal
Is the novella part of novel history and novel theory? Does it provide an alternative history — perhaps even a counter-history — of modern fiction? How stable and distinct is the novella in terms of its size/scale, generic variants, social referents, and narrative logic? Is it analogous to other aesthetic forms in the way it manages readerly attention? Is the contemporary novella rooted in a specific (nineteenth-century) lineage?
This seminar will open a discussion of those questions with an eye toward the fact that several recent critics have cited the novella as a newly significant object. The novella is a site of converging interest for writers, scholars, and students alike. We aim to consider it from several angles, using a range of tools, topics, and theories. Whether understood as an offshoot of novel studies or as an adjacent and autonomous form, the novella promises to be a lively keyword for analysis and discussion.
Setting Liz Miller and Benjamin Morgan with Michaela Bronstein, Yeonwoo Koo, John MacNeill Miller, Rafael Walker, Dora Zhang.
Setting names the time and place of the narrative, as well as the way the two work together as in Bakhtin’s discussion of the chronotope. This seminar brings together new scholarship that considers setting from ecocritical, postcolonial, feminist, and narrative perspectives. In recent years ecocritics have drawn attention to the way that the foregrounding and backgrounding of setting in the novel are also a means of establishing the value of the natural world. As environmental philosopher Val Plumwood argues in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, at least since the Enlightenment it has been “standard in the west” to understand nature “as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against with the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture … take place.” Nature as “background” bears a connection, Plumwood suggests, to the backgrounding of women and colonial subjects in the western tradition. At the same time, literary critics have long understood that setting often serves an active rather than passive role in shaping the direction of the narrative, as the term “atmosphere” conveys and as is especially apparent in the Gothic, speculative, and non-realist novel traditions. Historically, the novelists who have become most notable for their settings, such as Joseph Conrad or E.M. Forster, have been those who set their novels in colonial spaces, suggesting the central role of setting in drawing the map of world literature as it emerged under capitalist and imperialist discourse networks. Our central goal in this seminar is to unpack the work that setting does as an ideological, environmental, and narrative capacity. Setting relies on literary description, as Dora Zhang has recently emphasized, and while “at least since the rise of realism in the nineteenth century, description has been an indispensable means of world making,” its “ideological power derives precisely from masking this fact.”
Translation Sangeeta Ray and Tze-Yin Teo with Akshya Saxena, Laura Brueck, Harris Feinsod, Farah Bakaari, Samah Selim, Yoon Jeong Oh
Trans-: across; latio, to carry or bring. Translation thus is to hold and to move, even as its work in the world is often tied to dispossession and unfreedom and can represent a violent vehicle of modernity and the colonizing West. The International Booker Prize’s recognition of translated works into English obviously straddles both. Panelists working on a range of linguistic contexts explore related tensions surrounding translation as aesthetic, conceptual, and peripatetic labor and are invited to consider if it may be thought otherwise. Some questions include: Might resurgent interest in translation offer compelling ways of thinking about literary experimentalism, critique, and their formal-political possibilities? How might translation enable us to probe the fiction of a unified national language—and why might we choose to do so as literary scholars? How does recent work in translation and comparative literature open up critical questions for the study of the novel today?
Verb Penny Fielding and Paul Saint Amour with Yoon Sun Lee, Jeehyun Choi, Jonathan Dick, Anastasia Eccles.
This seminar addresses the structure of language as a model to understand how narrative works. Although this approach was used as a reason to dismiss structuralism, we now ask if we can revisit narratological approaches to find ways to model a broader phenomenology of narrative by thinking about verbs and what we do with them/what they do with us? Verb as more/other than a grammatical category, verb as what holds or indicates our relation to time, agency, personhood, impersonality, possibility, finitude. Verbs are what declare, perform, command, indicate the position of the subject and the other. We open out the term “verb” to include all the categories that organize verbs in time and space: tense, mood, voice, and aspect, and we think about how to use these terms to explore narrative events, durations, and points of view. We ask if grammatical organization can be mapped onto historical temporality as well as on narrative time. We particularly welcome discussion of language models besides English, particularly those whose verbs work differently (for example, those that don’t conjugate, operate according to different categories than mood, voice, and aspect, or lean more heavily on particular categories).
Vicky Fem Charlotte Sussman with Amanda Anderson, Ann Cvetkovich, Rachel Gevlin, Stephanie Hershinow, Lisa Moore, Adela Pinch
This seminar about the ongoing work of feminist knowledge production takes its name and inspiration from a graduate student reading group on Victorian feminism formed at Cornell in the late 1980s. The group was dedicated to reading feminist criticism and work by women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—texts that were almost entirely absent from our official coursework. Both the content and the methodology—feminist, peer-oriented—of “Vicky Fem” have had a profound effect on our intellectual lives. This seminar brings the questions that motivated that group into the present. How do we understand these materials now? What are the afterlives of Victorian feminisms? Can we trace the roots of current approaches to the novel and to feminist criticism back to the nineteenth century and beyond? What histories of feminist knowledge production remain to be written? What was the role of peer-education in the past, and what is it now? How can we understand the reading group as a methodology?
