Free Indirect Style Across Languages
Description
Though the foundational work on free indirect style was done in non-English languages, today the critical discussion often centers on Anglophone scholarship. This seminar aims to redress that omission by engaging with critical work on free indirect style from the nineteenth century to the present in languages other than English. Each contributor will submit a critical response to a non-English critical text. If contributors have translated one of these texts, they are welcome to submit a commentary reflecting on the process of translation. The seminar invites work on relatively well-known figures like Charles Bally, Tzvetan Todorov, and Leo Spitzer, as well as engagement with early-twentieth-century critics like Eugen Lerch, Pavel Kozlovsky, Marguerite Lips, and Kazimierz Wóycicki whose contributions have been marginalized or overlooked. We’re especially excited to feature investigations of free indirect style in non-European languages. Following Karen Emmerich’s recent call in PMLA for Anglophone scholars to translate and engage with secondary sources and not just primary texts in other languages, the aim of the seminar is to reconstruct an earlier moment in the history of criticism and linguistics when critics were revising the parameters for identifying free indirect style. Some of these approaches now look misguided, incomplete, or outmoded. But by treating these critical texts as not just historical sources but as present interlocutors, the seminar asks how we might think in new ways about free indirect style today.
This seminar is organized in conjunction with a special issue of Narrative but welcomes all interested scholars.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Colton Valentine is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His first monograph—Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque—studies how late-Victorian queer authors read, wrote, and loved across multiple languages. His writing has recently appeared in Representations, ELH, MLQ, Victorian Studies, and The New Yorker among other venues. His book-length translation, Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose, is forthcoming with MHRA.
Speaker Bio
Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College, and author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (2021) and Reading Together (2025).
Speaker Bio
Spencer Lee-Lenfield is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University whose writing has appeared in journals including PMLA, MLQ, Poetics Today, and the Journal of Korean Studies, and is working on a book about translation and loss between Korean and Korean diasporic writers.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eve Houghton is a Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She is currently writing a monograph on free indirect style in early modern English fiction. Her other projects include an essay collection on the index (co-edited with Dennis Duncan) and a special issue of Narrative on free indirect style in languages other than English (co-edited with Colton Valentine).
Speaker Bio
Miriam is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where she contributes to the work of the research project "The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe." She recently finished her PhD project on the narrative politics of women's friendships in contemporary German and Anglophone Literature. She has published on the topic with Forum of Modern Language Studies and Textual Practice. Previously, Miriam has taught at Oxford, FU Berlin and Shahid Beheshti University Tehran.
Speaker Bio
Olivia Lingyi Xu is a Postdoctoral Associate in the English Department at Yale University. Her current book project examines the formal intersection between translation practice and novel writing in nineteenth-century England and early twentieth-century China. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals of Victorian Studies, Comparative Literature, and ELH.