Literary Ethnography
Description
“Literary Ethnography” is an invitation to scholars who otherwise travel in a garden of forking paths—comparative literature and linguistic anthropology—to gather and probe how questions of literary method can be reinvigorated by ethnographic analysis and vice versa. This seminar’s exploration of interdisciplinary reciprocity begins with an observation of genealogical affinity. Roman Jakobson, whose work on the poetic function has been influential in literary studies, was also the teacher of the important linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, who develops the concept of “metricalization” to study the poetics of turn-taking and role-alignment in social interactions. Linguistic anthropologists focus on the social indexicality rather than the referential function of language use: the socio-cultural frameworks shared among participants in an interaction to negotiate their social intelligibility to each other (e.g. accent as an index of class distinction).
Literary scholars such as Michael Lucey and Tom McEnaney have in turn drawn on Silverstein’s work to develop a sociologically robust way of close reading literature as language-in-use. Their concept of “literary fieldwork” attends to the social indexicality of literary artefacts that transforms them into rich archives from which distinct perspectives on the social world, born out of interactive processes of texts encountering various publics across time and space, can be reconstructed.
One path this seminar will take is to build a critical lexicon across both disciplines: how does Asif Agha’s account of registers as social types resonate with or diverge from Lukacs’s notion of type as deployed in realist fiction? How does the ethnographic concept of “tropic figuration” to parse the semiotic sedimentation of social phenomena suggest the renewed affordances of literary hermeneutics for the metapragmatic analysis of ethnographic data?
Another path this seminar will pursue is to track how the methods of both disciplines translate across this interdisciplinary encounter. How do literary scholars who employ ethnographic methods such as interviews and participant observation to study world literature through site-specific and vernacular reading practices understand the distinct yet connected poetics of literary and ethnographic figuration? What might linguistic anthropologists, who analyze transcripts of recorded conversations, gain from an approach that treats dramatic literature as “transcripts” that encode social scripts of language use in literary form, the ethnographic richness of which is reactivated when artists translate theatrical scripts into embodied performances?
This seminar will explore the roads not taken as well as revisit well-trodden paths of inquiry to discover new itineraries of cross-disciplinary collaboration. We warmly encourage submissions from both literary scholars and linguistic anthropologists working across different linguistic traditions and historical periods.
Schedule
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Josh Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His current book project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinction in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore, examines the discursive and aesthetic afterlives of totalizing colonial models that shape everyday life in the Southeast Asian island city-state and across the modern world. His work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Signs & Society, Society & Space, Visual Anthropology Review, and others.
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Cheng-Chai Chiang is a PhD candidate in English and critical theory at UC Berkeley writing a dissertation titled The Theatre and its Dubber: Queer Translation in the Anglo-Chinese Diaspora.
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Laura Kunreuther is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her research centers on sound, voice, translation/interpretation, human rights, media, and affect. Her first book, Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu, traces the relation between public speech and personal interiority during a democratizing moment in Nepal. Currently, she is completing a project about the labor of interpreters, and the ideologies of voice they support, in humanitarian fields.
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Jennifer Silver is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her doctoral research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, John L. Simpson ABD Research Fellowship in International & Area Studies, Magistretti Fellowship, and FLAS Fellowship. She holds master's degrees from the National University of Singapore and the University of Oxford, completed under Princeton University’s Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship.
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Xinyu Guan is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on state-constructed housing and everyday understandings of citizenship in Singapore. Xinyu holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University, with minor fields in Southeast Asian Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
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Elisa Taber is a writer, literary translator, and anthropology PhD candidate at McGill University. She wrote An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country (11:11 Press), and translated Horacio Quiroga’s Beyond (Sublunary Editions) and Miguelángel Meza’s Dream Pattering Soles (Ugly Duckling Presse). Elisa is also Co-Editor of SLUG and Editor at Large at Seven Stories Press.
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Acacia Chan is a Comparative Literature Ph.D. Candidate at The University of Texas at Austin, writing her dissertation Not “Just a Juicy Story”: Fostering Affinity between Christian Apocrypha and Fanfiction Studies. Chan holds degrees in Religious Studies and has been a fanfiction practitioner (reader and writer) for over a decade. She also teaches a Rhetoric of Fandom class for undergraduate students.
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Jennifer Yida Pan’s research and teaching center around nineteenth- and twentieth-century anglophone literature, science and technology studies, and literary theory. She has additional interests in translation theory, design theory, and digital humanities. She is currently at work on her first manuscript, Implicit Sacrifice, in which she explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels formed critical sites for theorizing responsibility in technological design.
Speaker Bio
Shirl Yang is a literary theorist interested in how economic systems, often described by experts and laypeople alike as being governed by laws of inhuman rationality, feel to the people in them. She has taught courses on representations of financial crisis in popular culture, labor and gender, and comedy. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU.