Reconsidering Selfhood in Fragmented Narratives
Description
Literary representations of fragmented or disjointed selves are often understood as reflections of broader social disintegration. The “solitary, asocial” modernist protagonist was, for Lukács, a product of early twentieth-century technological and industrial innovations that transformed each individual into “a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments” (1955), and even Tristram Shandy, whose self-professed discursiveness made it an outlier in the eighteenth century, has been reinterpreted as representing a “devastating loss of faith in wholeness or continuity” endemic to Sterne’s general historical moment (Keymer 1998). Today, scholars tend to associate the current popularity of fragmented fiction with the ubiquitous internet (Nünning & Scherr 2018). At the same time, however, it is largely taken for granted that "there is no essential, original, coherent, autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating” (Smith 1995).
If the self is fragmented all the way down, and if its (illusory?) coherence and integrity are possible only through narrativization, should we think again, and perhaps differently, about the nature of fragmented selves in fiction? Our proposed seminar thus issues the following provocation: could it be that the much-discussed fragmentation of self is not solely a symptom of or reaction to external conditions but, rather, an attempt to make visible an internal process of self-narrativization, or, conversely, a deliberate attempt to resist that process?
To explore this broad question, we invite proposals on any aspect of self-fragmentation without placing any limitations on narrative genre or medium, historical or geographical context, or methodology. Indeed, our discussions and potential future collaborations will depend on bringing together a wide variety of new perspectives. Along the way, we will almost certainly confront kindred questions, including those pertaining to the relationship between narrative form and models of selfhood.
Works Cited
Keymer, Thomas. “Narratives of Loss: The Poems of Ossian and Tristram Shandy.” From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, ed. Stafford & Gaskill, Brill, 1998, 79-96.
Lukács, Georg. “The Ideology of Modernism.” The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. Mander & Mander, Merlin, 1963, 17-46.
Nünning, Ansgar, and Alexander Scherr. “The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age.” Anglia 136.3 (2018): 482-507.
Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (1995): 17-33.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel Aureliano Newman is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Toronto. His book Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman came out in 2019. His essays appear in journals including Style, Twentieth-Century Literature, Partial Answers, Journal of Narrative Theory, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, StoryWorlds and James Joyce Quarterly. He also co-edited Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students.
Speaker Bio
Alexander Sherman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies novels, travel writing, and the history of science in the long eighteenth century, with interests in narrative theory, literary space, and the oceanic humanities. He earned a PhD in English at Stanford University, where he was part of the Core Research Team of the Stanford Literary Lab. His work has appeared in PMLA, Space and Literary Studies (Cambridge UP: 2025), and other venues.
Speaker Bio
Rachel Lebovic is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her research combines methodologies from narratology and life writing studies to examine how conceptions of the self have evolved in response to the increased digitalization of the twenty-first century, with a particular interest in exploring how fragmented fiction using first-person narration can offer new models of the self in a rapidly changing world.
Speaker Bio
Kayla Goldblatt is a PhD candidate in English at the Ohio State University. She studies twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and narrative theory, and her research is particularly invested in theories of character and theories of the novel. She is the current Graduate Assistant for Project Narrative at OSU and is the founder and president of the Project Narrative Graduate Organization.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Virginia Pignagnoli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona in Spain, where she teaches U.S. Literature and Literary Theory. She is the author of Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts (Ohio State University Press, 2023), and her articles have appeared in journals including Narrative, Poetics Today, Neohelicon, the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), and Enthymema.
Speaker Bio
Sun Jai Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Konkuk University, where she teaches English Novels and Poetry. Her research interests include Victorian literature, Cultural studies, Animal studies, Disability studies, Thing Theory, and Children's literature.
Speaker Bio
Alex Story is a film and media scholar completing a PhD in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he teaches courses on writing and film and is interested in how narrative-based signifying practices in contemporary American culture harness generic discourses of horror and its adjacent genres in representing interpersonal trauma and intrafamilial trauma.
Speaker Bio
Kathleen E. Urda is Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on how character works, especially in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel, and her work has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Philological Quarterly, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sonia Scarlat holds a BA in Linguistics and Spanish from the University of Toronto and a MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Salamanca in Spain. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Salamanca, investigating the intersection of metafiction and autofiction in contemporary Spanish and American Literature. Additionally, in 2026 she will be completing a research stay at Queen’s University and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Toronto.
Speaker Bio
Mathuri Sivanesan (she/her) is a second-year English PhD student at Simon Fraser University, and a second-generation settler scholar born and raised on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Grappling with speculative history and life writing, Mathuri’s primary research examines the intersections of testimony, race, and environment in depicted in archives of BIPOC peoples.
Speaker Bio
Charlotte Esme Frank is a PhD student in English at McGill University, working under the supervision of Miranda Hickman. Her research explores experimental narration and circular forms in contemporary female and genderqueer literature. Charlotte is also a research assistant for Assisted Lab and Poetry Matters McGill. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in the humanities from Carleton University, and a Master’s degree in English and creative writing from Concordia University.
Speaker Bio
Lindsay Holmgren is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management and Associate Faculty in the Department of English at McGill University. A past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Director of the Laidley Centre for Business Ethics and Equity, she has published on a range of topics, including literature, film, medicine, economic modelling, and narrative. She teaches ethics and holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her work on time and existential phenomena.