Rethinking Literature’s Persons
Description
Character, person, speaker, voice: these English-language terms are at once ubiquitous elements of literary criticism and disputed ones. On the one hand, they have never seemed formal enough: caring about character has long been the sign of the sentimental reader; poetic speakers threaten to usurp, or to dissolve back into, the linguistic codes that summon them. On the other hand, such terms have never felt sufficiently historical: when we call Gilgamesh, Layla and Majnun, Hamlet, Anna Karenina, and Superman “characters,” are we really talking about the same thing at all? How responsive, or not, are literature’s anthropomorphic affordances to differing regimes of social identity? This seminar invites presentations on the formal, historical, or generic dimensions of literary persons or person-effects (including characters, narrators, lyric speakers, personifications, types, and other figures). We seek participants who will bring particular texts (or authors, or traditions) to bear on a shared comparative conversation. How might we teach one another to rethink literature’s persons?
A surge of recent scholarship suggests that these questions have gained fresh urgency. In an age of autofiction, the relation of literature to person may itself be changing: “I’m not interested in character,” Rachel Cusk said in 2018, “because I don’t think character exists anymore.” This seminar asks whether it ever did. Recent reevaluations spring as well from the still-unfolding aftermaths of New Criticism and poststructuralism. As those formalisms have aged, the interpretive habits they once instilled have grown strange. In their wake, some have celebrated the cognitive and affective realities of literary characters; others remain fascinated with the disfiguration, reification, and figural drift that a literary person can occasion. Comparative approaches, with their provincialization of received critical idioms, have further catalyzed scholarly interest. Scholars are renovating our common theoretical edifice in light of the heterogeneity of literature’s populace across time and space.
We invite proposals that link case study to concept, or otherwise suggest how a specific interpretation may yield methodological, theoretical, or historiographic transformation (“rethinking”). Organized by a medievalist and an early modernist, the seminar aspires to dialogue across subfields and language traditions and across the modern/nonmodern divide. We welcome papers on poetry and narrative alike, on topics including—how grammatical forms or literary tropes imply models of the person; literature’s relation to historically shifting socio-political regimes of personhood; what voice has to do with literary persons; the porous boundaries of the person, via the poetics of impersonality; extension of mind, feeling, and will beyond the individual or the human; and the responses, including but beyond identification, that literary persons elicit from readers.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Julie Orlemanski teaches and writes about texts from the Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she is a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, drafting a book manuscript entitled Making Literary Persons: A Poetics of Voice in Chaucer. Other research interests include fictionality, periodization, and the reception of the Song of Songs.
Speaker Bio
Elisha Cohn is Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel (Stanford, 2025) and Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of George Eliot (2025).
Speaker Bio
I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at Brown University. My dissertation project, tentatively titled “The Sensible Visible: Grammars of Belief in Colonial Modernity,” examines how the authority of Western Christianity and secular scientific knowledge exerts duress on traditional sensibilities within colonial Indian and African contexts. I am currently also working as an Assistant Editor for Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
Speaker Bio
I am an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where I also serve as the Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Critical Inquiry, and as Director of Studies at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. I am the author of the book Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings (Penn) as well as essays in ELH and Critical Inquiry.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Fatima Burney is an assistant professor in the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced. She has published articles in the Journal of World Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, Philological Encounters, and Comparative Literature Studies. She was the co-editor of a special issue in Comparative Critical Studies that interrogates debates in lyric theory through European translations, imitations, and criticisms of Asian poetry.
Speaker Bio
Omri Moses is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, where he teaches courses on literary and visual modernism as well as the scientific humanities. He is the author of Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford UP, 2014) and is working on a new book project, The Open Mind, which examines theories of extended cognition to understand better how we read fiction and poetry, while also turning to literature to test these new neurobiological theories.
Speaker Bio
Herschel Farbman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Interim Director of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature (Fordham University Press, 2008; paperback 2012), along with articles on topics in comparative modernist studies, film and media studies, and critical theory.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Christina Fogarasi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen (Dept of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and the Centre for Culture and the Mind), where she works on trauma studies, disability studies, and contemporary Anglo-American fiction. Her scholarship has been published in New Literary History, MELUS, Studies in American Fiction, and Modern Language Studies as well as venues such as LARB and Public Books.
Speaker Bio
Nathan Likert is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. He is currently working on a monograph about the influence of the Theophrastan character type in early modern English literature.
Speaker Bio
Ryan Hintzman is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research focuses on Japanese poetry between 900 and 1500 and on comparative poetics. He completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale in 2025.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Samuel Fallon is an associate professor of English at SUNY Geneseo. His first book, Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England, was published by Penn Press in 2019.
Speaker Bio
Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor at Yale University in the Divinity School. She was educated at the University of Chicago, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and UCLA, and is currently an Alexander von Humboldt fellow the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (Routledge, 2019) and Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026).
Speaker Bio
Katie Ebner-Landy is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Utrecht University, and a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows. She is the author of The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types Harvard University Press, 2025. Her academic writing has appeared in journals including Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Renaissance Studies and Iride: Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate, and her public writing in The Guardian, Le Monde, and The New Yorker.