The Labor of Narrating
Description
How is the labor of narrating and interpreting the social world distributed in narrative? Who gets to narrate and interpret the world in which events unfold, and who serves instead as a provider of details, without getting a saying on how and why stuff happens? Centering the position of the narrator and the question of narrative authority, this seminar considers the framework of the division of labor in narrative. Rather than focusing on labor as it pertains to the content of literary representation, we invite participants to discuss how a concern with the division of narratorial labor can reinvigorate the stakes of formal analysis in both fictional and non-fictional works.
Whether upheld as a means to enhance productivity or denounced as a driver of socioeconomic inequality, the notion of division of labor has seen a resurgence in social sciences research, but has rarely been considered in relation to narrative form. In narrative, the question of the division of labor is entangled with the distribution of narrative authority, with the tension between the particular and the general, the type and the detail, and with the blurred lines between the diegetic, the descriptive, and the interpretive. These are all problems that require revisiting if we still believe that narrative worlds—imaginary and non-fictional—can serve as useful scenarios and training grounds for the worlds we inhabit.
Narrative has long been studied formally through narratological concepts such as narrative mood, voice, and focalization. This seminar seeks to center the question of labor in such formal categories, and to generate new concepts that may arise through an engagement with the following questions: When and how do literary narrators and characters step out of their immediate world to analyze, interpret, and generalize, translating individual vicissitudes into plural ones? When and how do they leave this work to the reader? Meanwhile, rationalizing one’s actions is not just a privilege but can also be a burden—it is a form of epistemic labor that may fall on the shoulders of the oppressed and is often shaped by narratives that are beyond individual control. In such instances, how is the burden of interpretation unequally distributed among narrators both willing and unwilling? Ultimately, what kinds of expertise does narration demand or generate, be it from fictional characters mired in an everyday life of manual labor or from writers of non-fiction who narrate life and work in precarious economies?
We welcome submissions that consider narration alongside a variety of related topics including but not limited to:
- Division of labor in non-fictional and ethnographic narratives
- Narrators who deliberately refuse the labor of interpreting and generalizing
- The labor of revealing and effacing the self
- Self-explanation as privilege and burden under uneven power relations
- The labor of narrating and the realist-modernist divide
- Reproductive labor as narrative form
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Niloofar Sarlati is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her current manuscript examines acts of giving and taking, their contested
names and translations in English-Persian encounters shaped by (semi)colonialism and capitalism. Her
writing has appeared in Symplokē, Philological Encounters, Comparative Literature, Victorian
Literature and Culture, and the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature.
Speaker Bio
Kang Kang is a cultural worker and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. She is writing a dissertation on revolutionary pessimism in 20th-century Sinophone ethnic and indigenous literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Lizhen Zhao is a doctoral candidate at University of Massachusetts - Amherst. In her research, she critically examines the social, cultural, and environmental implications of digital technology and platform capitalism. Specifically, she focuses on three interconnected aspects: platformized cultural productions on the margins, materiality and spatiality of platform capitalism, and tech-driven capitalist environmental governance.
Speaker Bio
Ling Kang is an associate professor of modern Chinese literature at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He received his PhD in Chinese and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include modern Chinese literary history, leftist cultural movement, and sound studies. His recent publication includes Audible Leftism: Poetry Recitation and the Body Techniques of Revolutionary Literature and Arts (2020).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Aditi Saraswat is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on 20th-century South Asian women's literary culture, with particular attention to Hindi language readership and writing practices in magazine archives from the 1950s-1990s.
Speaker Bio
Yanqing Shen is a third-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University. She earned her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and her MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on comparative Chinese and Japanese literature from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
Speaker Bio
Mandana Naviafar is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University. She holds a BA in English Literature with a minor in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Houston and an MA in Theoretical Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on global and Iranian modernisms, Iranian cinema, and the technologies of memory and writing at the intersections of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and media theory.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Adele Kudish is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Borough of Manhattan Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, The European Roman d'Analyse: Unconsummated Love Stories from Bocaccio to Stendhal, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic. She is currently working on a book about women and money in early 20th century fiction, but is still fascinated by the trope of indescribability that served as a central focus of her previous scholarship.
Speaker Bio
Stanka Radović is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her monograph Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined colonial spatial hierarchy in the writings of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Beryl Gilroy, and Raphaël Confiant. Stanka's current book project, Hostile Houses, investigates (dis)possession in the 20th century Gothic fiction.
Speaker Bio
Toral Jatin Gajarawala is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.