Uses and Abuses of History in Literary Narratives
Description
To bend a phrase by Fredric Jameson, narrative is a historically symbolic act. Literary scholars and historians have long argued that not only are texts implicated in the time, place, political events, and economic forces in which they get produced, but they also produce their own ideas of and uses for history. Indeed, for Marxist, psychoanalytical, and deconstructive critics (among others), a text’s historical contingency needs to be rigorously elaborated to determine how it works across varied sites (from social to political) and contexts (from academic to public). Moreover, to differing degrees, they all also agree that it is only by understanding the historical undercurrents of a narrative that we might gauge if it intervenes and/or interrupts in subjective or collective life. Precisely for this reason perhaps, contemporary academic and public criticism persistently holds onto the “judgement” of history (Scott, 2020) to either repudiate the falsity of narratives as colonial, racist, nationalist, or patriarchal; or champion them for being attentive to the "small voice of history", subaltern perspectives, or pluralist and intersectional experiences.
This panel is interested in (tentatively) suspending such outright judgement by returning to viewing historical narratives as what Hayden White has called “verbal fictions”. It is also interested in suspending the theoretical knot predominant in well-rehearsed debates on the relationship between history and literature by inviting reflections on how history itself becomes a narrative object. Some of the questions we ask are: How do writers construct history within literary texts? What kind of tropes do they deploy when representing narratives of the past? What pressures do the conditions of postcoloniality put on the writing of history? How do those pressures manifest at the level of narrative form and aesthetics? What are some narrative objects through which history is mediated in a text (such as museums, monuments, archaeological ruins, ghosts, maps, radios, or photographs)?
We are open to submissions that consider “literature” broadly, working with textual, aural, performative, digital, and visual narratives; as well as exploring how various adjacent disciplines, such as psychoanalysis and media studies, can help explore the literary uses of history. Proposals can be related but not limited to the following topics:
- Literary History and History in Literature
- Fictional/Speculative History
- Historical memory and its fictional representations
- Literary genres of historical storytelling (epic, katha, itihasa, dastan, bildungsroman etc)
- The use of historical objects in different settings: the archive, the museum, the clinic; the anti-colonial/liberatory revolution or movement; the university or classroom etc
- Instrumentalizing history for both fascist or liberatory politics
- Tools and tropes in visualizing history: from literature to video games to novel image generation software
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng is a doctoral student in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, studying early 20th century South African literature and history. He has published fiction and literary journalism at various publications. Motsoeneng writes stories about Johannesburg, where he was born and raised.
Speaker Bio
Genevieve Amaral is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sheridan College, near Toronto, Ontario. Holding a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University, Genevieve previously taught at Temple University, where she was also Associate Director of the Intellectual Heritage Program. Her current book project is tentatively titled, Act Six: Aristocracy and History in Interwar French Literature, Film, and Thought.
Speaker Bio
Nisarg Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Literature program at USC. He is currently working on a Dissertation Project titled “Enframed: Visual Culture(s) and the Changing Perceptions of History in India (1860-1960)” under the supervision of Prof. Neetu Khanna. His project examines 19th-century colonial stereographs, 20th-century Indian cinema, and post-colonial vernacular literature, in order to construct a ‘history of perception’ by tracing the shifts in ‘perception of history’.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ronjaunee Chatterjee is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University. She is the author of Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford University Press, 2022), and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2024). Her work has been published in PMLA, differences, Mediations, Victorian Studies, French Studies, and other venues.
Speaker Bio
Andrew P. Clark is a PhD candidate in the department of French & Francophone Studies at Brown University. His research concerns nineteenth and twentieth-century prose and poetry, literary theory, and political subjectivity. This year he is a graduate fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
Speaker Bio
Cullen Goldblatt teaches comparative literature at Binghamton University (SUNY). His first monograph, Beyond Collective Memory, was brought out by Routledge. He was awarded an NEH fellowship to translate an early work of Francophone African literature, Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté. He is currently thinking about homelands; queer queenliness in South Africa; multilingualism in translation; and the historical formation of African literary canons.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ella Jando-Saul is a second year PhD student in English. Her research explores the development of English cultural identity in the Middle Ages and its expression across literary and historical genres of writing. She is also beginning to experiment with scholarly podcasting.
Speaker Bio
Ishanika Sharma is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. Her areas of research and teaching interests include South Asian literatures, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and the environmental humanities. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as ARIEL, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, Research in African Literatures, and South Asian Review.
Speaker Bio
Shiv Datt Sharma is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Situated at the intersections of queer feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and film and media studies, his dissertation is a sustained inquiry on films by the Indian filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in relation to questions of form, historical memory, sexuality, and communal violence. Shiv is a past recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and has a MA in Historical Studies (New School, NY).