Though the foundational work on free indirect style was done in non-English languages, today the critical discussion often centers on Anglophone scholarship. This seminar aims to redress that omission by engaging with critical work on free indirect style from the nineteenth century to the present in languages other than English. Each contributor will submit a critical response to a non-English critical text. If contributors have translated one of these texts, they are welcome to submit a commentary reflecting on the process of translation. The seminar invites work on relatively well-known figures like Charles Bally, Tzvetan Todorov, and Leo Spitzer, as well as engagement with early-twentieth-century critics like Eugen Lerch, Pavel Kozlovsky, Marguerite Lips, and Kazimierz Wóycicki whose contributions have been marginalized or overlooked. We’re especially excited to feature investigations of free indirect style in non-European languages. Following Karen Emmerich’s recent call in PMLA for Anglophone scholars to translate and engage with secondary sources and not just primary texts in other languages, the aim of the seminar is to reconstruct an earlier moment in the history of criticism and linguistics when critics were revising the parameters for identifying free indirect style. Some of these approaches now look misguided, incomplete, or outmoded. But by treating these critical texts as not just historical sources but as present interlocutors, the seminar asks how we might think in new ways about free indirect style today.

This seminar is organized in conjunction with a special issue of Narrative but welcomes all interested scholars.