In an interview with The New Yorker, Rachel Cusk predicted: “I don’t think characters exist anymore”. Cusk’s jarring prognosis illuminates a range of recent innovations in the form of the novel: Annie Ernaux’s scalpel-like possibilities of introspection in autofiction or Ocean Vuong's metaphorically dense lyricism or László Krasznahorkai dense post/modern experimentalism. In all attempts to save narrative through supposedly ‘newer’ forms of narration, a question remains — what happens to character?

This seminar offers the provocation that this crisis of narration is related to the drift of character into the peripheries of literary imagination. Amid all the talk of narrative, voice, and style, the very notion of character appears on the brink of disappearing as a viable fictional device outside of genre fiction. Perhaps relatedly, literary characters are strongest in both experimental and realist works about the family or hegemonic social institutions in contemporary writings from the Global South like Ghachar Ghochar or The Vegetarian . Such trends index and perpetuate the ‘intimacy’ of crises that are not registered on a global scale. 

Champions of realism have privileged characterization for mediating social totalities (Jameson, Lukács). On the other hand, modernist prose staked a new limit for character by turning psychology into the totality, simultaneously inscribing its depth and diffusing it into atmosphere. Critics of contemporary immediacy often look back at modernism as a reminder that psychological fiction – when self-consciously alienated — could be political. Did modernism’s expansion of subjectivity into the book’s very environment bring character to the brink, setting its demise into motion?

We invite proposals that interrogate the presence of characters on the edges of literary texts. How do borders — colonial, economic, racial, sexual, and aesthetic — allocate different spaces to “major” and “minor” characters? How do nonhuman characters assert their authority? Do characters risk their collapse at these peripheries and do authors write these characters’ nearness to the brink into the fiction itself? Connecting political and literary marginality, we are inspired by recent attention towards characters as supernumerary surplus (Woloch and Steinlight), contesting racial markedness and unmarkedness (Lye, Zhang) or a computational unit of narratological analysis (Menon). Juxtaposing these methodological approaches with the literary marketplace’s death sentence on the future of character, we ask if a new theory of characterization can emerge not aside from, but precisely because of its marginality in literary production?

• Postcolonial Literature and World Systems Theory
• Realism vs. Modernism (Jameson) or Realism vs. Naturalism (Lukács)
• Characters in Genre Fiction (e.g Autofiction, Climatefiction, and Documentary Fiction)
• Referentiality in Fiction/ Nonfiction
• Peripheral Realisms
• Sociology of Literature
• Animal and the Nonhuman
• Legal Personhood