This seminar investigates how we know the literary human as distinct from the philosophical subject, the legal person, the theological soul, the political citizen, the biological organism, or the sociological actor. It asks what makes the literary human immediate and accessible, even as it moves across languages, genres, periods, and cultural traditions. The literary human emerges from the raw material of literature itself, where language gives human life shape, pressure, texture, and presence. Reconfigured through such language, the literary human is at once tangible and oblique, intimate and estranged, ineffable and laid bare.

The seminar thus seeks papers that address how literature carries human life into perception, taking both “literature” and “human life” in capacious terms. What are the limits of literary representation? Why do some forms make human life feel immediate, while others render it distant, opaque, or strange? How do different genres and media approach the question? What aesthetic moves allow readers to apprehend human life as human? What happens when literary form makes the human difficult to recognize, or refuses recognition altogether? Together, these questions invite a poetics of the literary human: an inquiry into how literature renders human life formally visible.