Liberal modernity has long privileged ideals of autonomy, self-sufficiency, independence, and individual agency. Yet many of the most compelling novels and films of the twenty-first century appear increasingly preoccupied with their opposites: dependency, vulnerability, caregiving, attachment, and interdependence. Against narratives of self-making and personal freedom, contemporary culture has turned toward the conditions that make life possible in the first place and the often invisible relationships through which it is sustained.

This seminar explores the category of the fictions of dependency to describe a broad range of contemporary narratives organized around questions of care, reliance, reproduction, and obligation. Whether through narratives of aging parents, divorce, caregiving, illness, friendship, precarity, motherhood, or ecological entanglement, these works foreground forms of dependence that liberal models of subjectivity have often marginalized or concealed. Examples might include the post-marital worlds of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, and Katie Kitamura; the intimate vulnerabilities explored by Jenny Offill, Sally Rooney, Singrid Nunez, Richard Powers, Ben Lerner, and Annie Ernaux; technologically mediated forms of attachment such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects; films such as Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, and Mia Hansen-Løve's Things to Come; as well as television series including Scenes from a Marriage, The Leftovers, The Pitt, and The Bear. Rather than treating dependency as a temporary condition to be overcome, such works present it as a constitutive feature of social and professional life.

We welcome papers on literature, film, television, and visual culture from any linguistic, national, historical, or theoretical tradition. Possible topics include caregiving and aging; divorce and post-marital fiction; illness and disability; friendship and obligation; motherhood; intimacy and precarity; ecological interdependence; domestic labor; social reproduction; vulnerability and ethics; technologies of care; and comparative histories of dependency in literary and cultural production.

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