Can language address its others without apostrophe or the vocative? Of course (it just did). But if address is not tied to specific linguistic markers, how do we know it’s there? How do we discuss it? What is it doing? 

This seminar will consider literary address as a pragmatic property of language that describes its orientation towards others. We will set aside explicit markers of address to begin instead with address as connected with the sociality of literature more broadly. If address is the vector along which poetry, fiction, and drama interface with a world of ordinary language, of “real things,” then it runs the gamut of aesthetic, ethical, and political problems—above all, the problem of how aesthetics, ethics, and politics relate to one another, and how literary language activates those interrelations. We will therefore focus on larger questions of language and literature as raised by and wrought through address. Topics might include animacy, assent, dissent, coercion, ideology, social and/or sexual differentiation, translation, speech, exposure, concealment, self-possession, subjectivity, and racial phenomenology. 

So far, discussions of address have tended to focus on the western canon of lyric poetry, structural linguistics, and narratology (Benveniste 1966; Genette 1966; Johnson 1989; Ricœur 1990; Waters 2003; Alpers 2013; Culler 2015). Aside from a few scattered reflections outside these fields (Butler 2003; Allan 2007; Caruth 2016; Dwivedi 2018; Roelofs 2020), there has been no sustained discussion of address in relation to issues of sociality. Submissions are therefore encouraged to focus on address as it appears in unexpected places, and to make forays into new terrain. Can neologism act as address, for example, as an invitation to puzzle over the invention and ambiguity of a new word? How do collective pronouns work to differentiate or create as-yet unformed groups of addressees? How might covert address establish complicity as against the overt addresses of ideology (Althusser 1970) and authoritative discourse (Bakhtin 1975-1981). Can address give us a finer-grained account of formalism by refocusing attention on the social pragmatics of literary style?

The seminar is open to papers that approach literary address in different ways and draw omnivorously on critical and theoretical traditions where address has been discussed—psychoanalysis, sociolinguistics, the black radical tradition, rhetoric, lyric theory, structural linguistics, narratology, etc. Participants are also encouraged to discuss or revisit more idiosyncratic writings on address or to theorize solely from literary examples. Discussions of address and associated concepts in other languages are particularly welcome. Questions can be directed to [email protected].