“Literary Ethnography” is an invitation to scholars who otherwise travel in a garden of forking paths—comparative literature and linguistic anthropology—to gather and probe how questions of literary method can be reinvigorated by ethnographic analysis and vice versa. This seminar’s exploration of interdisciplinary reciprocity begins with an observation of genealogical affinity. Roman Jakobson, whose work on the poetic function has been influential in literary studies, was also the teacher of the important linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, who develops the concept of “metricalization” to study the poetics of turn-taking and role-alignment in social interactions. Linguistic anthropologists focus on the social indexicality rather than the referential function of language use: the socio-cultural frameworks shared among participants in an interaction to negotiate their social intelligibility to each other (e.g. accent as an index of class distinction).

Literary scholars such as Michael Lucey and Tom McEnaney have in turn drawn on Silverstein’s work to develop a sociologically robust way of close reading literature as language-in-use. Their concept of “literary fieldwork” attends to the social indexicality of literary artefacts that transforms them into rich archives from which distinct perspectives on the social world, born out of interactive processes of texts encountering various publics across time and space, can be reconstructed. 

One path this seminar will take is to build a critical lexicon across both disciplines: how does Asif Agha’s account of registers as social types resonate with or diverge from Lukacs’s notion of type as deployed in realist fiction? How does the ethnographic concept of “tropic figuration” to parse the semiotic sedimentation of social phenomena suggest the renewed affordances of literary hermeneutics for the metapragmatic analysis of ethnographic data? 

Another path this seminar will pursue is to track how the methods of both disciplines translate across this interdisciplinary encounter. How do literary scholars who employ ethnographic methods such as interviews and participant observation to study world literature through site-specific and vernacular reading practices understand the distinct yet connected poetics of literary and ethnographic figuration? What might linguistic anthropologists, who analyze transcripts of recorded conversations, gain from an approach that treats dramatic literature as “transcripts” that encode social scripts of language use in literary form, the ethnographic richness of which is reactivated when artists translate theatrical scripts into embodied performances?

This seminar will explore the roads not taken as well as revisit well-trodden paths of inquiry to discover new itineraries of cross-disciplinary collaboration. We warmly encourage submissions from both literary scholars and linguistic anthropologists working across different linguistic traditions and historical periods.