What is voice without personhood? Voice typically suggests a person speaking, or, perhaps, a disembodied imitation of human speech, or a non-human entity that is anthropomorphized through the very act of speaking. Under what circumstances does voice elude the legal regime of the person, propose alternative modes of subjectivity or perception, or eschew categories of identity? How and when does voice constitute evidence for conceptually driven models of advocacy, identity, or critique, especially under fraught conditions of enunciation? 

This seminar invites approaches to the complexity of narrative that might build on recent scholarship in literary studies on form, media, science/technology, and environment that typically operate at scales beyond the stylistics of voice, as well as debates about the centrality of voice as the foundation of lyric poetry. How can voice be conceived differently across cultural and linguistic traditions, historical moments, or even genres? How have distinctive voices such as lyricism, free indirect discourse, or first-person narration changed and expanded? Do concepts of voice, style, and medium necessarily involve the material conditions of personhood or impersonality? What aspects of narrative voice are not captured by media studies or the newest formalisms? How can attention to the poetics of narrative voice contribute to our disciplines' advocacy for literature's distinctiveness? What modes of critique could be animated by a turn to voice, the reader, or the addressee beyond concepts of the person?