How is the labor of narrating and interpreting the social world distributed in narrative? Who gets to narrate and interpret the world in which events unfold, and who serves instead as a provider of details, without getting a saying on how and why stuff happens? Centering the position of the narrator and the question of narrative authority, this seminar considers the framework of the division of labor in narrative. Rather than focusing on labor as it pertains to the content of literary representation, we invite participants to discuss how a concern with the division of narratorial labor can reinvigorate the stakes of formal analysis in both fictional and non-fictional works.

Whether upheld as a means to enhance productivity or denounced as a driver of socioeconomic inequality, the notion of division of labor has seen a resurgence in social sciences research, but has rarely been considered in relation to narrative form. In narrative, the question of the division of labor is entangled with the distribution of narrative authority, with the tension between the particular and the general, the type and the detail, and with the blurred lines between the diegetic, the descriptive, and the interpretive. These are all problems that require revisiting if we still believe that narrative worlds—imaginary and non-fictional—can serve as useful scenarios and training grounds for the worlds we inhabit. 

Narrative has long been studied formally through narratological concepts such as narrative mood, voice, and focalization. This seminar seeks to center the question of labor in such formal categories, and to generate new concepts that may arise through an engagement with the following questions: When and how do literary narrators and characters step out of their immediate world to analyze, interpret, and generalize, translating individual vicissitudes into plural ones? When and how do they leave this work to the reader? Meanwhile, rationalizing one’s actions is not just a privilege but can also be a burden—it is a form of epistemic labor that may fall on the shoulders of the oppressed and is often shaped by narratives that are beyond individual control. In such instances, how is the burden of interpretation unequally distributed among narrators both willing and unwilling? Ultimately, what kinds of expertise does narration demand or generate, be it from fictional characters mired in an everyday life of manual labor or from writers of non-fiction who narrate life and work in precarious economies? 

We welcome submissions that consider narration alongside a variety of related topics including but not limited to: 

1. Division of labor in non-fictional and ethnographic narratives
2. Narrators who deliberately refuse the labor of interpreting and generalizing
3. The labor of revealing and effacing the self
4. Self-explanation as privilege and burden under uneven power relations
5. The labor of narrating and the realist-modernist divide
6. Reproductive labor as narrative form