Ethnography and/as Literature: Content, Context, and Comparisons

This seminar will explore ethnography as a method of studying literature—as well as a literary genre. 

How do literary scholars constitute our objects? As a field, we do not tend to talk about methods or data with the same degree of explicitness that social scientists use. However, questions about methods, content, and context stand at the heart of many of the most pressing debates in the discipline, both past and present. What is it that we want to know about? How can we go about finding out about that thing? Finally, how do the ways that we pursue our questions shape the field–or, what counts as literature (at a time when interdisciplinarity and various forms of institutional precarity are dissolving the bounds)? 

This seminar explores ethnography as one such method of recontextualizing and, thus, reconstituting our objects. We invite papers reflecting on the utility and limitations of ethnography for addressing pressing questions about affect, performance, translation, and circulation, as well as specific questions of method. We also invite papers that reflect on the historical entwinement of the comparative study of literature with comparative anthropology and ethnography. 

At the same time, we encourage engagements with self-reflective texts that an anthropologist or sociologist would recognize as auto-ethnography that have become a mainstay of contemporary literature, as observed by Anna Kornbluh, Annabel Kim, and others. What is the difference between (calling something) "autotheory," "autofiction," "autoethnography" or "eco-ethnography"? What do the distinctions we draw between these genres tell us about our understanding of singular selfhood as it intersects with cultural or ethnic otherness, and about the literary-critical methods we build around this understanding?

In recent years, anthropologists and ethnographers have turned to literature in volumes such as Crumpled Paper Boat to revive and reflect on their own genres of writing. It is time for us, as literary scholars, to return the favor–and rediscover the many commonalities between our disciplines that often remain obscured by Northwestern, postimperial definitions of what counts as a literary object.