is the novel democratic?
20-21 april 2012
From its inception, the novel has often been associated with attributes of democratic modernity. These include the rise of a literate middle class, print culture and a public sphere; the ascendancy of the vernacular and a privileging of quotidian reality; secularization and a turn to irony; the professionalization of letters; and the development of individualist or revolutionary ideologies. Bakhtin's reflections on the heteroglossic nature of voice and on the polyphonic nature of the novel, and his claims for the novel as the site of sobornost–an authentic community of equals–deepened the association of the novel with democracy.
This conference will examine the historical and contemporary limitations and possibilities of this paradigm in novel studies, and the unorthodox meanings of "democracy" and/or the "democratic" to which it gives rise. Participants may choose to pursue a number of questions that arise from the juxtaposition of democracy and the novel. These include but are in no way limited to: What role does the novel (its writing/dissemination/reading) play in democratization both historically and in the global present? How do we distinguish the relationship of "democracy" and the novel from that of "globalization" and the novel? What is the relationship of novel character to the creation of democratic subjectivity? What is the relationship between this putative role and culturally and historically specific reading practices? In what way and to what degree (and perhaps to what end) are democracy and the novel imagined as homologous forms?
co-sponsored by the stanford institute for creativity and the arts
web concept & design copyright 2008–2011
davey hubay / d(h)sign
elizabeth anker
nancy armstrong
elizabeth maddock dillon
brian edwards
meltem gürle
kent puckett
vaughn rasberry
mariano siskind
alan tansman
ban wang
Elizabeth S. Anker is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University, and her research and teaching focus on contemporary world literature, law and literature, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Her first book, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in the Postcolonial Novel, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2012. In addition to essays in Modern Fiction Studies, the James Joyce Quarterly, and Theory & Event, she has recently published on animal rights and phenomenology in New Literary History and the 9/11 novel in American Literary History. She is currently working on a new book project provisionally entitled “Constitutional Failure and the Aesthetic Formations of Sovereignty in Crisis,” as well as two edited collections. She holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. She received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin. She teaches courses on the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in English, and critical theory, and she serves as editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She is the author of Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987), Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard University Press, 1999) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored with Leonard Tennenhouse The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (University of California Press, 1992). Her current book project explores the late Victorian literary reconception of the line between animal and human life.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is an Associate Professor in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include early American literature, Atlantic colonialism, the early novel, feminist theory, political theory, aesthetics, transatlantic print culture, Caribbean literature, and early American drama. The author of numerous articles, her book The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere was published in 2004 (Stanford University Press), and she is currently completing New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850 (forthcoming Duke University Press) and co-editing, with Michael Drexler, a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.
Brian Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary at Northwestern University where he is the Director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. His work explores American literature and culture in its international context, globalization and culture, and contemporary North African and Middle Eastern literary and cultural dynamics. He is author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke, 2005) and co-editor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of Globalizing American Studies (Chicago, 2010). In 2009, he edited a portfolio of new Egyptian writing for the literary journal A Public Space. He has published on Henry James, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Alfred Hitchcock, Frantz Fanon, Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies, contemporary Moroccan cinema and fiction, and Iranian cinema. His current book project, After the American Century: Ends of Circulation in Cairo, Casablanca and Tehran, examines the circulation of American culture and its forms in North Africa and the Middle East.
With advanced degrees in both philosophy and literature, Meltem Gürle is an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in the School of Foreign Languages. She is a comparatist whose focus is on the genre of the “world text” (Orhan Pamuk’s “East-West novel”) and on non-western modernisms, with a particular interest in the relationship of post-1950 twentieth-century Turkish literature to the modernist masterpieces of the West in the volatile context of recent Turkish political history. Her research areas also include nineteenth century German philosophy, theories of the novel, and the work of James Joyce. She spent the 2010-2011 academic year at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar, and is presently working on her book, “Beyond Property and Propriety: the Turkish Bildungsroman and its Dynamics,” in which she considers the Islamist influence on the development of the genre.
Kent Puckett is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. He did his graduate work at the University of Virginia and Columbia University. He is the author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-author with Derek Nystrom of Against Oligarchies, Against Bosses: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (1998, reprinted 2002.) He has contributed to Critical Inquiry and The Henry James Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2005) and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (2009). His current projects include Interminable: Reading: Literature and Psychoanalysis, an examination on the psychic and economic stakes involved in close reading, and a second book exploring the ways in which difficult arguments about war are embodied in the cinematic style of some British war films.
Vaughn Rasberry is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. His research interests include African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," will soon appear in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press). His current book project, Totalitarianism in Question: African American Literary Culture and the Global Cold War, is a study of black literary and intellectual history in the post-World War II era, in which he challenges the notion that landmark civil rights initiatives emancipated African American writers and illuminates how black literary production engages the coordinates of the global Cold War.
Mariano Siskind is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. His research areas include nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American literature, travel writing, histories and theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and critical articulations of literature and philosophy. He is the co-author, with Sylvia Molloy, of Poéticas de la distancia. Adentro y afuera de la literatura Argentina (Buenos Aires: Norma Grupo Editor, 2006.) His work has appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, La Biblioteca, Hispámerica, and Revista Hispanoamericana. His article "The Globalization of the Novel and The Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature" first published in the journal Comparative Literature (Fall 2010), has recently been reprinted in World Literature: A Reader (Routledge: Forthcoming 2012.) He is currently finishing a book entitled Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America.
Alan Tansman is Agassiz Professor of Japanese as well as Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a PhD from Yale University. His specialization is modern Japanese literature and culture. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya (1993), The Culture of of Japanese Fascism (2009), and The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (2009) and co-editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan (forthcoming). Professor Tansman has published extensively on numerous topics including Japanese cultural criticism, popular culture, and film. He is also a translator of Japanese fiction and criticism. His current book project is a comparative exploration of Japanese and Jewish responses to atrocity.
Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies and a professor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is currently chairperson of the Departments of Asian Languages and Cultures. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth ÐCentury China (Stanford UP, 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford UP, 2004), and History and Memory (in Chinese, Oxford UP, 2004). He co-edited Trauma and Cinema (Hong Kong UP, 2004), The Image of China in the American Classroom (Nanjing UP, 2005), China and New Left Visions (forthcoming from Lexington), and Debating Socialist Legacy in China (forthcoming from Palgrave). He edited Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Brill, 2010). He was a research fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000 and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2007. He has taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard University, Rutgers University, Seoul National University, and E. China Normal University. Working with Professor Russell Berman of Stanford, he co-taught the NEH seminar ÒShanghai and Berlin: Urban ModernismÓ in 2010 and 2011.
