Keyword Seminar will be two-hour events that start with several short presentations, and will be followed by lots of time for discussion with participants. LEADERS and PRESENTERS will each make 5-minute interventions at the beginning of the seminar. PARTICIPANTS can register in advance to be guaranteed a seat in the room and share in the discussion after the intervention. You will have a chance to rank the seminars you would like to attend when you register for the conference. Participants’ names will be printed in the program if you register in good time and are not otherwise listed. Some keyword seminars will be concurrent, but you may attend more than one if they meet at different times. You may also attend a novel and a peripatetic seminar if you like. Your name will appear on the program once.
Keyword Seminar #1: SOUND
Leaders: Aarthi Vadde (Duke) and John Plotz (Brandeis)
How best to characterize the changing relationship between the novel and the various sonic affordances that lift words from the page? This keyword seminar centers the relationship between the acoustic and the novelistic while also reaching out into a broader discussion of the relationships among technologies of reading, writing, and listening. Topics may pertain to novelistic distribution (e.g. audiobooks versus other forms), to novel theory and criticism on the airways (e.g. from radio shows to podcasts), and to novel form (e.g. how novels themselves represent and work through the relationship between the visual and oral/aural in their composition and anticipated reception). Conrad, for example, was enchanted by the idea of a character best known as a voice; Cather envisioned the perfect novel as made up of overtones of words not spoken aloud yet vibrating through the air. This seminar will sound out the novel to bridge the gap between fictions read and heard.
Keyword Seminar #2: SECRET
Leaders: Penny Fielding (Univ. of Edinburgh) and Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley)
The moment of the archive, Derrida says, is the “institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the non-secret.” What, then, is the secret that may not be homologous with the private, and what is its place in the novel as archive and the archive of the novel? Do novels have secrets that inhere in their plots? Does novelistic discourse rely on the unspeakable? Are secrets unnarratable, or are they the essence of narratability? The seminar will explore the structure and ontology of the secret itself as well as how the secret mediates the novel’s relation to other forms of telling and showing, including testimony, confession, deception, and surveillance.
Keyword Seminar #3: MIGRATION
Leaders: Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol) and Paul Stasi (University at Albany)
This seminar understands migration in (at least) two senses: the movement of people across borders as well as the movement of literary forms which sometimes accompany them. Presentations will vary in scope. Some might consider the tangled history of novelistic traditions, tracing the material paths through which the novel has made its way across the globe; others might focus in on a single text, analyzing the novel’s engagement with those genres that traditionally mark its limits (epic, oral literature, romance); still others might consider how migration is not only the condition for the novel’s global ubiquity but also built into the form at its origins.