Approaches to Genre: The Novel

Approaches to Genre: The Novel

Using Texts: Literature and Linguistic Anthropology
Course Number: 
202C
Course Catalog Number: 
23793
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Tom McEnaney
Days: 
M
Time: 
2-5
Semester: 
Location: 
4104 Dwinelle

Humanities scholars increasingly feel pressure to justify the “usefulness” of their scholarship and pursue “pragmatic” ends. This course draws on a different tradition of use and pragmatism, namely the field of linguistic anthropology and its relationship to literature and the sociology of culture. Drawing from these fields, our course will strive to understand how literary texts can function as rich analytical archives of social practices and ritual. Rather than celebrate the aesthetic autonomy of literature, we will ask how literary texts work in the world as they are transformed through dynamic processes of reading and cultural uptake that help create different social communities.

What does it mean to “use” a text or literary artifact? What happens to a novel when we examine it as an “interactive text” produced in a shared “real time”? How does the use of a particular term help construct a context of publics and counterpublics? We will approach these questions through pragmatic and metapragmatic linguistic anthropology in relation to free indirect discourse, Bakhtinian register, Bourdieuan dispositions, and Foucauldian author functions to consider how literary objects continue to change their definition and their readers as they circulate across different social and historical contexts. Examining books from Manuel Puig, Claudia Rankine, Luis Zapata, Svetlana Alexeivich, Mohammed Mrabet, David Mitchell, Andy Warhol and others that take the form of an interview, we will study the maneuvers of spoken conversation in print. Other theorists will include M. Warner, V. Jackson, M. Silverstein, N. Harkness, P. Faudree, M. Inoue, and A. Agha.