Various corners of literary studies have recently renewed their attention to both the thematics of collectivity and aesthetic strategies for evoking communal voice. Such discussions often correlate the limits of political representation with literary representation, or note how the changing shape of collective action manifests in contemporary writing. While the particulars of (for instance) polyvocality in lyric studies or “mass characters” in narrative theory have been thoroughly debated within generic subfields, what is often lacking from these accounts is attention to how adjacent areas of study deal with similar issues. In order to theorize collectivity’s rise and fall across different genres, we propose a panel conversation between scholars who approach the matter from three distinct vantage points.
“Collectivity in Crisis” asks three panelists to reflect on communal and connective models and the ways such models have failed to narrate experience at the scale of class or population. Is collectivity -- or individualization contra collectivity -- a helpful analytic for understanding literature? Do concepts like Anderson’s “imagined communities” or Jameson’s ideologeme no longer apply to study of contemporary objects? If our present historical situation defies collectivity, how have aesthetic strategies recalibrated to imagine solidarity? Can collective subjecthood be written, archived, or done away with entirely? Our session will take up these questions by interrelating studies of narrative fiction, of poetics and affect, and of archives history.
Examining two novels bookending the 2008 financial crisis, Ryan Brooks argues that the most important source of innovation in American fiction has shifted from post-postmodernism – a center-left formation that embraces neoliberalism’s personalizing disavowal of class antagonism – to a vision that insists on the irreducibility of this antagonism. By comparing the experimental, semi-ironic “we” narrator of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) to the intensely personalized rhetoric of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009), Brooks will track how a revitalized literary realism emerges alongside a revitalized American labor movement.
Rachel Carroll similarly analyzes recent histories of collectivity by responding to the longstanding questions of how to identify feminism’s collective subject. What is the role of identification (or self-recognition) in the formation of feminist collectivity? How do subjects recognize themselves or others within the collective space of feminism? Carroll addresses these questions in her reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982), a book that surprisingly has not been discussed in terms of the feminist politics of its present. Situating Dictée against the backdrop of emergent coalitional Third World Feminist and women of color feminist politics, Carroll argues that the book explores the political potential of ambivalent aesthetic identification.
Finally, Heather Lukes chronicles the efforts of a UCLA collective to archive material from the LA punk scene. Lukes discusses this collection as one that both reinforces the notion of collective members as holders of occult historical knowledge and reproduces the opacity of punk to outsider interpretation. By highlighting the campy and DIY strategies deployed by the UCLA collective (like distributing matchbooks for punks to burn their own collections), Lukes shows how a “collecting collective” might maintain punk’s dialectic of attraction and repulsion. The archive itself, Lukes argues, performs the hermeneutics of crisis.
Our panel will begin with brief introductory remarks by the session presiders (<10 minutes). Each paper will then run for no longer than 17 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes of discussion between the panelists, presiders, and those in attendance.