Being human means living in relation with the world, entangled in material and immaterial interdependencies. As a site of intersubjective encounter, literature functions as a medium of relation, enabling the self to cross over into the territory of the other. Literary texts exist between the reader and the author, compelling us to reexamine the relational forces at work in literary production and consumption. This panel foregrounds the study of literature as a site for developing relational conceptions of the self, highlighting that human existence is inextricably interconnected with and shaped by the external world. While the history of relationality stretches back to the origins of Western philosophy, it is striking how central renegotiations of relational selfhood have become in the humanities in the past fifty years. First promoted through feminist theory and relational psychoanalysis, models of identity that focus on human interdependencies and intersectional layers the self have made an increasing impact in diverse academic fields, including Black, Indigenous, queer, and ecocritical studies, as well as narrative medicine and health humanities.

In literary studies, the intersections between relational dimensions of selfhood and narrative have been most prominently explored in the field of autobiography studies (for example, Paul John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories, Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk, Nancy K. Miller’s “The Entangled Self,” and Anne Rüggemeier’s Die relationale Autobiographie). Building on these formative studies, the goal of this panel is to sharpen our understanding of relationality from a literary perspective that centers on the question how rhetorical devices and aesthetic form shape the relationship between author, text, and reader. Critical approaches focused on relational writing and reading practices in prose and poetry promote an articulation of the complex connectivities between self and other at work in literary texts, opening up new understandings of dialogic meaning making through the use of metaphor, ellipsis, erasure, fragmentation, and narrative framing.

In her contribution, “Relating to Illness as War,” Anita Wohlmann takes up Walter Mignolo’s concept of comparison as a “relational ontology” to explore the relations that metaphors establish. Metaphors make connections between two words. They are also connected to the person who makes the comparison. Writers relate to metaphors in various ways: they use them pragmatically, disparage them polemically, and use them for tentative explorations into the meanings of an experience, such as illness. Metaphors thus afford different relationships. Wohlmann will ask how these multiple relations shape the divergent uses of war metaphors in illness narratives. The warfare metaphor is one of the most prominent and most criticized metaphors for illness. And yet, despite the ethical concerns about the limits and the dehumanizing, violent connotations of this metaphor, writers continue to use it in their illness narratives. This persistence suggests that the writers not only see something true in the war concept, they may also have become strangely attached to it. Wohlmann will analyze the war metaphors used by Arthur Frank, Audre Lorde, Siri Hustvedt, and Joan Didion, and she will conceptualize the relationality of metaphors by drawing on concepts of counternarrative, attachment and reparative reading.

In her paper “Relational Lives – Relational Forms” Anne Rüggemeier starts from Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011) to illuminate the reciprocal connections between relationality as a site of intersubjective encounter and human interdependency and the specific forms that writers use to express relationality and to foster relational reading practices that are receptive and productive at the same time. Close reading Kingston’s latest book, a memoir and a political manifesto in free verse, Rüggemeier will start a discussion of relationality and how it can manifest itself in the specific formal choices that writers exploit and develop for their texts. Before Kingston published I Love a Broad Margin, she was famous as a prose writer. Why, we might ask, this turn towards the broken lines of poetry? The answer can be found in the title of her latest book, which evokes the memory of her Chinese father, a poet, who – while reading the Chinese translations of his daughter’s books –, wrote his comments into the broad margins of her texts: “He answered me; he wrote / in the flyleaves and wide margins of the Chinese / editions of my books.” Her father’s textual practice serves as a metaphor for Kingston’s literary production. She conceives of her book, but also of her life story, as an open text with many entry points for the stories, the comments and the lives of others. By employing and exploiting “broad margins,but also white spaces, broken lines and seemingly incomplete, unfinished or rudimentary forms of literary expression, an intriguing tension between aesthetic density and incompleteness that trades readerly enclosure and immersion for relational dialogicity.

Finally, Christine Marks’ paper “Relational Responses to Violence in Documentary Poetry” reads the relational writing practices of documentary poets Phil Metres and Layli Long Soldier as a vital strategy in contesting the monologic violence of American imperialism. Similar to Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Metres’ and Soldier’s poems are open texts with multiple entries, drawing the reader into a complex tension between identification and complicity. Metres’ Sand Opera (2015) and Soldier’s Whereas (2017), respectively, respond to, disrupt, and fragment the language of occupation, military violence, and carceral regulation in ways that simultaneously enact and transcend its epistemic violence through tentative gestures toward the other. Testing the limits of shareability, documentary poetry—with its direct representations of lived experience through personal testimonies and its integration of legal documents, standard operating procedures, and congressional resolutions—asks the reader to enter into an ethical relation with voices often silenced by incarceration, torture, murder, and dispossession. The documentary poetics of the selected texts resides in and makes palpable the threshold of susceptibility that determines the relationship between author, reader, and text, resisting one-dimensional meanings through the use of multiple voices, redactions, and transformations of the dehumanizing lexicon of the U.S. military and government.