The concept of situation derives from theater history and lives on in screenwriting, creative writing, and game design, but it also enjoys a parallel intellectual life in philosophy, ecology, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and sociology. The Situationist International pushed it towards the street theater of everyday life, on the one hand, and the art world, on the other. More recently, the idea of “situatedness” has come to signal self-consciousness about the ways identity categories affect narrative authority, but there are many other dimensions to the term. In “Situation: A Narrative Concept,” forthcoming in Critical Inquiry in Summer 2024, Marcie Frank, Kevin Pask, and Ned Schantz draw upon this eclectic history to distinguish situation from setting, plot, genre, and context and develop a new tool for narrative analysis across media and form. This panel proposes to extend that work by inquiring into its status in literary criticism. The first paper elucidates the role of situation in elocutionary theory and traces its uptake by the New Critics; the second explores Erving Goffman’s use of situation in his concept of stigma and proposes that it made possible the personal writing to be found in queer criticism; and the third, by disclosing its capacity to generate narratives of the profession of criticism, exposes the stakes it makes visible. Together these papers help to expand the uses of situation as a narrative concept even as they also make contributions to sound studies, theories of reading, and debates about the profession itself.

In “A Literary Situation: Samuel Silas Curry and the Oral Interpretation of Literature,” Victorianist and sound studies scholar Jason Camlot considers the way Curry, a late Victorian - early twentieth-century professor of oratory, vocal expression, and the oral interpretation of literature, used situation as an interpretive method for determining the oral performance of a literary work. For Curry, any example of literary expression, no matter how seemingly abstract, is always situated by the creator’s, speaker’s, and listener/reader’s imagination such that “natural expression is hardly possible without situation.” Tracking the lasting impact of Curry’s work as it was adapted by the methods of close reading associated with the New Criticism, Camlot explores the possibility that Curry’s ideas also enabled the more sophisticated theories of communication, speech analysis, and sociological and dramaturgical analysis of everyday interaction that would develop in the 1950s and thereafter.

In “Situational Awareness: Stigma and the Dynamics of Identity,” Heather Love considers the representation of identity as a dynamic situation in Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman pursues the basic situation of “spoiled identity” – being perceived as less than human – and its management, including a number of strategies that the stigmatized use to counter such perceptions. For Goffman, identity is both serial and impersonal, and thus situational, which leads both to the “coldness” of his account and to its capacity to generate identification. Tracing situational thinking within Eve Sedgwick’s recasting of Silvan Tomkins’ shame and Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” Love locates in this inheritance the narrative affordances for the personal writing they used and that continues to occur in queer criticism.

In “The Situation of the Professional Class and the Crisis of Employment in the Humanities,” John Guillory investigates the stakes of the narratives we tell ourselves about our profession insofar as they make possible new understandings of it. He considers the equation of professional and proletarian identities occasioned by the precarious employment of many recent Humanities PhDs and proposes that this situation may challenge received theories of class formation. He probes the affordances and limits of narrating the contemporary situation as a situation, especially when compared to crisis, on the one hand, and condition, on the other.

Participants will each present fifteen-minute papers, and the respondent will have ten minutes, which, after brief introductions, will leave eighteen minutes for unstructured discussion. Participants come from different areas of the discipline of literary studies and use diverse methods of analysis, which will serve to highlight the range of possible applications of the situation concept.