There has been an efflorescence of renewed interest in the notion of literary character, as exemplified by such books as Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many, John Frow’s Character and Person, Marta Figlerowicz’s Flat Protagonists, and On Character, co-written by Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi. As all agree, character as a component of narrative has for too long been sidelined as a feature of literary-critical analysis, whether formalist, theoretical, or historical. The question of characters’ ontological status remains open: should their status as elements in a textual design take precedence over the readerly tendency to engage with them as human-like beings? The age of artificial intelligence confronts us anew with questions about personhood as a category and the meaning of our engagement both with one another and with entities that resemble persons.

The following four panelists will speak for 12 minutes per person. NB: Our panel foregrounds how literary character has been shaped by histories of racialization and exclusion, approaching questions of personhood through a plurality of voices.

Chris Freeburg’s paper begins from a claim made on a 1961 radio broadcast by Alfred Kazin that “the negro [in America] has not merely been a writer, he also has been a character, he’s been one of the most profound characters in literature...novelists...were always aware of ‘the negro’ as a force, a human being.” Revisiting some of the texts to which Kazin referred, from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Melville’s Benito Cereno, he argues that by focusing on “negro character,” the ends of racial politics become slippery, personhood unravels, and the social world of racial conflict reveals the reality of its hidden chaos. In the same broadcast, James Baldwin calls the “negro character” in the national life a “floating corpse.” Attempts to resuscitate this figure, to resurrect it for democracy’s sake, Freeburg contends, seems to bring the discussants into greater intimacy with their unanswerable questions rather than revealing the answers they desperately sought.

For Florence Dore, the moment of dissolution that might be said to define American modernism—Thomas Sutpen’s expulsion at the front door of the plantation house in Absalom, Absalom!—makes the fall into racialized thinghood a constitutive basis for character itself. Rather than reading poststructuralist critiques of the subject backwards to find their origins in modernist character, as current theories of the novel tend to do, she follows the opposite trajectory to argue for an idea of character as by definition “ghosted”—as abandoned, that is, without acknowledgment. Reading forward to Lorrie Moore’s I am Homeless if This is Not My Home, Dore shows the persistence of modernism’s effort to forestall the reduction of the subject to thinghood in the contemporary moment. Like William Faulkner (and Sigmund Freud), she argues, Moore fastens ghosted subjects to precedents supplied by grand narratives.

Jennifer Fleissner’s paper aims to shift the debate about whether or not we should understand characters as persons to one that understands the different construals of characters by critics and authors alike as rooted in differing conceptions of personhood itself. As she argues, recent arguments against “humanist” understandings of character are no less based in ideas about the constitutive qualities of persons than those they oppose; they differ only regarding what these qualities are. Focusing in on the “post-characterological” novel from the nouveau roman to the present day, she argues that the same can be said of many novelistic experiments mistakenly viewed as evacuating rather than reconceiving the human as such. A conception of novelistic history less tied to realism can help us to theorize the human as category in our age of AI.

Widespread calls for regulation as people begin spending hours upon hours interacting with virtual entities. Intense fear that our capacity for social interaction and ability to distinguish between reality and fiction will disintegrate, as we become increasingly drawn into emotional, time-consuming relations with unreal people. The age of AI? No, argues Yi-Ping Ong—the rise of the novel. Moral panic over novel-reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focused on the capacity of fictional characters to elicit empathy, projections of agency, and imagined intimacy. The history of ethical concerns about novels thus sheds light on what might be at stake in analyses of human-chatbot interactions. Yet despite the parallels, there are also important differences. This paper outlines the ethical concerns over simulating persons across different domains, arguing that the responsibilities of parties who create or engage with such simulations differ according to their effects.