Labor and the Novel: A Roundtable with Christina Lupton, Leah Price, and Moira Weigel

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKERS: Christina Lupton, University of Pennsylvania; Leah Price, Rutgers University; Moira Weigel, Harvard University

"Not Working, Writing!"

This paper makes the case that life writing is central to the history of humans not working.  I’ll begin in the eighteenth century, with the example of Richardson’s Pamela and land with Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.  Together, these cases suggest a history of writing about work being evidence of servants becoming more than workers.  Even as literacy has been instrumental in creating the modern professional, I argue, it has featured as a form in which disposable time has been won and claimed by those who lack it. 

“Wages for Makework” 

Can you get paid to read novels? Juxtaposing employment scams advertised in magazines with fictions that train their readers to distrust such offers, this paper traces Victorian struggles over whether to count reading as a species of work or as its opposite.

"The Gig Work Memoir: Self, Space, and Society in Heike Geißler and Hu Anyan"

This talk starts from two questions: How do the temporalities and rhythms of algorithmically mediated work shape narration in Geißler’s Seasonal Associate  and Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing? And, more basically, how can two authors who never read each other share so many similarities? To answer these questions, Professor Weigel will turn to some surprising  connections from the history of translation.

About the Speakers

Christina Lupton currently teaches at the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  She has been a Chair of Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Professor at the University of Warwick, and Head of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Copenhagen. 

Leah Price’s books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books 2019),  How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press 2012), and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge University 2000).   She writes for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, and Public Books.  She is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, where she founded and directs the Initiative for the Book.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of Labor of Love (2016) and co-editor, with Ben Tarnoff, of Voices from the Valley (2020). 

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.