Novel Theory

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Ravit Reichman, Brown University It was the year Madonna descended from a seventeen-foot wedding cake at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, the year Torvill and Dean won ice dancing gold at the Sarajevo Olympics with perfect marks...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Jeehyun Choi, Rutgers University Jeehyun Choi will discuss her research on the literary and political archive of Nak Chung Thun, a Californian immigrant farmworker who left behind a substantial but unpublished body of Korean-language...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKERS: Katie Ebner-Landy, Utrecht University; Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University; Deidre Lynch, Harvard University Please join us for a conversation about Professor Katie Ebner-Landy’s The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores...

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...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Katie Trumpener, Yale University Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March is a pathbreaking historical novel of the recent past; a memorable depiction of life in a dying Austro-Hungary, on the eve of World War I, it focuses on the fate of army...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania In 2018, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Drawn & Quarterly) became the first “graphic novel” to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, a move that many regarded as renewed legitimation of the...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKERS: Margaret Cohen, Stanford University; Christie McDonald, Harvard University "Who Has the Right to Tragedy? This paper discusses the novels of Claire de Duras, the author chosen to represent the 19th century for the French agrégation...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKERS: Elyse Graham (Stonybrook University); Benjamin Mangrum (MIT); Tom Comitta Literature as thinking, or, why AI can't nail metaphors - Elyse Graham This paper explores why large language models (LLMs), for all their superficial fluency...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Mariano Siskind, Harvard University Notably, Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel, but he crafted the plots of the novels he decided not to write. This presentation will consider Borges' decision to 'not-write' novels, alongside the...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKER: Ayelet Ben-Yishai, University of Haifa In the political nightmare that many of us inhabit, complicity – the condition of being “folded into” (and thus variously responsible for) injustice, injury or otherwise undesirable outcomes –...