Project Narrative's annual Founders' Lecture will spotlight Professor Yoon Sun Lee in a hybrid event.
How can we recognize when two different things or people are equal? This talk considers how narratives work through the problem of equivalence not only mimetically but through their formal dynamics. Austen’s novels, for example, establish duration as a key element: how long something takes is often as precisely measured as money. Time thus becomes a source of value upon which the narrative movement establishes equivalences—for example, through the plot structure of requital. But the time in question is not only story-time but text-time as well. With some help from Marx’s 1867 discussions of value and exchange, we will see how Austen’s Emma contrasts a vertical idea of social equality with a kind of impersonal dynamic commensuration that extends to the level of discourse.
Yoon Sun Lee is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College. Her most recent book is The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Penn, 2023), and her essays can be found in journals and collections including ELH, The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, MLQ, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, and The Cambridge Companion to Race and Romanticism. She also co-edited “Proxy Wars” for Representations, with Kent Puckett (August 2023). She is the Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, co-convener of the Novel Theory Seminar at the Harvard Mahindra Center, and lead PI for a three-year Mellon Humanities grant called “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives.” Part of that grant is a new Narrative Lab that brings together faculty and undergraduates to study narratives across media and disciplines.
Zoom Information:
https://osu.zoom.us/j/92582185611?pwd=MFpGNmU0UWhuQTJya1pDY2c4MUd6dz09
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Password: 838658
