The Charles Jensvold Memorial Lecture by Nancy Armstrong, the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Trinity College, English Department, Duke University
After rendering migrant populations all but invisible for nearly three centuries, novels have recently promoted the migrant to the protagonist of a world in which the traditional opposition between home and workplace has collapsed. Where most novels do so by reconciling a migrant population to the same social system that ruled it out of bounds, a distinct minority--J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One among them—use patterns of migration to imagine a world without reproductive and productive labor—without, that is, work and sex.
About
Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, English Department, Duke University. Armstrong has served as editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction since 1996 and serves as co-organizer of The Novel Project at Duke, a faculty research seminar. Her scholarship explains how novels imagine a world that can be inhabited (or not) in specific ways by historically and culturally variable readerships. Currently focused on the contemporary novel, she continues to address questions of how modern cultures imagine themselves as a political society: Have, do, or can novels imagine alternative social formations? What narrative mechanisms make it possible for them to do so? How do novels presume to change their readers in the process? How do these "arguments" against the status quo engage political theories that attempt the same feat? Can any such alternative leave the formation we call "the family" intact?
