To what ends do narratives fail? If narrative is our way of making sense of the world (Herman 2004), why frustrate sense-making? Well-known in experimental fiction and film (from Sterne, Stein and Rankine to Caché and The Stanley Parable), frustrated narratives also occur, intriguingly, in texts with more practical, didactic or ideological aims: documentaries, journalism, political discourse, advertising, etc. And despite our rich conceptual vocabulary of frustrating narratives—“weak narrativitiy” (McHale 2001), plot “perversion” (Roof 1996), “antinarrative” (Rose 2012), “unnarratability” (Abbott 2003; Warhol 2005)—much remains to be explored about the motivations, readerly dynamics and impacts of narrative frustration.

Emerson Society at the Thoreau Annual Gathering CFP

The Emerson Society will sponsor a panel at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering this summer in Concord, Mass. (July 9-13, 2025). This year’s conference theme is Thoreau’s Revolutions. We will consider papers both on the topic below and on the conference theme more generally.

“Emersonian Revolutions Today”

In the Humanities, notions of coloniality and postcoloniality are usually entangled with nation states that are, by nature, multilingual and multicultural. The societies of each of these nations are further stratified based on hierarchies of economic and social-political classifications. In other words, motivated and maintained by and through power and notions of telos, differences of race, sexuality, caste, and religion exist in differing ways. Literatures of these differences then occupy their space(s) under the larger category of ‘postcolonial literature(s)’.

Edgar Allan Poe worked for a double audience (the popular and the critical), in double tones and manners (grim and mocking, metaphysical and pseudo-scientific). Whether he strove for alternance or interdependence between the terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” which he used to categorize his own narratives, critics such as G. R. Thompson and Dennis Eddings have argued that the former – more visible in tales such as “King Pest,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “Lionizing,” and “Loss of Breath” -  underscored the carnivalesque, the satirical, and the hoaxical.

After years of financial crisis and politics of austerity, as well as a pandemic that brought ordinary life to a halt, culture today is laden with excess. This excess can take many different shapes and foster diverse readings, some of them positive, focusing on excess as an opportunity, while others reflect on its pernicious effects.