“Networked Collectives in the Fiction of Silko and Yamashita”

FAIN: FT-278507-21

Scott Selisker
Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)

Research and writing to complete the final chapter of a book examining representations of social networks in contemporary fiction.

I am requesting support for archival research for the final chapter of a book-in-progress on social networks in contemporary U.S. fiction. The book analyzes for the first time a formal feature of fictional narrative I call its “character network,” the web of connections between characters. It places contemporary fictional uses of character networks in conversation with the roles of network metaphors in discussions of media technologies, business networking, and centralized and grassroots political formations since the 1970s. Drawing on and complementing current sociological work in network analysis, I claim that recent fiction uses networks in innovative ways in its representations of precarity, exclusion, and individual and collective action. I seek funding to visit archives for key draft and process documents for two major novels on multiethnic coalitions in grassroots political movements, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel.