From Bystander to Actor: Literature, Collaboration, and Participation

Critical literary theory promulgates the claim to literature’s inherent situational transcendence as well as its world- and community-building potentials, but leaves largely unreflected the effect of individualization that is built into the dominant processes of literary writing and reading alike. Thisproject is a joint effort to not only register this tension; it is more than that an attempt to ameliorate it by focusing on the manifold collaborative and participatory formats in which contemporary literature happens, both in terms of production/writing and reception/reading. The aim is a) to develop a theoretical model of reception as transformation of the reader-bystander into a collaborator akin to the spect-actor envisaged by Augusto Boal; b) to generate and specify that model in the course of case-specific analyses of concrete literary collaborative events and their respective modes of recipient address; and c) to bring the model into conversation with alternate conceptualizations of verbal world-making beyond the confines of dominant notions of ‘literature’ –  as, e.g., exemplified in the South Asian tradtions of sahitya as a praxis that posits writing as inherently ‘being-together’.