Reading in Detail: Type and Difference in Unmarked Texts

Departing from the premise that novelistic details function to particularize and to locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this talk examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. My focus will be on Anne F. Garréta's experimental novel, Sphinx (1986, English translation 2015), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison's 1983 short story "Recitatif," which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one of whom is Black. Drawing on Lukács's discussion of realism and typicality, I consider the ways that these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well their approaches to the representation of difference.