Whose Agency? Representations of Inaction and Negative Action, in Fiction and Life Writing

ended

The WARINA project will analyse some fictional, autobiographical, and diaristic texts that represent characters who are unable to act, or who can only act for the worse, that is, perform what in this project will be called “negative action”. The project poses a special focus on how “inaction” and “negative action” activate different stereotypes about social categories such as race, gender, and social class. Its driving belief is that the study of fiction and life writing (autobiographies and diaries) will provide new insights into politically charged representations of inaction or negative action, results that will be achieved by the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical grid, combining literary theory, the social sciences, and cultural psychology. The concepts of inaction/negative action have not been studied as general topics in literature: they tend to be connected to specific authorial poetics, or to great cultural narratives. What is missing is a study of the specific ways in which rhetorical strategies represent and thus create images of inaction and negative action. This study will be conducted in close dialogue with social sciencists and social psychologists' research on agency. In particular, research objects will focus on 1) the use of cognitive metaphors to define what “action” and “inaction” are, and the implementation of metaphors of place that connect a certain place with inaction; 2) the study of emotions from a constructivist point of view, that is, with the aim of understanding how the same emotion can be represented either as being conducive to action, or to inaction, even in the same text; 3) the close observation of the ways in which characters or authors build their life narratives by selecting salient events, relationships, and media products. The corpus’s texts stem from the first half of the Twentieth century, a period whose culture informs some of the terms related the agency that are still in use today.