This seminar invites 20-minute presentation papers on the topics of novels, narratives, and narrators for the 2025 American Comparative Literature Association’s virtual conference. Interpreting literatures broadly, this seminar asks presenters to examine the aesthetic, ideological, and national-political theorizations of the novel form and analyze the novel alongside close readings of literary texts and considerations of narratives. This seminar asks what the analyses and critiques of the novel accomplish for readers and writers alike in the periods, stories, and genres taken as its subject matter: Does it underscore a utopian project that embraces a narrative of temporal and universal progress cemented by a predominantly Western consciousness? Do its authors creatively undermine that mimetic impetus and aestheticize their writings as literary critique of the narrative project of imperial modernity or of geopolitical linguistic dominance? Or, as Benedict Anderson has theorized in his famous text Imagined Communities, is the novel one of two major objects of print capitalism that narrated the nation form? This seminar also welcomes other approaches to the study of narratives, including the way the novel registers realism and omniscient narration in the 19^th-century novel; the way a narrator of a literary text mediates the tension between its plot, characters, content, and context, and complicates its own abstracted status by making such contradictions apparent; the politics of translation of literary texts into different languages; and the aesthetic intervention of resistance to capitalist and imperialist ideologies coinciding with the novel form. Though literary texts may be the discursive form analyzed most closely with the topic, this seminar invites panelists to consider other aesthetic and mediated forms such as poetry, short fiction, film, television, art, games, music, translated texts, etc. Please upload your abstracts for consideration onto the ACLA website by October 14, 2024.