Sebastian Muth is a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on the relationship between social and economic stratification and language use in multilingual societies. He has worked on signage in politically disputed areas in post-Soviet space, on commodification of language study in the context of medical tourism, and on language and rehabilitation in the prison system. He will be discussing, in conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky, how linguistic practices are affected by and, in turn, affect, political economy. Seminar participants are asked to read Judith T. Irvine's "When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy" (American Ethnologist (1989), 16.2.248-267). Are the concepts and tools of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics  applicable to literary study? In particular, can Irvine's fieldwork with Wolof praise-poets of Senegal shed any light on how Western print literature responds to economic and social incentives? What ideological forms may mediate its responses, if any?