ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred (Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues. Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) was only the best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples address ethnic/race issues. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s the “Foreigner” (1900) the supernatural element is connected to the foreign identity of the protagonist. This seminar examines and assesses the various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality been used and by whom?

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To view literature and the visual arts as a form of conjuring up the dead, a form of remembering and mourning, has a long-standing tradition. In recent years this preoccupation has been supplanted by an interest in literary and artistic modes of coming to terms with and appeasing the undead. Two developments seem to contribute to the present concern with the liminal space between the dead and the living: the general lack of forms and rites when it comes to transforming the biologically dead into the symbolically dead; secondly, the sheer scale of anonymous mass deaths (in camps and on battlefields) which makes this predicament particularly tangible. The seminar seeks to combine multiple disciplinary perspectives: Anthropological, cultural-historical and psychoanalytic approaches aim at a more nuanced understanding of the processes of symbolic conversion, its successes and failures; a key aspect is the exploration of the aesthetic dimension of these conversion processes specific to media, such as literature, film, painting, or photography. Taking their cues from writers and artists as diverse as Georges Bataille, W.G. Sebald, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Robert Harrison, and Gerhard Richter, scholars from a variety of backgrounds (literary and religious studies, art history, philosophy and political theory) examine different modes and models of coping with or coming to terms with the anonymity and persistence of the undead. While we intend to focus this inquiry on German culture, we would also welcome papers dealing with other European, or non-European cultures.

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This seminar invites papers on the Faustian trope throughout world literature, in particular the concept of the human and its relation to knowledge, immortality, and magic. Papers may include analyses of canonical versions of the Faust story (Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann) as well as non-canonical and interdisciplinary approaches.

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The question as to how literature, along with other creative arts, both helps to determine and is determined by the human is at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism in Europe and the Americas. Art for art’s sake–both as an approach toward art and as an attitude toward life–promotes freedom and autonomy, aims for newness and originality, hails pleasure over instruction, and prefers form and beauty to content and truth. As such, aestheticism invites us to consider the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, especially in light of its purported severance between these two spheres. By widening the distance between art and life, separating aesthetics from the economic, scientific, pragmatic, and political, and trying to avoid the fate of “art for capital’s sake” or “art for the market’s sake,” l’art pour l’art critiques the dominant social and economic values that made such a redefinition of art necessary in the first place. This seminar thus aims to explore the extent to which art for art’s sake can be viewed as an attempt to rehumanize (rather than dehumanize) art, the artist, or the artistic receptor in ways that speak to the question of what makes us human. Seminar participants should thus discuss how the aestheticist view of art and literature is either life-sustaining or life-evading. Both theoretical analyses and textual comparisons are welcome.

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A common literary and dramatic theme in many cultures from many different time periods is the confrontation between humans and divine beings. These confrontations take many different forms, from imparting wisdom to imposing judgments, from playing pranks to threatening death. This seminar seeks papers that address literary and dramatic accounts of the meetings between humans and divine beings. (While papers addressing specifically religious narratives and texts, e.g., the Bible, the Qu’ran, are welcome, they should address these narratives and texts as literary productions rather than sacred scriptures.) We are looking for a slate of papers that examines a range of cultural backgrounds, time periods, and media. Topics of interest include, but are by no means limited to, the following: the status of knowledge/information gained in the divine human encounter; patterns or variations within and across different cultures; gods as dramatic personae; the fictional as revelatory and the revelatory as fictional; film/drama as religious spectacle.

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The term “humanism” has a vexed history, yet one that will not die. Many scholars speak in “post-human” terms, rejecting any concept of humanism on the grounds that the term masks negative agendas and repressive ideas. Yet many others find that they need to hold on to some, perhaps vitiated, concept of humanism, often for political reasons. For example, Edward Said, shortly before he died, wrote a book about humanism. Will any humanism be possible in the future? From this central question a range of questions could emerge. Humanism has been associated with technological and historical progress. Will it continue to be viewed this way? Is humanism possible in the future without progress? Will future humanism(s) hold on to some of the precepts of the humanist tradition, or will it take a different turn entirely, or will it exist at all? Will future humanism(s) be anchored in a tension between religion and secular culture, or is there a way to destabilize such binaries? How do we understand a synthetic approach to diverse cultures after postcolonial critiques to approach a form of global humanism? What are the effects of diasporic phenomena on humanism? Papers are welcome from a variety of critical approaches: Philosophy, Social Theory, Literary Studies, Psychology, Interdisciplinary Studies.

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This session grows out of the current debate about what does and does not constitute the human in the 21st century. In the current context of the complexity of medical innovation and research, the ways of remaking and repairing military casualties, and the debates about what constitutes the normal or normative in terms both of human bodies and human psyches, this session proposes a broadly comparative approach. Given the obsession with the vampire around 1900 and in our current age, it tracks the limits of the definition of the human in the context of these modern debates and the earlier fascination of the super-predator, the vampire. It seeks to locate this orientalist and gothic archetype at the cross-roads of cultural anxieties, be they intra- or inter-cultural, imperial or post-colonial. The session will interrogate what is entailed ontologically as well as aesthetically and culturally by this atavistic and notorious complement to other variations on the human.

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As an outcome of the Babelic curse, translation and its conundrums have often been associated with the limitations of the human condition. As a recurrent symptom of the nostalgia for the possibility of a language that could transcend difference, the sacralization of the original (as that which should remain forever stable and thus repeatable in its sameness) has pushed translation to the margins of scholarship and built a reputation for translators that is frequently associated with the role of an unwelcome, but necessary, traitor. However, in the wake of postmodern thought, which tends to emphasize the transformational vocation of any reading or interpretation, translation is turning into a privileged site for the understanding of the ways in which we appropriate otherness and renegotiate the traffic between the domestic and the foreign. At the same time, we are beginning to evaluate the many ways in which this negotiation inevitably reshapes and redefines cultural products and identities. From this perspective, we plan to examine how the traditional relationship between the so-called original and the translation, or the source and the target languages and cultures, can be rearticulated, and what this rearticulation might teach us about the ways in which translations and translators reinvent and recombine both the domestic and the foreign. In other words, we are interested in looking into some of the consequences of an “ethics of difference” (in Lawrence Venuti’s words) for translation, and invite specialists to send proposals that address these issues either in translation projects or translation theories.

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In this seminar we will explore different conceptualizations of the relation between “affect” and “the body” as a translational mechanism crucial for establishing, producing and articulating the entities generally labeled as “human.” This seminar therefore aims at establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between traditional notions used to describe this crucially “human” dialectic, belonging primarily to different strands of psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics, with other alternative ways of conceptualizing the nature of affect emerging within contemporary post-structuralist critical thinking, cultural studies and film theory. A key objective of the seminar will be to incorporate translation theory to the theoretical constellation at stake here in our attempt to discuss the mechanics of affect between particular “bodies,” since a process of “translatio” seems to take place not only in the production of affect, but most evidently in the different attempts to provide particular interpretations/readings of different modes of affect. Finally, and within this context, we will pose key questions concerning the very category of the “human” as the exclusive realm in which “affects” might be able to operate and thus investigate the possibilities for a more or less technologically sophisticated realm where “affects” manage to translate into their post-human or inhuman form(s).

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Arguably what makes us human is verbal, certainly written language. The need for translation reveals both the universality of linguistic communication among humans, and the differences separating languages and cultures. As a crucial communication tool, translation requires the translator’s invisibility, yet literary translation is often the opposite, a transformation of the original text that allows the translator to find his/her own voice as a writer. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of the original text into another language sometimes creates a new and “better” writer–Baudelaire’s Poe being a case in point. Issues discussed in the proposed two-day panel include translating as a bridge between writing and reading (cf. Proust on the writer as translator); the family romance of translation (translation as filial labor of love, yet also the locus of appropriation, misreading and oedipal conflict); translation as illustration of the original.

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Space and time have been central, organizing categories in many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic constructions of the human. What it means to be a human subject (or conversely, a subhuman one) have classically been defined along these two axes, in terms drawn from a well-known family of spatio-temporal metaphors and motifs – at one extreme, the human as constituted by limitless horizons and latitude of movement, at another, a providential, purposeful unfolding of history. This seminar invites papers that address and interrogate the centrality of either of these two tropes in representations of the human, in various kinds of texts and media, and across different historical periods and geographical contexts. Some questions that might be posed in this connection include: the privileging of a poetics of space and time, or vice versa, in different literary-philosophical discourses; the differential spatialities and temporalities of raced and gendered subjects within the normative space and time of Western ‘man’; property as colonization of space; the impact of recent transformations in regimes of space and economies of time on contemporary configurations of the human; the body as site and moment of subjection/subversion.

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Is it possible to articulate the subject that subverts the late-capitalist brand of Orientalism? Is there a homo-social system that sustains inter/national ties between men of empires? Are the nation-states in postcolonial East Asia semi-sovereign vis-à-vis the Western sovereignty? These are some of the questions that arise when we observe the terms of political, economic and cultural relations that cohere the Pacific Rim as a region. Consequently, it becomes necessary to explicate power relations that are organized around gender and race, and overdetermine the formation of gender and national subjectivity. This panel seeks to capture the critical junctures in which geopolitical designations of nation-states along the Pacific Rim, either as the colonizer or the colonized, reciprocally inform the concept and content of gender and nation. We shall inquire how gender and nation are trans-national and trans-cultural construction, while working out theoretical paradigms based on the (post)colonial histories as represented in films, literature and culture. To inquire into trans-pacific configuration of gender, sexual, national and racial/ethnic identifications, relevant questions might be: How does the concept of hybrid figure in this relation?: What kinds of masculine and feminine subjects emerge in both the metropolis and (post)colonies?: How do (neo)imperialisms of America and East Asian territories figure in this context?: How may the Pacific Rim (dis)articulate classic boundaries of nation-states and regions?: What are the cultural expressions of national subjectivity in the Pacific Rim?

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Despite recent work on theatricality, the term remains too often unexamined. What has “theatricality” been? In what historical contexts does the concept arise? Are there cognate terms? To what extent does “theatricality” relate to the theater? To what extent, on the contrary, does it describe not theater but those moments when other art forms cease to be themselves? Why does “theatricality” so often describe a slipping away from the human, a bestial mimetic practice? Why has theatricality become such an important theoretical term? Why, too, does theory continue to recognize itself as theater – and/or, why does it fail to do so? The aim of this seminar will be to investigate the theoretical and philosophical discourses surrounding theatricality and historical situations in which problems of theatricality arise.

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Few literary critics have so emphasized the at once constitutive and constituting role of culture in the formation of the human as Raymond Williams. Indeed, the concept that is perhaps most synonymous with Williams, “structures of feeling,” is an attempt to deal with precisely the centrality of human perception and action in reproducing social relations. Yet despite the fact that Williams’ work on the human was a formative influence on theorists such as Edward Said and Terry Eagleton, and was pivotal to the establishment of Cultural Studies, this contribution has been underrecognized and underappreciated. This seminar will attempt to redress this silence and explore the possibilities that Williams’ projects make realizable in our contemporary situation. Some of the themes which this panel will explore are:

• Nature, creation and the human
• The country and the city revisited
• Media and Williams
• Williams and the theory and politics of film
• Contemporary structures of feeling
• Memory, history and the human
• Williams and oppositional aesthetics
• Alternative country music
• Cultural materialism: then and now

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According to one etymology, the English word “man” shares a root with the Latin word for hand (manus.) Handiness is not first of all a definition of the human. Rather it functions as a gesture; the hand points to the human. Yet the hand that allows the human to be pointed out by pointing toward the ability to gesture also points away from the human (and from hands). Not only do apes’ gestures ape the human, but human gesture, when it imitates the non-signifying movements of nature, poses so grave a threat to human reason that Plato has to exclude the mimetic dancer, along with the poet, from the polis. This suggests what is at stake when theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Max Kommerell, Theodore Adorno, and recently Giorgio Agamben, turn to gesture as a mode of literary criticism, or even as the emblem of criticism itself. This seminar will address the question of gesture. Is gesture a sign of the human, or does it ask the human finally to sign off? Is the living being that gestures distinct from the zōon logon exon, the living being with language? And finally, what promise does gesture hold as a figure for literary criticism, or even for thought itself?

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This seminar proposes to investigate in historical and theoretical terms the multilingual contexts in which Yiddish literature has appeared. The vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish has a thousand-year history of functioning at territorial, linguistic, and cultural crossroads. A fusion language consisting of Romance, German, Slavic, and Semitic components, Yiddish throughout the modern era has excited considerable anxiety among its linguistic neighbors: it has been vilified as a thieves’ language; a degraded form of German; a linguistic symbol of irrationality and disorder; a mark of provincialism, parochialism, or Ashkenazic chauvinism; a language of the anti-Zionist left as well as the anti-modern right. In spite of these pejorative and stereotypical labels—which have been applied to Yiddish as much by Jews themselves as by antagonistic non-Jews—the Yiddish language has functioned as Ashkenazic Jewry’s primary language of mediation and cultural negotiation for nearly a millennium, and Yiddish culture for the past 150 years has produced a roving, experimental, subversive literature fully engaged with the leading modernist trends active in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. This seminar will therefore attempt to understand Yiddish literature as an inherently multi-lingual, liminal cultural production that can only be understood fully with reference to its dialogical relationship with contemporaneous and co-territorial literary cultures. As such, it intends to demonstrate the relevance of Yiddish, as well as other local, “minor” languages, to a theoretical understanding of the politics of literary form, the self-perception of the Other, and the problematic assumptions of the Human in the age of post-Enlightenment modernity.

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This panel proposes to continue inquiries from previous ACLA conferences which invited the application of post-colonial theories and concepts to the literature and culture of Eastern Europe and related geographical spaces. In previous sessions we discussed the classical empires (the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian) and their cultural influences. Last year’s panel focused specifically on echoes of the “Soviet Empire” on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. Working within the theme of this year’s conference, we can surmise that the empires roaming through the past and looming in the present of Eastern Europe have created not only Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia as a specific kind of Eastern “Other,” as opposed to the more “Human” West (i.e., enlightened, democratic, progressive, etc.), but also that Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia have at different times created their own hierarchies of “Others” (i.e., gypsies, various Asian peoples, etc.). These processes are recorded and reflected, however obliquely, though literary and cultural production, and conversely literature and culture also actively participate in the othering process. We invite papers on various aspects of Othering of and in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. We are interested in the ways that traditional empires “Othered” the peoples of Eastern Europeans, the Balkans, and Eurasia, but also the way in which Eastern Europeans “Other” each other in contemporary literature and culture. We are specifically interested in papers that explore how this creation of “Others” relates to themes of nationalism, violence, class, gender, and identity.

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The seminar interrogates the notion of “being at the threshold” as an ontologically scripted open (non)-place in conjunction with Agamben’s (2004:92) suggestion that “in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the terms of the operation was also at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new - more effective or more authentic - articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that - within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.” Papers address historical, theoretical, (bio)political, ethical and practical issues arising from various instantiations of the “open” in a zone of indistinction.

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Medievalism has for centuries been a tool for defining, but also temporalizing, essential European and by extension “human” traits, and has thereby provided a means for mapping humanity in time. Critical studies of medievalism have focused primarily upon its importance in the writing of European national identities and upon its role in placing colonized peoples “back” in human time. But medievalism was also practiced in European colonies, by the very people against whom Europe and the human were being defined. This seminar seeks to understand the uses, functions, and effects of those Other Medievalisms, specifically those developed outside the geographic and imaginary boundaries of “Europe.” What did medievalism look like from the other side of the colonizer’s “mirror”? To what effect did colonized Others use the tool of medievalism? What were their motives? What was their legitimization and rationale? Did their efforts intervene in the production of “Europe” and the “Middle Ages”? How did their actions interact with the possibility of their partaking in the civilized Human realm?

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Conventionally, the Gothic narrative traces the encounter of the human subject with the mysterious and horrifying supernatural, that lies beyond human experience. This seminar will address the tendency of the Gothic text to replace the supernatural figure of horror with the human Other, the person who is represented as being inhumanly horrifying. The seminar will be divided into three panels: The Racial/Cultural Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which Gothic horror is located onto the figure of the racial or cultural Other, who is represented as monstrous by the dominant culture. The Sexual Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which sexual difference results in horror. The Ill or Disabled Other and Gothic Horror panel will detail moments in which physical or mental difference is translated into inhuman monstrosity that results in horror.

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What is the portrait of the human (and inhuman) that may be drawn from the Holocaust? How did the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics redefine not only the human, but man’s other self? How did the Nazi perversion of Darwin and Spengler in order to create the Aryan ideal disturb the human sense of balance? Did the Nazis use Nietzsche’s superman or reinvent him? and for whom, the captor or the slave? How did Nazi euphemisms distort the language, the people to whom these euphemisms were applied, and the people who applied them, when dead people became no more than a “schmattes” (rags) and the prospective death of millions a “final solution”? Can the experience of the camp inmate in good conscience be spoken of in the same terms as the journey of the hero, as Primo Levi would have it, without doing permanent damage to the human spirit? Do we turn this crime “against humanity” into a crime “of humanity” when we attempt to study and understand those who perpetrated the Holocaust, as Claude Lanzmann states? How is it that such horror could produce such beauty as Celan’s “Todesfugue” and art of the caliber of Imre Kertesz Fateless without creating absolute revulsion of the artist and reader for their own carnivorous and cannibalistic appetites? Papers addressing these and other questions of what the Holocaust has done to and for the human being are presented.

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This panel invites papers from scholars considering literature by writers who define themselves as “Dalit” (untouchable caste) as well as literature concerned with the representation of untouchability. As Dalit literature has emerged in many of the languages of India (Marathi, Hindi, Tamil)as well as in English, it provides a rich site for the work of the comparatist. In addition, both writers and scholars seeking to broaden the scope of Dalit writing often bring these texts into conversation with the literature of African-Americans and that of other marginalized communities around the world. Presentations may consider some aspect of the following questions:

• What are the different ways in which the Dalit has been conceived of as subhuman? How has the trope of the animal/beast been important in this conception?
• In what way might Dalit literature be conceived of as participating in a new humanism which privileges the human experience as central and fundamental? For example, in the comparative gesture (by Dalit activists and writers as well as by scholars) that links this work with that of the Black American South, can we read a crosscultural humanism?
• What are the intellectual characteristics demanded of the Dalit/Dalit writing to be considered ‘human’, particularly in relation to Mandal commission politics, and/or in relation to the aesthetics privileged by mainstream literature?
• The theme of ‘humanizing’ the subject through literacy and education appears often in Dalit narratives. How does Dalit literature address this thematic frame?
• How does geographical space play a role in this humanizing mission?

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This seminar allows for papers ranging from first contacts in the New World and elsewhere to representations in fiction and non fiction of people as being human or non-human. For instance, papers about topics like Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery through Las Casas’s defence of Natives (their genocide) to colonial and postcolonial novels, and fiction about the holocaust and the Gulag would come under this rubric as long as they addressed the issue of what is said to be human and what is not.

This seminar is sponsored by The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

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Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism’s essentializing ethnocentrism. Papers may include: depictions of the relationship between technology, the human, and its other in literature and film; examples of historical and contemporary technologies and how they push at the boundaries of the human (cloning, prosthetic devices, gene manipulation, etc.); how and why science and technology make defining the human a pertinent concern for us today; and the possibility of a critical theory or ethics of technology based on ideas of what it means to be human vs. obligations to the other, we will address the religious, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the use of technology to define what is human and what is other than human.

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This seminar will explore treatments of the “human” family in visual culture, e.g., theater, cinema, photography, television, performance art, painting, and other visual arts. In what ways are families portrayed as something other than human? Why is performing the drama of human families and/or the human drama of families a site of contested values? How or why is the visual mode particularly suited to the representation of the human family drama? The goal of this seminar is to compare families and their humanity (or lack thereof) from different cultural and national perspectives and across the ages, from ancient times to the present.

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This seminar invites papers on the Faustian trope throughout world literature, in particular the concept of the human and its relation to knowledge, immortality, and magic. Papers may include analyses of canonical versions of the Faust story (Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann) as well as non-canonical and interdisciplinary approaches.

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Many twenty-first century European Institutions and individuals deploy symbols of the past to represent themselves in the present. In order to portray Europeans, for example, as democratic successors of the Greek City-States, descendants of the open-minded Renaissance man, or defenders of the Declaration of Human Rights, European Community officials use symbols to represent these values and explicitly or not to exclude others. So as to construct a new transnational identity, the European Union has an anthem and a flag, as well as joint cultural and economic ventures, such as the Erasmus Program and the Airbus industry. The proposed conference panel examines how European and diasporic artists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and singers use and interpret these and similar symbols of European unity. Some, certainly, may embrace them; others may interrogate or even subvert them, revealing inherent contradictions in the construction of a new European identity. Panelists themselves will stake out different positions on the general topic and discuss a wide range of source materials from or about the European Union’s member states (or candidates for membership). Basing their inquiry on concepts of national identity formation (such as Anderson’s “imagined communities”, Hobsbahm’s “invention of tradition”, Nora’s “lieux de mémoire”, Habermas’ “concepts of New Public Sphere”, Balibar’s “Marxian” analyses of “Europeanness”), and other analytical tools, panelists will examine European fictions (novels, theatre, films) and essays produced in the national and regional languages and cultures of Europe to better understand how an imagined community in the making defines itself and its Others.

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Since its inception in the late sixteenth century, the essay has existed in the space between fiction and fact, between art and science, between the discourses of the human and those of the nonhuman world. Its occupation of this liminal space positions the essay both as a site of the investigation of the human and its others as well as a means for that investigation. The papers in this seminar interrogate the essay in terms of the modes of subjectivity it occasions and in terms of the discursive properties of essayism which orient it for an understanding of the human and its others.

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The digital is perhaps the defining “other” of the human body in the late 20th century. We invite papers and/or performances that seek to investigate the informatic relationship between the animal and the machine, as Norbert Wiener phrased it in the subtitle of his Cybernetics. The relation of the carnal to the mathematical, or physical to digital, is a pressing contemporary concern for artists, theorists and writers. We would like to frame this question quite broadly as possible, in historical terms, inviting scholars specializing in all periods and areas up to the present, from the Baroque, the 19th Century and the early 20th to to the present. Our aim is to consider the relation of physicality and digitality, with a cast of conceptual personae that will include thinking machines, automata, robots, cyborgs, posthumans, and other hybrid monsters.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with the journal Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics.

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As a continuation from the 2005 ACLA meeting, this panel invites papers focusing on the Asian Diaspora, which challenges and resists political, ideological, cultural, and national boundaries. The physical mobility of diasporic people, either self-motivated or forced upon them by varied social and historical factors, creates spaces where ideas are exchanged, cultivated, and nourished, through these dynamic movements.
Possible topics of papers include:

• (post-and neo-)colonial landscapes
• choice of languages and textual experiments
• transnationality and identities
• intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and diaspora
• challenge to the notions of nation states, and homogeneity
• (counter-)memories and national history

Although focusing on the contemporary Asian diasporic literature, the seminar aims to discuss every (possible) dimension of Asian transnational writers throughout the world, including those living in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

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Animal Others play a major role in defining ideas of the human in literature, the visual arts, and culture from prehistoric times to the present. The panel will present broad cultural and theoretical perspectives on this issue as well as specific examples from a number of historical periods, cultural regions, genres, and media.

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What is the function of the animal in a post-human world? From Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto to Steve Baker’s discussion of contemporary animal art in The Post-Modern Animal, to the philosophical ponderings on man and animal by Derrida and Agamben, the question of the animal has been foregrounded as a theoretical question for our times. In the aftermath of what has been seen as a crisis in humanism and the insufficiency, if not impossibility of the human as promoted by the humanist enterprise, the arts and humanities have made a turn to the animal as a means of both exposing and shoring up human deficiencies—especially the deficiencies of our language and our ways of knowing. The term, “the animal,” Derrida reminds us, is itself a construct of a humanist world that posed this impossible, singular identity to oppose and define the identity of the human. Humanism, as Agamben also reminds us, judged itself and its progress in terms of a mastery over the animal and the distance the human traveled from an animal state. Are these claims justified and sufficient? This panel will consider both the status of the animal for humanism and the animals (or Derrida’s “animot”) that might replace the construct of the animal in a post-human world.

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This panel will examine the manner in which aesthetic form is rendered, and variously conceived, as external to patterns of normalcy. Formal experimentation proceeds from pre-established artistic, social and political criteria, and both shares with, and reacts to, dominant discourses. Subsequently, novel art forms are attacked on the particular grounds of debasing these accepted standards, of being degenerate or decadent. Papers are sought that analyze and critique techniques, styles and aesthetic forms that have been vilified as monstrous, particularly when their relationship to contemporary artistic, social and political paradigms establishes the grounds for this moral or critical opprobrium. Proposals are sought analyzing both literary and non-literary artistic media.

Seminar sponsored by the journal Studies in Philology.

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Symptomatic reading is one of the most pervasive critical methods in literary studies. Though many literary critics disagree with the premises on which Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson based their influential theories of symptomatic reading, our disciplinary adherence to the procedures of symptomatic reading is so thorough as to go unremarked. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson defines the symptom as that “whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects” (26) and states that what is most “interesting” in a text is what it represses (49). The critic’s task is “diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text” (48). Interpretation “always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code” (60). Symptomatic reading is a surface/depth model of interpretation that defines the text’s true meaning as what it does not say; the text’s gaps, silences, disruptions, and exclusions become clues to the text’s absent cause and determining structures. The critic must therefore reconstruct and reveal the “other scene” (of history, empire, sexuality, gender trouble) whose exclusion shapes the text. The purpose of this panel is to ask what other kinds of reading are possible, and what theories of interpretation and of the textual object those ways of reading imply.

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This seminar seeks to explore the effects of reaching the limits of Western epistemological and ontological discourses. The effects we have in mind encompass the storytelling function at work across the Western humanities: history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, film, etc. Our theoretical aim would be to collapse the various disciplines of the Western humanities into the same, which is to say, into the spacing of Derridean differance. We seek papers that solicit and disturb the epistemological privilege that the Western Academy, through its institutional authority, grants to the various disciplines in the Humanities. Thinking also of John Nash’s Equilibrium, our intention is that if no disciplines insist on epistemological privilege, a more open and intense dialogue can take place in the space of the same, which, we would insist, is a radical alterity. The notion of radical alterity we are operationalizing here outstrips the definition of the linguistic sign while at the same time giving rise to specific theoretical practices, in the Althusserian sense of this indexical expression. What kinds of positions do these theoretical practices enunciate in such disciplines as literary, cultural, and film studies? History, Philosophy, Linguistics? We look for papers that make increasingly explicit the global illocutionary force of deconstruction, the absent-present work of the erasure of the Western Humanities’ most precious concepts.

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This seminar will explore examples of sacrifice in literature in order to better understand how the human relationship to violence has been structured in a variety of ancient and modern contexts. Papers may discuss theoretical approaches to the issue of sacrifice or literary examples of ritual violence, heroism, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and punishment. Does sacrifice present a particularly human way of dealing with violence? Does sacrifice provide an incitement to violence or a humanizing of violence? How does sacrifice connect a narrative to notions of the sacred?

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Bombarded by otherness, the subjectivity springing out of the three sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition faces influence, invasion, and inspiration from innumerable sources in the Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an. Divinity, demons, destiny, and the desert all have their way with their human targets. The inscribed combat and collaboration between these biblical humans and their biblical others continues to resonate with believers and doubters alike. The use of a variety of theoretical and imaginative strategies helps to foreground the action at this dynamic interface. Polymorphous strategies are welcome, including rhetorical criticism, literary theories, cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, mysticism, sociology, psychology, and performance studies.

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The metaphysical view of the human involves, it has often been argued, a conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible. If a new understanding of the human implies putting this conceptual scheme into question, it would mean that the senses–traditionally relegated to one part of this division–would have to be reconceived. How are we to understand the senses in a non-metaphysical way, how are we to conceive of the relationship they entertain between them, and how can we think the fact of their multiplicity–the (surprising?) fact that there are several senses? These are some of the questions that guide this panel on the conceptual revolution of the senses, a revolution that we assume contemporary thought is undergoing. Topics include: towards a new empiricism; skepticism and the misconception of the senses; metaphysics and the senses; a politics of the senses; the “outside” of the senses; the privation of the senses, e.g. blindness, deafness, callousness; anesthesia, synesthesia; the question of total art; the relationship between the multiplicity of the arts and the multiplicity of the senses. We welcome work on any historical period and linguistic tradition and in the disciplines of literature, philosophy, film, art history, political theory, psychoanalysis, and music.

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In the turbulent 20th century, most of East Asian countries have been radically changed or affected by a series of revolutions: nationalist revolutions for independence, “proletariat” revolutions of class struggle, and various types of cultural, social, and artistic revolutions that aim to modernize social customs, arts and languages. “Revolution” was once such a popular concept that different classes, social movements, interest groups, parties, schools, etc. all competed with each other for the title of “revolutionary.” Revolution hence becomes an open field where different discourses struggle with each other, and it finds others not only among self-conscious conservatives, but also “revolutionaries” themselves. This session aims to discuss the influence of revolution in East Asian countries — both past and present. Possible topics are: What are the different interpretations of “revolution”? What are the permutations of the concept of revolution in today’s world? To what ends is the term revolution used/misused?; How do revolutionary discourses (the democratic idea of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc.) travel to East Asia and among Asian countries? How do the local people receive and revise these discourses?; How do revolutionary theories interpret the nature and function of art? How does revolution affect the production, circulation and consumption of artistic works? How is revolution itself presented in art?

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Animal Symbolicum — Homo Sapiens — Barbarian — Human — Woman — Overman — Counter-Human — Fellow-Human — Inhuman — Subhuman — Being-There — Being-With — Human Rights — Bare Life — Singularity — Immanent — Silence —

“The ‘I’ is a placeholder for the human voice.” This list, which could be expanded, testifies to the struggle we face as we try to assert ourselves in and through language. We find words for ourselves or for others. And we act on those words. Therefore, we also again and again need to free ourselves from those words, rebel against and reject them, extricate themselves from the languages to which they belong. Through language we negotiate our differences, assert what is important to us. We express and mask our respects and contempts, and we claim and reclaim our dignity. The “human” is a value in the sense of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral — a value subject to constant and multiple re-valuations, as difficult to surrender, as it is to assert. Any use of that term today requires a rigorous examination and awareness of the field of struggles surrounding the place of the “human” in language. We seek submissions, which explore instances of this struggle of the “human” as a value, and the search for alternatives. How have writers, philosophers, artists or human rights advocates grappled with this problem? We look for a variety of perspectives and media in the arenas of discourse, culture, postcolonialism, race, gender, and nationality.

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Medicine and healthcare are central and universal human experiences. Throughout the arts, medicine is represented in ways that are both realistic and metaphorical: from works on epidemics in classical antiquity to Renaissance images of anatomy and healing to modern narratives about illness and health to recent films that question the ethical boundaries of the profession. The complex relationship between medicine and human experience, between patients and practitioners, between medical ideals and practical realities, is explored throughout the arts in ways that provide a reader/viewer both identification and engagement but also some distance for judgment.This panel explores representations of medicine. Papers deal with single texts/authors or general topics, such as how art represents doctor patient relations, public health concerns, healthcare sites and circumstances, crisis intervention, aging, alternative treatments, and mental health issues. Representations across cultures and historical periods, and with a focus on both aesthetic and social contexts, are included.

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This seminar will explore the complexity and difficulty inherent in efforts to represent humanity during moments of social terror. Of particular interest will be essays that analyze how the politics of panic and terror associated with war, authoritarianism, fascism, empire, and globalization require the construction of an inhuman other. To what extent do torture, genocide, and other forms of military violence depend on an impoverished notion of humanity? How do these forms of violent othering relate to social practices of racial profiling, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, criminalizing of communities, classism, xenophobia and other ideological structures dependent on divisive notions of social identity? And what role has cultural production played in challenging these notions? How have cultural products attempted to mediate the trauma of terror, record alternative versions of official history, and suggest alternative, egalitarian worldviews? What role does culture play in the struggle for Human Rights? And how can the scholarly methods of Comparative Cultural Studies enable interdisciplinary investigations into the relationship between politics, aesthetics, psychology, and historical crisis? This seminar will take a global view of the ways that these issues have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century and will especially welcome studies that are cross-cultural or transhistorical.

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In “Printers’ Correctors and the Publication of Classical Texts,” Anthony Grafton remarks: “The corrector seems a preeminently modern figure… For the modern literary system, as Michel Foucault and others have taught us, is collaborative.” That Grafton, whose eloquent vision of Renaissance humanism is grounded largely in the traditional methods of the Geisteswissenschaften should nonetheless assume a familiarity with Foucault, is emblematic of the ways critical theory has influenced scholarship on Renaissance humanism. This seminar, accordingly, invites papers exploring how the Renaissance ideal of the Studia humanitatis might be rethought and redescribed in the wake of the great waves of critical and literary theory. And while Foucault’s reading of “that strange figure of knowledge called man” may well be a central topic of the seminar, papers could also address, for instance, how Certeau’s “mystic fable” has affected the study of Renaissance mysticism or how Derridean différance has influenced views of Renaissance philology. We also invite papers reconsidering the work of Burckhardt, Kristeller, Warburg, Yates, and Baron in the light of theory. Finally, papers examining the revalorization of hitherto ignored or neglected figures and topics as a result of theory’s influence are also welcome. In sum, with the recent deaths of Derrida, Said, and Ricoeur, and with the many conferences and publications marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Petrarch’s birth and the four-hundredth anniversary of the first part of Don Quijote, the moment is particularly ripe for comparatists to survey the state of the field.

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There has long been a common perception of realism as a disciplinary narrative mode, one which must exclude or assimilate extremes, to paraphrase George Levine. The papers in this panel examine the workings of exclusion or assimilation and the processes of “othering” in works of literary and cinematic realism. They consider the various others of realist texts and the importance of imperialism and globalization, narrative articulations of space, epistemological clashes, and political realities to the excluded or assimilated others that realism represents.

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Psychoanalysis has thoroughly transformed the traditional concept of the human. The psychoanalytic findings, such as the discovery of the unconscious, the intersubjective figuration of the self, the subject’s embeddedness in language, to name a few, continue to challenge any narrow or forcefully unifying vision of the self, transforming the social apprehension of the human as much as its aesthetic figuration. The presentations at this seminar fuse all these concerns to propose a perpetual agency of psychoanalysis in conceptualization of what it means to be a human.

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As suggested by the performative force attached to the Latin “humanitas” and its semantic proximity to ideals of “civility,” “cultivation,” and “urbanity,” premodern literary cultures picture humanity less as a fact of nature than as a fact of art. Indeed, unlike the modern conception of “the human,” whose definite article presumes a kind of categorical imperative, the premodern character of humanity denotes an achievement grounded in mastery of the various arts (of love and war, conduct and conversation, policy and politesse, thought and persuasion) transmitted in the body of texts and traditions still referred to as “the humanities.” One consequence is to identify humanity with “the humanities” themselves: are fully human those (and only those) initiated in the polite culture of humanist, mandarin, or clerical learning. However, a second consequence is that, precisely because human beings make themselves so, humanity announces the family of contrasting yet intimately related modes of being from which it arises. “The human” thus stands in protean relation to what, though “more” or “less,” is never wholly “other” than that: the gods and heroes, beasts and women, madmen and barbarians, prophets and poets, hierarchs and heretics who share the wider conceptual space within which notions of humanity operate. The seminar explores the exchanges, ratios, and metamorphoses this conception makes possible. Proposals are welcome from all fields of literary and cultural study, eastern or western, dating from classical antiquity to the threshold of the global modernity inaugurated in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

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In light of Giorgio Agamben’s ground-breaking theory of bare life, this seminar seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that re-examines the politics of life and death which produce, police, and define the human in opposition to the animal. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben writes: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83). Following Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power” and his claim that the modern state supplants the sovereign “right of death” by the power to “make live,” Agamben suggests that in the extreme case of the state of exception, sovereign authority propels this power to “make live” to a paradoxical excess; stripping individuals of the significant markers of social and political existence, only bare life can subsist. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben further argues that the anthropological machine itself produces bare life, a life that is neither human nor animal. We invite papers that explore how the dichotomy between man and animal produces a definition of the human that calls into question the relationship between the human and the non-human. Possible topics include: Can the animal respond?; “Biopower,” animality, and humanity; Dasein, the openness to a world, and the animal; animality, voice, and performative; “bare life,” death and the human; procreation, animality, and sexual difference; human, animal, and the (war) machine.

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What or who gets lost when we translate poetry of national, ethnic, or cultural others or poetry that is other? What or who gets found? In the end, is translating poetry always intransitive? Is it always other, which is to say something else than the writer’s, reader’s, and translator’s intents or interpretations? This panel seeks to explore questions of translating poetry: on the one hand the phrase describes poetry which translates its own otherness while at the same time translating experiences of l’étranger (e.g. cultural) from other to another, or from opposition to apposition as Édouard Glissant would say. On the other hand, the phrase describes the event of translating poetry as a poetry in its own right. We welcome papers which address translating the poetry of “the Other,” whether cultural, linguistic, or another historic era; comparative translations of a poem; poems about bodily or spiritual translation; poems that translate prose or vice versa, and other relevant topics. Original translations are encouraged for those papers that address works not written in English.

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In the post-Freudian West, dreams are most often understood as expressions of our unconscious, or subconscious, selves. But prior to and outside of the psychoanalytic tradition, dreams have often been seen as privileged locations for connection between humans and their others. Religious and mythological traditions from around the world emphasize the potential of dreams to lead the dreamer outside of herself, to provide access to super-human, extra-human, or other-than-human realms. Many cultures have thus produced literature in which dreams are shown to provide connection with the divine; to be a source of hidden truths; to allow the human soul to travel outside of the body; to transcend the human constraints of geography and time. How have world literatures figured dreams as a point of contact between humans and others? How do dreams figure the relationship between the dreamer and things outside of herself? What can humans do in dreams that they cannot otherwise do? How does the otherness of dreams serve to define the humanness of the waking self? What literary purposes do dreams serve, if not to elucidate the mind of the dreamer? Papers in this seminar will discuss literary accounts of dreaming which are outside of or challenging to the psychoanalytic tradition. We will discuss literature from a range of time periods, from Late Antiquity to the present.

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Neurologists from the nineteenth century to the present have actively engaged in debates about what it means to be human. For instance, late-Victorian laboratory experiments on the brains of frogs, dogs, pigeons and monkeys suggested that animal and human brains are uncomfortably similar. These findings caused scientists and laymen alike to ponder whether humans are soulless automata. This seminar will explore how literary authors after 1800 have intervened in debates regarding brain function. In so doing, we aim to fill a prominent gap in current scholarship. Although there has been much excellent work on the relationship between literature and science in recent years, there has been very little discussion of the traffic between neurology and literature. Rather than suggesting that neurology influenced literature or vice versa, this seminar will emphasize the complex dialogue between these two disciplines. To that end, we will consider papers examining literature from a neurological perspective, as well as papers performing literary explications of neurological texts.

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This panel seeks to explore the textual construction of Human, Animal, and/or Environmental Subjectivity in relation to each other. Papers from any theoretical approach will be welcomed, especially from: Ecological Criticism, Gender, Postcolonial, Ethnic, Subaltern Studies, Philosophical, or Psychoanalytical perspectives. Different definitions of Subjectivity are also welcomed. Though the object of study can be any text/s, fiction or not, belonging to any period or tradition, the paper should focus on the way the text constitutes the subject (Human, Animal, or Environmental). It should seek to answer these or similar questions:

1. How is the Subject constituted within the text on a formal, structural or aesthetic level?
2. Is there any Subjectivity achieved outside the text?
3. Is this a speaking subject? Who is s/he speaking to? What are the consequences of this speech? Is any kind of agency attained through this speech?
4. What is the relationship between the Subjective (the world of the Subject) and the Objective (the world of the object) world?
5. What is Subjectivity? What is its relation to the environment? Does Subjectivity necessarily imply consciousness and agency?
6. What are some moral consequences of subjectivity?

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This seminar will address the notion of the monstrosity of language. Vico, for instance, stated that all “poetic monsters and metamorphoses” take place as a particular kind of trope, one that creates new ideas by putting together incongruent figures. The problem, for Vico, is not necessarily the fact that these “poetic monsters” happen as a result of a “composition” or the positing together of two distinct forms. After all, it could be said that poetic language is always a way of subsuming diversity under one figure. Rather, Vico defines the monster as a poetic figure forged by an uncertain or illegitimate relation. For example, children born of prostitutes are “monsters,” according to Roman law, since they have a human nature crossed with the “bestial characteristic of having been born of vagabond or uncertain unions.” This seminar therefore invites papers that focus on the monster as a formation of an “uncertain” or illegitimate relation. What is an “uncertain” relation? What would be a “legitimate” relation? More generally, we invite papers that focus on the way rhetoric is theorized as “monstrous” or is figured as somehow threatening. Furthermore, we invite papers that study a specific rhetoric of monsters in a wide range of texts. How does the monster play a part in conceiving other relations to the human, to politics, to law, to literature, or to language in general?

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Translation, transposition, and transcultural intertextual dialogue figure significantly in the modern formation and transformation of critical discourse in and on fiction, film, and related literary forms. This panel critically examines such self-consciously displaced fictional and critical discourse, delineating its own territory in terms of an “otherness” that disrupts conventional configurations of purportedly “humanistic” canonical national literatures. Focused on twentieth-century transpositions (literal and literary), these papers explore the extension of earlier margins and representations of marginal or multicultural consciousness already essentially defining Russian, Latin American, and transnational literature. They examine metamorphoses of fictive form and critical discourse in terms of parody and stylization, translation and transformation, often embodied in grotesque, inhuman/e, animal or insect consciousness.

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The conquest and colonization of the Americas by the major powers of Europe forced human beings from three continents into permanent contact with their racial others. As Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Americas began to intermingle and intermarry throughout the Americas, colonial authorities tried to create laws to govern which races could and could not mix with one another and rubrics to categorize the children of mixed parentage. The Americas continue to exist as a space where different races both embrace and collide, perhaps more than any other place on earth. This situation begs the question: how do Americans (in the hemispheric sense) react to racial mixture? “Mestizaje, Mestiçagem, and Miscegenation: Mixing with the Other in the Americas” seeks to explore how the idea of racial mixture has been both welcomed and shunned throughout the Americas since the encounter. This seminar allows for synchronic and diachronic analyses of racial mixture within one country/region of the Americas, but it specifically hopes to discuss how the perceptions of racial mixture differ across the nations and cultures of the Americas.

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By defining the soul in terms of self-motion, Aristotle has established movement as a human affair. Yet already in Aristotle, “movement” refers both to a physical phenomenon and to an abstract notion (defined in the Physics as the actuality of the potential as such). The history of this figure runs at least since Heraclitus to reach our times with an unnoticed wealth of ambiguous usage. Think of expressions like the “stream of consciousness,” the “movement of thought,” or the “movement of meaning”; think of the notion of meaning as the effect of an incessant movement of signifiers, the movement of deferral and difference, the movements of desire; think of “lines of flight,” the “image-movement,” “speed” and “acceleration.” Movement is upon us, but what is it that we are saying when we apply the term “movement” (or its related figures) to the study of meaning in literature and the other arts? What critical force does this term carry? What makes it helpful, if it is, for textual analysis? What are its philosophical ramifications? What has the new art form of the moving-image contributed to the efficacy of this term or to our theoretical understanding of a notion of motion? This seminar presents studies of movement in literature, film, philosophy, rhetoric, and the arts. It also offers an investigation of the notion of movement even as it is applied in critical analysis.

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In Histoire de la Folie, Michel Foucault writes: “As death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, madness is its limit in the realm of animality.” This seminar will examine how writers, across disciplines and genres, utilize states of madness to interrogate such limits on the human. In questioning the meaning of madness, writers such as Kant, Rhys, Melville, Naipaul, Feldman, and Fanon also question the meaning of the human. While acknowledging the connection between madness and writer, the seminar focuses more specifically on the connection between madness and writing in various time periods and genres.

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The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

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Biotechnology, a technological corollary of molecular biology and the Human Genome Project, is continually redefining what it means to be human in the context of the natural world. Genetic engineering is producing animal clones, enhancing human traits and even creating new species. However, unresolved questions remain as to how these novel constructs will affect the idea of the human and its relationship with them. Papers that address insights into the “othering” mechanisms of biotechnology generated in the realm of literature are especially welcome. From Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Butler’s Dawn, the effects of technology on human subjectivity in the postmodern era are brought to light in fictional manner. The themes of these novels resonate with readers on how the human has been shaped by science. This seminar is devoted to coming up with new understandings of humanity in the face of novel biotechnologies that seem directed at dominating nature rather than evoking new paradigms in which we as humans can live more congruently with the ecosystem. In this postmodern era of technology evolving at lightening speed, it is ever more imperative that society can conceive of biotechnology through the lens of narrative fiction.

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This seminar aims to explore how the category of the “human” can come to be reformulated through the structure of perversion, especially in the readings of literary texts. The comparative study of literatures has been instrumental in forming the category of “perversion,” as writers such as Petrarch, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have, in their international receptions, helped to shape what counts as “perverse” in relation to the properly human. Lacan’s formula for perversion, a<>$, suggests that the pervert can present him or herself in such a way that would radically restructure relations between the human and its other: in becoming the “other” for a subject’s enjoyment, the pervert can test, contest, and reconfigure the limits of subjectivity. Freud, on the other hand, in insisting upon the perversity infused into the very constitution of the “normal” human subject, destabilized any sharp division that might be made between the properly human and its perverse “others.” Moreover, Deleuze’s work on sadism and masochism suggests that perverse discourses emerge in and through aesthetic categories that separate them from the properly “human.” A good example of the ramifications of this analysis would be Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation of the masochistic “Equus eroticus” in A Thousand Plateaus. We welcome papers that explore the connection between the perverse and the human in literary texts. Papers from diverse theoretical perspectives, and from any period and national tradition, are welcome insofar as they focus on the relation between the perversity of the relation between the human and its others.

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This seminar explores the concept of testimony beyond humanist interpretations of what it means to witness pain or injustice. In the humanist tradition, witnessing has often been construed ideally as the act of a self-identical subject, whose testimony would reflect an “I” that was fully present at the event(s) in question, and whose speech therefore establishes the conditions under which truth can be ascertained and a judgment can be rendered. These presuppositions belie the complex relationship between experience and representation (including memory), and also the infinite nature of justice, which cannot be reduced to a closed circuit of restitution and appropriation. The papers in this seminar explore ways in which the experience of witnessing exceeds the subject and its cultural, social and political correlates—the legal system, social constructions of identity, and the nation—and thereby allows us to rethink how we relate to human and non-human others (including the dead and disappeared), and consequently to the possibility of justice.

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Both matter and essence, the timeless memory of the humankind and the ephemeral glimpse of the mind, the eventful being of language has never ceased to captivate our imagination. The multiple ways in which language structures the human have given rise to some of the fundamental articulations of human cognition, individual and social being: the controversial ontological status of language (the aporetic divide between words and things, extending from Plato to Saussure and Foucault), the paradoxes of the language-thought correlation (the approach of Sapir-Whorf and the philosophical-rhetorical deconstruction of cognitive forms), the varied modes of ideological (mis)appropriations of language (the critical tradition from Gramsci to Bourdieu) and others. The heteronomy of our time appears as a good host for much of this intellectual questioning. It, however, also brings forth some new bifurcations and unexpected conjunctions. The panel Language Ideology and the Human addresses the position of language in the multi-paradigm setting of the new humanities: cutting across disciplines, epistemological frontiers, and political practices, it will examine the position and the potential of language as such.

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Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet’s ongoing attempts to integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.

This panel explores how the social, political, economic, and religious interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and produced a wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as expressed through literary and cultural productions from the ancient through modern times. Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited, to: Reading and Representing the “Subject”; Literature and Human Rights; Language and the Human; Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and Otherness; Media and the Human; The Human and the Natural World; Philosophy, Literature, and the Human; Gender and Transformation; Religion and Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and Temporal and Spatial Expressions of Identity.

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On numerous occasions Primo Levi —survivor, writer, practicing chemist— frames his understanding of the concentration camp experience in terms of a “laboratory”. Assaying that metaphor and catalyzing its permutations, Levi states that the limit experiences brought to light there are “pregnant, full of significance…[ask] more questions than…[they answer]…sum up…the entire theme of the grey zone and…[leave] one dangling”. In such limit experiences “it is possible,” he claims, “to recognize in an exemplary form the almost physical necessity with which political coercion gives birth to that ill-defined sphere of ambiguity and compromise,” what he calls a “terrible” but “indecipherable” world which must be, “if possible, understood”. Hypothesizing the validity of Levi’s metaphor, our panel proposes to examine the nature of the knowledge that arises out of such “experiments” and experiences of the limit. Examinations of these grey zones raise a series of profound epistemological, ethical, representational and linguistic questions: what can be known of such experiences; how can they be articulated; what are our needs and obligations with respect to them? Since we deem knowledge to be primarily an effect of retroaction, we do not seek to limit the panel’s discussion to the Shoah; rather, we believe that the conditio inhumana made manifest there constitutes a lens, albeit grey, for every articulation of knowledge of the human condition confronted with the non-human of a limit situation.

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– Mon semblable, mon frère – From Petrarch, who wrote familiar letters to his classical models, to Derrida, who could elide the boundary between his own voice and the voices of his texts to powerful effect, a disarming sense of intimacy between reader and text has been a consistent aspect of humanistic practise. Yet beside the extraordinary proximity achieved in humanistic reading there always seems to open a great distance, as though we are never so far away from our texts as when we are closest to them. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism Edward Said referred to this twinning of intimacy with exteriority under the headings of receptivity and resistence, but analogous formulations can be found in ethnography, ethics, political theory, and fiction. This seminar explored the simultaneity of intimacy and exteriority in three constellations.

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This seminar will explore the following issues:

1. the institutionalization of revolutionary individualism as a function of the novel and other narrative and political forms (17th-18th century novels, Declaration of the Rights of Man)
2. the theorization of group psychology (and authoritarianism) provided by Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their studies of totemic religions and mass culture
3. the description of the multiplicity as a function of Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s account of power.

This panel will provide historical, literary and theoretical dimension to the debates on the shifting site of sovereignty and domination in debates about the ”Human.” It will insist that this understanding is vital to our work in humanities.

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Language rights of indigenous peoples are acknowledged and protected by national constitutions, international treaties and declarations. As activist movements increase, indigenous writers are reviving and developing written literature in their languages. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, indigenous language publications hold a precarious place in the literature marketplace, a function of the specific issues confronting the individual language communities: official language status, socio-political and economic status, education and literacy, access to media and publishing, shift from oral to written tradition, the existence of a viable reading public and the identification of a national and international audience. Some authors are leaders in political indigenous rights movements and assert their linguistic rights by writing in their native language, while others write in Spanish or English, in a mixed-language style expressing their cultural and linguistic identity. The literary texts are published in dual-language or translated editions in order to reach a wider market. Papers in this seminar examine both Guatemalan and Peruvian indigenous literature, and reflect literary, linguistic, anthropological and political perspectives. Topics cover the socio-cultural content of contemporary Mayan literature, and the profound influence of the oral tradition on the written genres. Canon formation and style in both literary and performing arts are discussed, and linguistic issues are addressed in the context of bilingual authorship, adaptation to audience/reader, and questions of translation/re-writing. Concluding papers analyze the financial and political factors affecting the status of Mayan and Quechua languages and publications.

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George Eliot writes in an 1859 letter that the primary task of art is to “enlarge men’s sympathies,” enabling us to “imagine and to feel the pains and joys” of people utterly unlike ourselves. Thus, she promotes a literary ethics, one based in the individual experiences of the artist and audience over theoretical principle and abstraction. Along with the possibility for compassionate understanding, this model brings with it the very real possibility of violation–for instance, the collapse of a distinction between the self and other people and the consequent subjugation or effacement of these others. The focus on individual experience also risks obscuring political and historical concerns. How do we confront these dangers? Is there an attendant danger in not imagining? As writers and readers, how can we imagine the other ethically? Although anxieties about failures of empathy and ethics may arise with urgency when we confront moments of crisis, such as war, terror, agony, or grave loss, how is the ethical imagination also challenged by mundane and everyday otherness? Responding to critics and philosophers such as Nussbaum, Sontag, Scarry, and Bakhtin, this seminar will explore the limits of the imagination, what lies beyond the boundaries of the imaginable, and how literature limns this boundary. The impulse to imagine others appears inherently human. Can we assure ourselves that it is also humane?

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Hypertext literacy is a literacy made up of new and technologically altered kinds of access. Publishing on the web has made the virtual printed word the creation of not just the select and selected few: anyone now can easily publish a web site that reproduces the form of established publications, whether journalistic or academic, while the content can bear little to no resemblance to the kinds of publications that trained the web-writer’s eye. The web also produces its own forms of public writing, like blogs, where authority is conferred not by resemblances but connections. Being hypertext-literate would perhaps better be described as being ‘fluent’: not simply knowing the markers of what constitutes literacy but partaking of a flow of writing in which meanings and connotations take unexpected turns that escape their writers’ control. This seminar will explore how this new form of literacy influences and alters our encounters with textuality: for the readers, creators, performers, students and teachers of texts. The papers in this seminar look at how this medium escapes or reinforces existing cultural hegemonies, and affects our creative and pedagogical practices as we attempt to transmit not static bodies of knowledge but the experience of being fluently literate.

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Colonial discourses of travel and the distinction between the Human and its Others have fed off one another. Mobility as a quality of the Human and fixedness as an attribute of the Other remained central to the perpetuation of this binary and its geopolitical execution in the form of the spatial disempowerment of the Other. The flow of migration from the “South” is causing a redistribution of space and redrawing the former geographies of otherness and humanness. Lavie’s “the savage is no longer out there but has entered the home here and fissured it” echoes Ha’s “everywhere we [non-westerners] go we become someone’s private zoo” and Lazreg’s “theater of the indigenous.” These scholars emphasize the contemporary residues of the distinction between the Human and its Others. This panel will investigate the persistence and (re)deployment of this distinction in current narratives, discourses and theories of movement and intrusion into foreign spaces.

• Are Otherness and Humanness still coterminous with space and geography?
• How do migrant narratives strategically and subversively (re)deploy this distinction?
• Are there residues of this distinction in postmodern and postcolonial discourses of movement by Deleuze and Guattari, Clifford, Kaplan?
• How do humanitarianism and the distinction between the Human and its Other feed off one another? I.e., in which ways are current travels to ‘rescue’ Afghan women and other incursion into foreign territories to protect human rights (ex. the debate over “genital mutilation”) epistemologically filiated to this distinction?
• When do human rights become a humanizing mission?

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In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said defines humanism as “the practice of participatory citizenship” whose “purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny” and thus disclose its “human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present” (22). In a postcolonial and global era that bears witness to a rapid mobility of peoples, it is imperative to rethink humanism no longer as a practice that defines the human to exclude other humans but as the practice that opens to a wide gamut of political and aesthetic forms of representation of the “global hybrid” that emerges in the public realm of the global sphere. As different cultural, linguistic, social and political realities are leaking into each other and the rapid flows of capital and labor force are producing new social, economic and political conditions of co-existence, the reinvention of the public sphere and the active participation in what Etienne Balibar calls the constitution of “a citizenship-in-the-making” are more than necessary. Our seminar thus focuses on humanism as a “democratic practice” and an intellectual praxis in the context of the newly constituting and constituted postcolonial and global conditions and addresses the need to rethink the field of comparative literature as a form of humanistic practice that can contribute to the envisioning of a global community open to hybrid forms of existence and representation.

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“Spirits”: ghosts, faeries, demons, and their teeming brethren have never quite made the transition to humanity, yet writers from all epochs have attempted to “embody” them in literature and explain their interactions with humankind. This panel solicits papers that discuss the peculiar magic inherent in attempting to define spiritual beings in anthropomorphic ways, chronicle contact between the human and spirit realms, or describe the paranormal in earthly terminology. Questions to explore: How do spiritual beings “translate” from older genres like the folktale and epic to more modern genres/audiences? From animistic cultures to non-animistic ones? Have spirits become an obsolete or irrelevant in postmodern writing? How have they evolved, faded, or transmogrified?; How do “culturally specific” spirits (e.g. ban sidhe, Dryads, animal spirits, rada and petro of Vodun, gandharvas of Sanskrit poetry, La Llorona, hathors of ancient Egypt) transmit the beliefs, memories, and Weltanschauung of the cultures to which they pertain? How do they function when transplanted to other cultural audiences through the medium of texts?; How do Eurocentric and Native American spirit mythologies impact Native/American literature?; Are there such things as “spirit imperialism”–texts in which the spirits of a colonized people are supplanted (linguistically or otherwise) by those of their conquerors, or texts in which spirits act as symbols of conquest/possession?; How do spirits support, resist, or redefine literary definitions of femininity and masculinity? How do they relate to earthly geographies and chronologies? How do they participate in what Harold Bloom has called “the invention of the human?”

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In this panel we will explore human time, that is to say the anthropological or socio-psychological dimension of time, as it is expresses itself in different media such as literature, film, the visual arts, etc. Human time, as opposed to objective time (i.e., geological time or what Aristotle called in his Physics “the time of the stars”), is a development of the subjective theory of time first formulated in Augustine’s Confessions. However, “human time” is not reducible to subjectivity, but expands the horizon within which putatively “subjective” notions of time can become significant for a critique of culture. In other words, we will ask how notions of time inform our ideas about cultural artefacts (e.g. in terms of collective memory), paying particular attention to their mode of appearance (representations in and of time). This seminar thus proposes to examine various questions related to how time is an issue for and an integral part of the human being, using art “the quintessential human activity in which man reflects on himself” as a starting point. We invite papers that ask how various media constitute human temporality differently and if there are any general propositions or conclusions that can link the investigation of human time with cultural theory.

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A “simple” question: In which language would universal human rights be expressed? That “non-universal” particular, the English language? By diagnosing the plight of stateless peoples and the failures of minority treaties after WWI, Hannah Arendt argued that the possibility for human rights would be inextricably linked with the sovereign power of nation-states. While the bulk of engagements with human rights have focused on the legal machinery of the modern state—the role of the decision and the exception, and the proliferation of extra-juridical territories—the function of language for materially enacting these policies has not borne the same scrutiny. Since Aristotle, sovereign powers like the nation-state have mobilized the category of the “human subject” as a being capable of language. Yet the nation-state adjudicates the limits of the human subject because people can only be recognized as human within a particular national language. A concept of universal humanity seems aporetic. This panel focuses on how language enfigures the human to provide the stable locus around which legal measures such as “rights” can be declared. For example, given the imperial and colonial legacies of the British and American empires, what hegemonic roles may “Global English” play to affect the possibilities of rights before issues of legality, “governmentality,” natural or civil rights could be claimed? What role will translation perform in articulating, defending, or foreclosing the possibility of rights? How will language mediate the emergence of extra-legal zones where some forms of life are thrown into camps? What is ‘lost’ in translation?

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From La Mettrie’s query about the human’s vegetal and mechanical tendencies (Man: A Plant / Man: A Machine) to Heidegger’s assertion (in the lectures on technology) that it belongs to the essence of man to become a tool for Being, definitions of the human have been bound up in vexed and complex ways with definitions of technics and technology. In this seminar, we propose to explore the conjunction of these definitions in literary and philosophical texts of any period or genre. We are particularly interested in submissions that conjugate theories of technics with those of literature or language. What happens when language destabilizes rather than shores up definitions of man as animal rationale? When literature is no longer a space of culture or of spirit but rather susceptible of automatization; thought from the side of the event rather than of the communication of its effects; when it becomes a grafting of living and dead, a space of hybridity or prosthesis? Who speaks or writes in this space?

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This seminar invites reflections on literature and language reform. More specifically, we invite participants to consider how nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist and internationalist language projects at once destroyed and reconstituted —- literally re-formed —- imaginations of language as something (uniquely) human: a double movement manifest in the para-literary and masocritical activities of historical and contemporary avant-gardes, in post-structuralist translation theory, and in current models of and for world literature. Papers might address the consequences for “human language,” and the relevance for literature, of any of the following or related topics in language politics and language ecology: alphabet reform; language purification; orthographic standardization; official language policies; international auxiliary and planned languages; global languages; monolingualism and plurilingualism; machine writing and machine translation.

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The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of “difference” has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human “difference” such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and “minority” literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of “difference” as it relates to the “human.” How does “difference” operate within the practice of “comparison,” especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as “language,” “culture,” and even the vague notion of “sensibility”? How do various categories of “difference” such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the “human”? Comparative analyses of regimes of “difference” across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome.

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Since Plato and Aristotle “the human” has been understood in terms of being-in-community, a being shaped by the unifying principles and techniques of shared civic and social responsibility. These principles and techniques are often assumed to be complementary: on the one hand, an often totalizing idea of community–the myths, fantasies, and ideologies which found it, and which typically assert its cohesion and communion around such markers as nation, culture, citizenship, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on–and, on the other, the particular rituals, practices, and performances enacted to sustain and reiterate this idea–rituals of eating, dancing, singing, mourning, gaming, warring, orating, poetizing, among others. However, while these practices aim to affirm the commonality or self-sameness of a community’s members, several recent theorists (Anderson, Nancy, Agamben, Butler) have suggested that the repetitive, citational form of ritual itself introduces a tension or an otherness into the communal structure, unworking the community in the very work of its perpetuation, and opening it out to broader ethical and political contexts. Further theorists (Said, Benhabib, Pratt, Laclau and Mouffe) have highlighted the oppositional practices—political action, parody, improvisation—that human “others” have turned against communities’ claims to univocity. This seminar is interested both in analyses of specific human practices and the tensions they introduce into a particular historical idea of community, and also in considerations, within particular theories of community, of the confrontations between commonality and difference, “humans” and “others.”

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This seminar will explore the uncertain place of economic thought in the contemporary study of aesthetics and material culture. In the social sciences, human agency has increasingly come to be understood in terms of acts of consumption rather than acts of production or self-production. Does this suggest that philosophical conceptions of self-determination have been abandoned in favor of economic models of rationality? How do these developments alter our view of the human being as an essentially historical entity? Might the critical force of aesthetic analysis rest on its capacity to prompt a rethinking of the relationship between mental and material labor? Participants are invited to consider the ways in which literary discourses offer unique insights into the powers–and dangers–of paradigms of production, utility, or value. Do traditional distinctions between the economic and the social still prove adequate where the relationship between aesthetics and politics is concerned? To what degree has the conceptualization of signification always relied on notions of money or material exchange?

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In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred (Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues. Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) was only the best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples address ethnic/race issues. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s the “Foreigner” (1900) the supernatural element is connected to the “foreign” identity of the protagonist. This seminar examines and assesses the various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality been used and by whom?

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How can figures of form, rhyme schemes, repetitions, rhythmic elements which pervade literary works - often in so far as they are literary – be distinguished from the formulaic? When does a metaphor become a dead metaphor? When does repetition turn from a literary / stylistic device into cliche, into the hackneyed or everyday? More broadly speaking, how do all of these questions contribute to our (human) ability to recognize repetition as such in its difference from what is being repeated? Papers addressing all aspects of figures which oscillate between the heights of form and the abysses of the formulaic welcome. Topics might include but are not limited to: lists, “received ideas”, rhetorical questions (how can they be distinguished as rhetorical), dead as opposed to living metaphors, and other figures of repetition.

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The familiar letter has been at the heart of a series of humanisms in Europe, from the love story of Abelard and Héloise and its echoes in Rousseau and others, to the inversion of European perspectives in the many novels written in the “Persian Letters” or “Turkish Spy” mode. The letter has also played a role in presenting the post-colonial subject, in works as diverse as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre. In each of these historical instances, letters have played a central role in redefining subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Paradoxically, while the relay mechanisms for mail delivery have become ever faster and more secure, the content of letters has shrunk, along with their projection of human subjectivity. The epistolary novel had become a rarity by about 1850. Though we may not take at face value Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement that “In a social configuration in which each individual is reduced to the level of a function […] the ‘I’ in the letter is always something of a mirage,” the replacement of corrrespondence by e-mail seems to have driven the final nail in the coffin of “letterature.” This seminar will explore the issues emerging from the above exposition, and contest its admittedly one-sided history of epistolary humanisms. Papers that interrrogate theories of epistolarity (e.g., Derrida, Kittler, Siegert), that adduce examples (genuine or fictional) from non-Western epistolary practices, and that treat electronic forms of epistolarity are all especially welcome.

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Confronting his creator Victor Frankenstein, the monster exclaims: “My form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.” Taking our cue from the monster, we invite proposals that explore the relationships between reproduction and monstrosity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print and visual culture. The areas we are interested in exploring include:

1. the relationships between technologies of reproduction and concepts of the monstrous copy or “filthy type”;
2. the ways in which technologies of reproduction transform and/or deform the human;
3. the ways in which technologies of reproduction produce “filthy types,” i.e., bad writing and/or bad characters;
4. the ways in which “filthy types”—the criminal, the pornographer, the revolutionary—employ technologies of reproduction like the printing press;
5. seditious literature and criminal biography;
6. conceptions of the reproductive body in scientific and medical discourse.

The seminar welcomes contributions from scholars doing work on print culture and literature; popular and visual culture; media theory; the history and sociology of reading; feminism and gender studies. We also welcome papers addressing broader questions regarding monstrosity in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century: How do technical and scientific innovations affect conceptualizations of monstrosity? What do conceptualizations of monstrosity tell us about changing definitions of the human/non-human during the period? What defines a monster as such? Are monsters necessarily singular or can there be a community of monsters? Can monsters reproduce themselves?

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To view literature and the visual arts as a form of conjuring up the dead, a form of remembering and mourning has a long-standing tradition. In recent years this preoccupation has been supplanted by an interest in literary and artistic modes of coming to terms with and appeasing the undead. Two developments seem to contribute to the present concern with the liminal space between the dead and the living: the general lack of forms and rites when it comes to transforming the biologically dead into the symbolically dead; secondly, the sheer scale of anonymous mass deaths (in camps and on battlefields) which makes this predicament particularly tangible. The seminar seeks to combine multiple disciplinary perspectives: anthropological, cultural-historical and psychoanalytic approaches aim at a more nuanced understanding of the processes of symbolic conversion, its successes and failures; a key aspect is the exploration of the aesthetic dimension of these conversion processes specific to media, such as literature, film, painting, or photography. Taking their cues from writers and artists as diverse as Georges Bataille, W.G. Sebald, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Gerhard Richter, participants examine different modes and models of coping with or coming to terms with the anonymity and persistence of the undead. While we intend to focus this inquiry on German culture, we also included papers dealing with other European, or non-European cultures.

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Studies of exile that focus on homelessness as the impetus for the émigré’s scholarship neglect two key aspects. First, this tendency has resulted in overlooking the significance of what Bruce Robbins calls the “situatedness-in-displacement.” Secondly, the interest in the epistemological value of exile has foregrounded its value for Western scholarship and neglected the bearing of émigrés in the non-Western world. In an effort to reevaluate the link between exile, Otherness, and critical consciousness in view of these considerations, this seminar seeks to examine the ways in which intellectual emigrants engage with their new surroundings. The first panel critically re-examines the question of exile vis-à-vis Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and their crucial role in the formation of Comparative Literature. The second panel raises questions concerning exile, language, and memory with regards to Rifa’al-Tahtawi, Eva Hoffman, Adam Zagajewski and Salman Rushdie.

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The goal of this seminar is to reflect upon the dehumanizing and uprooting capacity of language through the concept of “exapropriation”, a term coined by Derrida in his later works. The term exapropriation, when applied to language, expresses the double move of how language puts the human in place (hands it the qualities that are proper to it, appropriation) and at the same time dehumanizes (pulls the human out of its proper place, expropriation). We will focus on the imminent convergence of the tele-technological and the (post)colonial uprooting of place and the human as witnessed in contemporary globalization. On the one hand we will define exapropriation in relation to literature and the tele-technologies that uproot and exapropriate language and place itself (telephone, television, e-mail). This is a path that is explored by Derrida himself when he characterizes these technologies as “machines that introduce ubiquitous disruption, and the rootlessness of place, the dislocation of the house, the infraction into the home.” (Derrida 2002: 91) In this case, we encourage proposals for papers that address the intertwining of language, technology, and the inhuman in contemporary literature. On the other hand, we encourage the submission of papers that utilize “exapropriation” as a concept for the analysis of postcolonial literature and its uprooting instances of dehumanization.

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Generally, this panel seeks to explore the relations between the human or the post-human subject and its ecologies. The panel seeks contributions from humanists and post-humanists on the ecological, ethical, political, social, and/or economic consequences of such conceptions as “the human,” “nature,” and their variants. One of the goals of the panel will be to debate the extent to which such conceptions themselves already form an or multiple ecology/ies; that is to say, the extent to which they already demarcate and/or engender territories of “real” ecological consequence. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

• How do race, gender, and sexuality shape the ecologies of the (post)human?
• Where do (post)human ecologies end?
• How are ecologies shaped by representations?
• How are representations shaped by ecologies?
• What kinds of ecologies are there? Are there sound ecologies, cinematic ecologies, etc.?
• Where is the ecology of the (post)human to be situated?
• What are the ecologies of empire?
• Are ecologies real? What ecologies?
• Are there significant differences between human and post-human ecologies?
• What do ecologies exclude as part of their self-formation?

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Postcolonial theory has frequently asserted the value of positionality in order to foreground the politics of discursive authority. Positionality has generally been thought to include race, gender, sexuality, and class but has more recently come to include geographical and biotic space. In an era of increasing ecological degradation, the mutually constitutive relationship between social inequity and environmental problems has been more starkly illuminated, as the recent tragedy in New Orleans has shown. In an effort to understand how the history of empire has altered both the literal and literary landscape of postcolonial studies, we seek papers that explore these points of contact. This panel engages the connections between postcolonialism and ecocriticism in historical terms as well as their contemporary manifestations in areas of the world that remain particularly vulnerable to environmental crisis, (neo)colonialism, and globalization. Papers will address these, among other questions: Are postcolonial and environmental concerns compatible? What emergent theoretical paradigms are needed to address both fields? How do postcolonial authors imagine and theorize the relationship between human and non-human histories? What is the relationship between ecological imperialism and literature? Why has ecocriticism neglected the (racialized) history of empire, and what might it gain from a thorough engagement with postcolonial studies? How might these knowledges be drawn upon to guide the futures of sovereignty and sustainability?

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This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a “prosthetic god,” following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke’s seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom. We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the “cyborg” still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its “proper” (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the “post-human” (K. Hayles) or the “symbiont” (G. Longo) any better?

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Creativity is often cited as a privileged defining trait of human beings. This seminar seeks to explore the relationship between creativity and the human as expressed through literature and the arts. Encouraging a wide variety of interpretations and approaches, possible papers might focus on the creation of Humankind, human creativity and creations, and the role of creativity itself in creating the human. The seminar, while exploring the edges of creativity’s possible defining presence in the human, might raise questions such as: Is creativity specific to the human? Does creativity bridge the human to the divine? Can creativity exist in the absence of the human? Can the human exist in the absence of creativity? Is the human at risk in creativity? If creativity has an opposite, what would be its implications for the human?

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Is the “primitive” human, pre-human, inhuman, superhuman? For whom and in what circumstances? The notions that the alleged “civilized” world has produced about its cultural “other” in different periods and contexts can be said to oscillate between the image of a disturbing savage —an irrational, beastly creature who can only in some cases attain an acceptable level of humanity through exposure to “progress”— and that of an innocent, non-speculative, hence nobler and more powerful model able to offset the discontents of a secularized and alienated modernity that has subordinated its humaneness to material advancement. The purpose of this seminar is to engage with various definitions and uses of the “primitive” in both Western and non-Western contexts. We will explore the relationships (tension? coexistence? partial overlapping?) between apparently contrasting visions that the West has generated about other cultures (chronologically or spatially distant from Western modernity). But we will also compare Western perspectives on “civilization” and the “primitive” to the discourses produced by non-Western cultures on those issues. How and why did the construction of the civilized-vs-primitive dichotomy become production of values? Is it possible to conceive a critique of civilization and of its notion of humanity from a primitivist perspective? What role does the aesthetic play in the consolidation or the problematization of such categories as “civilized”, “primitive”, “savage”? The seminar welcomes papers addressing those and other related questions through texts from various disciplines (literature, critical theory, cultural studies, anthropology, visual arts, film studies, etc.).

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This seminar takes up the intersections between poetics and choreography. In the context of the ACLA conference on “The Human and Its Others,” we will think about the ways in which the human body can become a figure for issues in poetics, as well as the ways in which various ideas of poetry often invoke the human body: as metaphor, as referent, as audience, as performance. Our papers will range in historical period and literary field, though most will take up issues in modern performance studies. Our conversation will attempt to offer wide-ranging definitions of both poetry and choreography. Dance performances as well as theories of dance, poetic texts as well as theories of poetry will be our subjects. We hope to end our seminar with a workshop performance of a piece by Jonathan Appels, performed by dancers from the American Ballet./p>

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This seminar intends to examine the role of books in the cultural and social circuits of various local spheres at different historical stages, and the critical implication of this sociological context to our readings of traditional or modern literary texts. The panel will welcome diverse representations of how historical considerations of the production and circulation of books can be fruitfully applied to interpretations of specific literary examples or social phenomena. Overall, it is hoped that the seminar might bring out a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration about the interplay between the objective existence of books and the formation of identities and meanings.

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This seminar will explore the transformations of the human body imagined by the various avant-gardes during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period in which the celebration of technology transformed our understanding of the human: the typewriter transformed women into writing machines; radio stripped listeners of all senses except hearing and electrified our ears; the camera became a prosthetic eye through which the modern world could be seen in a radically new light; modern architecture introduced new possibilities of moving through space. In short, modernity turned human bodies into technologically-determined androids: all senses were now mechanized and the modern world was perceived through a series of equally modern prosthetic devices.
This seminar welcomes paper proposals examining the various androids imagined by the avant-gardes: from the surrealist plot to transform authors into automatic writing machines to the futurist design to accelerate human movement and turn poets into racecars. How were mechanical inventions recorded on the human body? What effects did radio, film, the gramophone, dictaphones, cameras, automobiles and airplanes have on authors? How were these transformations perceived by various avant-garde groups around the world?

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The question as to how literature, along with other creative arts, both helps to determine and is determined by the human is at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism in Europe and the Americas. Art for art’s sake–both as an approach toward art and as an attitude toward life–promotes freedom and autonomy, aims for newness and originality, hails pleasure over instruction, and prefers form and beauty to content and truth. As such, aestheticism invites us to consider the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, especially in light of its purported severance between these two spheres. By widening the distance between art and life, separating aesthetics from the economic, scientific, pragmatic, and political, and trying to avoid the fate of “art for capital’s sake” or “art for the market’s sake,” l’art pour l’art critiques the dominant social and economic values that made such a redefinition of art necessary in the first place. This seminar thus aims to explore the extent to which art for art’s sake can viewed as an attempt to rehumanize (rather than dehumanize) art, the artist, or the artistic receptor in ways that speak to the question of what makes us human. Seminar participants should thus discuss how the aestheticist view of art and literature is either life-sustaining or life-evading? Both theoretical analyses and textual comparisons are welcome.

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This seminar will focus on the actual act of defining “the human” in opposition to the deemed “other.” This act anthropomorphizes the world both through its acceptance and its rejection (you are human, you are not human); it shapes the way we view ourselves and the rest of the world. Exploring this act of “defining-through-opposition/the other” in terms of what has been deemed “non-human,” directly puts into question the very structures that hold the concept of “the human” in place. In the end, it can potentially be seen as an act of oppression, particularly through its rigidity and its way of masking itself as “truth.” The interest here lies in the actual consequences of this discourse and, more importantly, the consequences that befall the “others.” In other words: how do these definitions affect the ways in which we treat ourselves and the (so-called) outside? In this seminar, I would like to emphasize the anthropomorphizing of the so-called “rejects” of the world: womyn, “minorities,” animals and nature (through this rejection “methodology”). Some possible topics can therefore be, but are not limited to:

• oppression of animals, womyn, and/or nature through their position as “other”
• the place of the human (or hu-man) within an ecofeminist approach
• the position of the so-called “natural” within the definition of “the human”
• identity and categorization/anthropomorphization
• definitions and oppression
• definitions as an act
• the role of comparative literary theories in the act of defining

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How can an anthropological approach to cultural artifacts better enable us to perceive the fundamental structures and mechanisms that underlie social practices? To what extent are primitive or archaic rituals still present in modern or “advanced” cultures? Does the field of “cultural studies” as it is currently constituted presuppose an anthropological dimension (i.e., ethnography etc.)? It is often said that the primary purpose of literature or art is to represent the “human condition.” What does this mean, anthropologically speaking? How can a generative analysis of culture yield insights into the function of religion, art and politics in today’s world? This interdisciplinary seminar will attempt to address and debate these types of questions. Any contributions that either use or dialogue with an anthropological approach to literary or cultural studies are welcome. Those who draw on philosophical or psychological perspectives are also encouraged to submit papers.

Seminar sponsored by the e-journal Anthropoetics.

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This seminar will consider the changing roles of nonhuman animals as laborers, companions, commodities, and cultural figures in current processes of globalization. Animals and products produced from and by animal bodies are increasingly circulated by transnational production networks, impacting practices of human nutrition, scientific experimentation, agriculture, industrial production, and animal domestication worldwide. As globalization transforms the lived spaces of human and nonhuman life, animals have come to serve as powerful symbols in the transnational politics of culture: companion animals, laboring animals, and hunted animals are used to depict the cosmopolitanism and inequalities (economic, racial, etc.) enabled by the globalization of labor, information, and commerce. We will explore how highlighting animals in the global scene may help us rethink issues of nationalism, identity, and empire.

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The debate sparked by PETA’s animal “liberation” campaign entitled, “Are Animals the New Slaves?”–which has drawn criticism for comparing the institutional mistreatment of animals to the enslavement of African Americans–illustrates the complex racial dynamics of humanist discourse in American culture. Tim Wise’s Counterpunch article, “Animal Whites,” postulates that PETA’s “blindingly white” and wealthy membership explains its inability to comprehend the dangers of destabilizing the human/animal divide. Yet modern western textual instantiations of that divide historically have been raced, basing the coherence of (white) human identity on the abjection of the (black) other, positioning “negritude” at the limits, as Warren Montag has argued, as “the site of an oscillation between the human and the nonhuman.” This seminar seeks to interrogate the role of racialized discourse, particularly white supremacy, in literary, philosophical, scientific, and political narratives engaging the division between humans and animals, and in the interrelated cultural project of constituting the modern human subject. The focus is literary and cultural productions of the Americas and the Black/Green Atlantic from the sixteenth-century into the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on texts that negotiate racialized disciplinary regimes, including “New World” slavery, civil rights, institutional violence, public education, criminal justice, military training, and religious teaching. The seminar will also pay close attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ability, and socio-economic status as they complicate the racialized production of the human subject. Discussion will address how a discourse of the human can challenge the racism on which it is grounded.

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Beginning with the epistolary texts that document the transatlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus, America, the quarta pars orbis, was viewed as a repository for European fantasy. Amazons, mermaids, the lost continent of Atlantis and other beings and places inherited from the Greco Latin tradition, but never precisely located on their maps, were simultaneously juxtaposed with biblical history and topography, such as the Seven Tribes of Israel, the Earthly Paradise –itself born from the classical trope of locus amoenus— and the evangelical wanderings of the Apostle Saint Thomas. In this panel we will consider the development of the hybrid palimpsest that is reflected in what Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has called the “invention of America.” This will be accomplished through a consideration and analysis of the “indigenous factor,” in which incomprehension and misunderstanding led to the re-fashioning of American civilizations from New Spain to New Castile and which began both textually and iconographically in the former centers of pre-Hispanic culture and later colonial capitals: Cuzco and Tenochtitlan. Needless to say, this topic is not limited to the colonial period, as many Latin American authors –particularly those of the “Nueva literatura latinoamericana” and the “Boom,”—have revived these visions born of misapprehension while at the same time laying the foundations of an original American literature that is at once local and universal, past and present.

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This seminar seeks to explore how works of Science Fiction conceptualize and imagine beings from planets or places other than Earth. How is the completely alien imagined? To what extent do these conceptualizations repeat, mimic, or differ from narratives of inter-human contact as found in travel narratives and histories? How do they reflect, explore, or diverge from current theories of identity, borders, hybridity, gender, contact zones, diaspora, globalization, travel, etc.…? Can examining the completely fictional other world alien contribute to our investigations of actual and fictional inter-human encounters and interactions?

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This seminar discusses forms of “the human” that do not rest on the too-simple binaries like “human”/“other” or “human”/“non-/post-/in-human” privileged by many of today’s scholars whose work references Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Such too-simple differences reify concepts of the subject, identity, and agency to privilege Western images of individuality, naturalizing a humanist fallacy and privileging the victim/perpetrator dialectic. The first set of papers in this seminar pose theoretical challenges to the politics of the personal and contemporary concepts of the human. The second set addresses these paradigms through example, using literary and cultural texts to stage different kinds of theoretical challenges. Together, these discussions question “the human” as a necessary reference point for critics, interrogating how it reifies specific epistemologies and occludes alternate theorizations of the epistemological and real politics inherent in the post-industrial, globalized world of information societies.

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Arguing for its relevance today, Edward Said asserts that humanism is not an exclusionary stance that reaffirms our certainty in the canon, but rather “a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation.” This seminar will test this understanding against our classroom experience and current transformations of the American and European academy. How do we encourage genuine intellectual exploration in so-called skills courses? How do we invite our students to say interesting things about literary texts? How can linguistic difficulty be a source of interpretive power? How do we confront the corporate turn in higher education? When the humanities are no longer seen as critical, like the sciences and technical fields, what is their future?

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A phenomenon in the Renaissance that proliferated Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the cabinet of curiosities was in essence a personal collection of rare, unknown and marvelous objects. Popular, visual and encyclopedic in their approach, these cabinets, or Wunderkammern, included a diversity of specimens from both known and newly discovered worlds–from unicorn tails to monkey teeth, Indian canoes to phosphorescent minerals, carrots to pinned insects. These collections of curious objects that are seemingly not human in nature require the idea or application of human characteristics and traits to describe their inhuman state. In this act of collecting, categorizing, displaying and recording, the idea of a Natural Order and what it meant to be human were thrown into question by philosophers, scientists, theologians, and poets alike. Taking a broad view of this cabinet of curiosities, the seminar’s aim is: 1) to investigate the varied, changing, and possible forms of the cabinet itself (e.g. personal collections, Natural History museums, aquariums, zoos, circuses, scientific notebooks, anatomy halls, libraries and scriptoriums); 2) to examine the curiosities that were/are collected (e.g. artifacts, fossils, internal organs, organisms both rare and common, maps, cultural objects, literary texts, art); and 3) to evaluate and reflect upon the manner, instruments, and results of such collecting (e.g. use of the microscope, surgical instruments, optics, and galvanism, as well as the creation of museum guide books, specified taxonomies, and rubrics of Science and Religion).

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