ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The papers gathered in this seminar explore various aspects of sexual representation and, in particular, of the permeability between gender boundaries, either in the name of aesthetics (Pei-jing Li and Maria Euchner) or politics (Erin Schlumpf and Louisa Matmati). The participants in this seminar raise in novel fashion issues about gender, moral aesthetics, and political identity in transcultural communities.

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This session’s papers cover a wide range of topics, all of which deal with aspects of poetry that at first sight may appear to be “in the margins” of this genre: There is what seems to be conventional ‘courtly poetry’, in the case of Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther Skin, an epic written around 1200 A.D. in Georgia. Suddenly, the convention is undercut by an encounter between a lion and a leopard which begins as a courtship but ends in mortal combat—predicting that love will eventually disappear into mortal hate. Covering a somewhat later period yet retaining the animal image, the second paper presents a comparison of European Renaissance emblem books and Taoist Chinese poetry. Both genres explore ways in which animals were used as symbolic tools to focus the readers’ minds on the ineffable and to bring them into contact with divinity. The third paper focuses on poetry from the modern period: Baudelaire’s and Gertrude Stein’s prose poems can be seen as their authors’ attempts at addressing the increasing isolation of the two poets in their world. They critique thoughtless consumption and link questions of artistic production to self-production and material culture. By choosing the genre of prose poem and refusing a generic identity, both authors can traverse realms, high art and newspaper culture, aesthetic and social phenomena, and negotiate these realms critically.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written that “I have indeed thought of who will have come after the subject, if we set to work, in the name of who came before, so to speak. Here is the simple answer: …the Aboriginal” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 27). This remark occurs in a discussion of the eighteenth century debate about whether aboriginal peoples were human or not. The human and/or its other? Our session presents a series of critical analyses of figurations of aboriginality as the other, the edge, the before or the after of the human. Friday’s session includes papers on the Americas, while Saturday’s session looks at examples from India and Australia.

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This seminar explores how deviance, madness and otherness contour the limits of the “human.” Through their creative work, professed twisted minds have created deviant writings that show reality as a dominant fiction, as a strategic essencialism, and as a struggle between belief and knowledge. Deviant writings have appeared along history. They challenge the category of “difference” as it narrates, shapes, and redefines the “human.” They allow the most unthinkable other to emerge within the self. They redefine dominant social paradigms of the human from the inside. In doing so, they contour a redefinition of individual thought, in relation to a social knowledge of domination/submission, while exhibiting that representation is not solely a reflection of social relations of production but also a social relation itself.

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Is madness necessary to creativity? The myth of the cursed writer embodies two extremes of inspiration: divine vision and insanity. In Plato’s description of the mad poet in Ion, these two qualities of inspiration are elided, and it is the fact that the poet is out of his mind, “in a state of unconsciousness,” that occasions his communion with the divine: “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” The myth of the cursed writer is a constellation of values and prejudices regarding the social position of the artist (marginal), and assumptions regarding the artist’s attitudes and moral stance (anti-utilitarian and rebellious). It posits a hierarchical opposition between rational discourse and unruly “inspired” discourse, and a division between literature and the world. “Was it madness, or a work of art?” Foucault asks in Madness and Civilization. “Inspiration, or hallucination? A spontaneous babble of words, or the pure origins of language? Must its truth, even before its birth, be taken from the wretched truth of men, or discovered far beyond its origin, in the being that it presumes?” This panel will consider the relationship between self, language, and society in terms of the association of creativity and madness, and representations of mental illness in literature. Emphasis will be given to discussion of madness as associated with inspiration; as a rejection of society’s norms; as related to linguistic disjunction or displacement; and as a breach of the boundaries of temporality or self.

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What are the limits of theater? Is alienation a necessary part of the experience of theater, and at what point does spectacle become surveillance? Is theatricality necessarily dehumanizing, or are there ways of theorizing theatricality that would allow for a reaffirmation of our humanity? And how might concepts of catharsis, performance/performativity, spectacle, parody, irony, and dramatic monologue be applied outside of the traditional discourse on the theater? The aim of this seminar will be to explore ideas of theatricality in relation to politics, gender, race, and history, and through examinations of theoretical considerations by Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, and Mulvey, among others.

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This panel explores philosophical, literary, poetic, musical and cinematic discourses on the revolution of the senses, an examination of the conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible.  Contested sites include theories of the human, literary relations and representations, and intermediality, from the eighteenth century to the present.  Papers address topics ranging from metaphysics and the senses; notions of sensibility, sensuality and sensuousness; the sensory relationship to books and literary formalism; sensory poetics; poetry, psychology and psychoanalysis; artistic translation across media; the relationship between language and image, and language and sound; and postmodern multi-sensory effects.

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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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This panel investigates the crucial role played by faith in the articulation of identity, not only in religious terms but also in geographical and ethnic terms. From the early modern period the incorporation of faith in discourses of imperialism caused religion and race to function as vectors of alterity in dramatically new forms. Already in this period it is possible to observe the ways in which alterity came to be predicated on the basis of a biological or racial nature rather than that of a spiritual orientation, while faith – by definition Christian faith – came to be the exclusive property of the Western subject. This panel examines the ways in which religious, geographic and ethnic categories of alterity and identity have been deployed and reclaimed in imperial and postcolonial contexts. Panelists draw from a variety of disciplinary methodologies, including anthropology, history and comparative literature. Case studies encompass the role of supernaturalism and formation of identity in nineteenth-century America, South Asia and the Middle East and contemporary Britain, Iran, and South Asia.

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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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This panel explores the intersection between the human and its others by examining the problematic relationship between the inside and outside, understood variously as a relative distinction and an absolute relation. Among other focal points, we will look at the human traveling outside the familiar, human haunting, the outside of the writing/reading human, and human encounters at a threshold.

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This seminar will examine instances in which the monstrous impinges into the field of language-use, especially where rhetoric overlaps with poetics, eloquence, or systems of communication. Monsters are marvels and omens, impossible combinations stretching human imagination and possibility, troubles for beauty and action; how do they enter language or emerge from it? How are they “constructed” in and through literature? Are the word of mouth, the written testimony, the invention of fiction, the origins or originals of the monstrous? Do literature and monstrosity feed off of one another? We shall also consider qualities that the monstrous bring to language — bridity, contingency, inhumanity, the overabundance of humanity. Or is it the other way around?

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This panel explores the sites of extreme encounters and/or encounters at the extremes by investigating how humanness and otherness are interrogated, integrated, construed and perceived at the margins and frontiers of material and imagined spaces. At these extremes the seemingly stable category of human comes under fierce pressure to either survive or re-define itself and this enables us to consider: Where are the borders of the human? How and why define this border? How is location or space used to define “the human and its others”? How is human conceived and perceived through or beyond its bodily limits? Why and by whom? How is human constructed and construed within extreme environments? How can experiences at those edges or margins allow us to re-define our notions of human and other? How do the edge-zones of space or experience enable or generate our definitions of human and other?

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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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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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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, this seminar is focused on papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual,” in the early modern period in Europe.

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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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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, Agambem, Arendt, Wittgenstein, 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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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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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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Of late the human—so long the rational, articulate, adult, male, dominant foil to the irrational, the inarticulate, the child, the female, the dominated or minoritized—has struggled to free itself from its persistent definition in terms of binary opposition to various earthly Others. Yet interrogations of the human by phenomenologists, poststructuralists, and postcolonial theorists often remain mired in the very Self/Other dichotomy that haunts the category’s construction. This seminar reconsiders the construction of the “human” through the prisms of “alternative humanities”: the blind spots of so-called “non-humanity” in which humanity and human community are refigured and often productively reimagined. What kind of subject survives in zones of exclusion—or refuge—from the states of cognition, language, gender, age, class, race, ethnicity, and religion that the “human” historically has privileged? To what extent do feminist, postcolonial, and globalization theories challenge or subvert dominant conceptions of the “human,” and to what extent might they problematically uphold them? What happens when human identity (imagined either as unity or as singularity) is forged from human difference—when an Other is incorporated into, translated into, or purged from a Self? What happens when the “non-human” chooses to dwell beyond the boundaries of relation to the self-described “human” and so shatters the binary principle on which the distinction between the human and the non-human rests? Presentations in this seminar will engage such questions through both close readings of texts and contexts and metacritical reappraisals of philosophy and theory.

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Since the Enlightenment, the issue of the existence of gods has been a topic of debate. Many have flatly denied the divine. Others have tried to defend the existence of gods in traditional ways against the flow of modern and contemporary speculation. Perhaps more interesting, however, are those positions which attempt to reconstruct arguments for the existence of divinity outside of traditional ontological modes of thinking. Poetry and fiction have always been happy companions of this effort at reconstruction. This seminar explores the manner in which poetry and literature afford means for imaginatively reconceiving the existence of the divine.

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