ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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?

Friday, March 24

David Pickus, Arizona State University
“Walter Kaufmann and the Future of the Humanities”
Patricia Armstrong, Vanderbilt University
“Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say: Teaching Writing in a Foreign Language”
Kerstin Adam, University of Lille, France
“Teaching Foreign Languages in France: Towards a Decompartmentalization of Traditional Structures”
Charles Sheaffer, University of Washington
“Jokes and their Relation to the University: Hysteric Interface and the Future of the Academic Source Code”

Saturday, March 25

Katherine Stanton, Princeton University
“Who Cares? Teaching Literary Interpretation”
Annedith Schneider, Sabanci University
“Turning Linguistic Weakness into Critical Strength? Reading Literature in a Foreign Language”
Jim Hicks, Smith College & University of Massachusetts-Amherst
“Getting Away With Torture?: Towards an Activist, Rather than Academic, Role for the Humanities”