ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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?

Friday, March 24

Felicia McCarren, Tulane University
“Mechanical Dances”
Arndt Niebisch, Johns Hopkins University
“Hausmann’s Synaesthetic Machines”
Christine Kanz, University of Bern
“Male Birth Fantasies and the Avant-Garde”
Natasha Chang, Middlebury College
“Speed Against the Machine: Futurism and the Female Body in Benedetta Cappa Marinetti’s Writing”

Saturday, March 25

Edward Aiken, Syracuse University
“Between the 19th & the 21st Centuries, the Modernist Android Bridges the Gap”
Colin Moore, Stanford University
“Freud Phonograph Modernism Machine”
Patrizia McBride, University of Minnesota
“Reassembling the Individual: Montage and the German Avant-Garde”
Jonah Willihnganz, Stanford University
“John Dos Passos’s Technological Bodies”