ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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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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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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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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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