ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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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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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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?

[more…]

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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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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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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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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– 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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