ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In Histoire de la Folie, Michel Foucault writes: “As death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, madness is its limit in the realm of animality.” This seminar will examine how writers, across disciplines and genres, utilize states of madness to interrogate such limits on the human. In questioning the meaning of madness, writers such as Kant, Rhys, Melville, Naipaul, Feldman, and Fanon also question the meaning of the human. While acknowledging the connection between madness and writer, the seminar focuses more specifically on the connection between madness and writing in various time periods and genres.

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By defining the soul in terms of self-motion, Aristotle has established movement as a human affair. Yet already in Aristotle, “movement” refers both to a physical phenomenon and to an abstract notion (defined in the Physics as the actuality of the potential as such). The history of this figure runs at least since Heraclitus to reach our times with an unnoticed wealth of ambiguous usage. Think of expressions like the “stream of consciousness,” the “movement of thought,” or the “movement of meaning”; think of the notion of meaning as the effect of an incessant movement of signifiers, the movement of deferral and difference, the movements of desire; think of “lines of flight,” the “image-movement,” “speed” and “acceleration.” Movement is upon us, but what is it that we are saying when we apply the term “movement” (or its related figures) to the study of meaning in literature and the other arts? What critical force does this term carry? What makes it helpful, if it is, for textual analysis? What are its philosophical ramifications? What has the new art form of the moving-image contributed to the efficacy of this term or to our theoretical understanding of a notion of motion? This seminar presents studies of movement in literature, film, philosophy, rhetoric, and the arts. It also offers an investigation of the notion of movement even as it is applied in critical analysis.

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The conquest and colonization of the Americas by the major powers of Europe forced human beings from three continents into permanent contact with their racial others. As Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Americas began to intermingle and intermarry throughout the Americas, colonial authorities tried to create laws to govern which races could and could not mix with one another and rubrics to categorize the children of mixed parentage. The Americas continue to exist as a space where different races both embrace and collide, perhaps more than any other place on earth. This situation begs the question: how do Americans (in the hemispheric sense) react to racial mixture? “Mestizaje, Mestiçagem, and Miscegenation: Mixing with the Other in the Americas” seeks to explore how the idea of racial mixture has been both welcomed and shunned throughout the Americas since the encounter. This seminar allows for synchronic and diachronic analyses of racial mixture within one country/region of the Americas, but it specifically hopes to discuss how the perceptions of racial mixture differ across the nations and cultures of the Americas.

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Translation, transposition, and transcultural intertextual dialogue figure significantly in the modern formation and transformation of critical discourse in and on fiction, film, and related literary forms. This panel critically examines such self-consciously displaced fictional and critical discourse, delineating its own territory in terms of an “otherness” that disrupts conventional configurations of purportedly “humanistic” canonical national literatures. Focused on twentieth-century transpositions (literal and literary), these papers explore the extension of earlier margins and representations of marginal or multicultural consciousness already essentially defining Russian, Latin American, and transnational literature. They examine metamorphoses of fictive form and critical discourse in terms of parody and stylization, translation and transformation, often embodied in grotesque, inhuman/e, animal or insect consciousness.

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This seminar will address the notion of the monstrosity of language. Vico, for instance, stated that all “poetic monsters and metamorphoses” take place as a particular kind of trope, one that creates new ideas by putting together incongruent figures. The problem, for Vico, is not necessarily the fact that these “poetic monsters” happen as a result of a “composition” or the positing together of two distinct forms. After all, it could be said that poetic language is always a way of subsuming diversity under one figure. Rather, Vico defines the monster as a poetic figure forged by an uncertain or illegitimate relation. For example, children born of prostitutes are “monsters,” according to Roman law, since they have a human nature crossed with the “bestial characteristic of having been born of vagabond or uncertain unions.” This seminar therefore invites papers that focus on the monster as a formation of an “uncertain” or illegitimate relation. What is an “uncertain” relation? What would be a “legitimate” relation? More generally, we invite papers that focus on the way rhetoric is theorized as “monstrous” or is figured as somehow threatening. Furthermore, we invite papers that study a specific rhetoric of monsters in a wide range of texts. How does the monster play a part in conceiving other relations to the human, to politics, to law, to literature, or to language in general?

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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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Conventionally, the Gothic narrative traces the encounter of the human subject with the mysterious and horrifying supernatural, that lies beyond human experience. This seminar will address the tendency of the Gothic text to replace the supernatural figure of horror with the human Other, the person who is represented as being inhumanly horrifying. The seminar will be divided into three panels: The Racial/Cultural Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which Gothic horror is located onto the figure of the racial or cultural Other, who is represented as monstrous by the dominant culture. The Sexual Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which sexual difference results in horror. The Ill or Disabled Other and Gothic Horror panel will detail moments in which physical or mental difference is translated into inhuman monstrosity that results in horror.

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