ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Animal Symbolicum — Homo Sapiens — Barbarian — Human — Woman — Overman — Counter-Human — Fellow-Human — Inhuman — Subhuman — Being-There — Being-With — Human Rights — Bare Life — Singularity — Immanent — Silence —

“The ‘I’ is a placeholder for the human voice.” This list, which could be expanded, testifies to the struggle we face as we try to assert ourselves in and through language. We find words for ourselves or for others. And we act on those words. Therefore, we also again and again need to free ourselves from those words, rebel against and reject them, extricate themselves from the languages to which they belong. Through language we negotiate our differences, assert what is important to us. We express and mask our respects and contempts, and we claim and reclaim our dignity. The “human” is a value in the sense of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral — a value subject to constant and multiple re-valuations, as difficult to surrender, as it is to assert. Any use of that term today requires a rigorous examination and awareness of the field of struggles surrounding the place of the “human” in language. We seek submissions, which explore instances of this struggle of the “human” as a value, and the search for alternatives. How have writers, philosophers, artists or human rights advocates grappled with this problem? We look for a variety of perspectives and media in the arenas of discourse, culture, postcolonialism, race, gender, and nationality.

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There has long been a common perception of realism as a disciplinary narrative mode, one which must exclude or assimilate extremes, to paraphrase George Levine. The papers in this panel examine the workings of exclusion or assimilation and the processes of “othering” in works of literary and cinematic realism. They consider the various others of realist texts and the importance of imperialism and globalization, narrative articulations of space, epistemological clashes, and political realities to the excluded or assimilated others that realism represents.

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Few literary critics have so emphasized the at once constitutive and constituting role of culture in the formation of the human as Raymond Williams. Indeed, the concept that is perhaps most synonymous with Williams, “structures of feeling,” is an attempt to deal with precisely the centrality of human perception and action in reproducing social relations. Yet despite the fact that Williams’ work on the human was a formative influence on theorists such as Edward Said and Terry Eagleton, and was pivotal to the establishment of Cultural Studies, this contribution has been underrecognized and underappreciated. This seminar will attempt to redress this silence and explore the possibilities that Williams’ projects make realizable in our contemporary situation. Some of the themes which this panel will explore are:

• Nature, creation and the human
• The country and the city revisited
• Media and Williams
• Williams and the theory and politics of film
• Contemporary structures of feeling
• Memory, history and the human
• Williams and oppositional aesthetics
• Alternative country music
• Cultural materialism: then and now

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In “Printers’ Correctors and the Publication of Classical Texts,” Anthony Grafton remarks: “The corrector seems a preeminently modern figure… For the modern literary system, as Michel Foucault and others have taught us, is collaborative.” That Grafton, whose eloquent vision of Renaissance humanism is grounded largely in the traditional methods of the Geisteswissenschaften should nonetheless assume a familiarity with Foucault, is emblematic of the ways critical theory has influenced scholarship on Renaissance humanism. This seminar, accordingly, invites papers exploring how the Renaissance ideal of the Studia humanitatis might be rethought and redescribed in the wake of the great waves of critical and literary theory. And while Foucault’s reading of “that strange figure of knowledge called man” may well be a central topic of the seminar, papers could also address, for instance, how Certeau’s “mystic fable” has affected the study of Renaissance mysticism or how Derridean différance has influenced views of Renaissance philology. We also invite papers reconsidering the work of Burckhardt, Kristeller, Warburg, Yates, and Baron in the light of theory. Finally, papers examining the revalorization of hitherto ignored or neglected figures and topics as a result of theory’s influence are also welcome. In sum, with the recent deaths of Derrida, Said, and Ricoeur, and with the many conferences and publications marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Petrarch’s birth and the four-hundredth anniversary of the first part of Don Quijote, the moment is particularly ripe for comparatists to survey the state of the field.

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This seminar will explore the complexity and difficulty inherent in efforts to represent humanity during moments of social terror. Of particular interest will be essays that analyze how the politics of panic and terror associated with war, authoritarianism, fascism, empire, and globalization require the construction of an inhuman other. To what extent do torture, genocide, and other forms of military violence depend on an impoverished notion of humanity? How do these forms of violent othering relate to social practices of racial profiling, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, criminalizing of communities, classism, xenophobia and other ideological structures dependent on divisive notions of social identity? And what role has cultural production played in challenging these notions? How have cultural products attempted to mediate the trauma of terror, record alternative versions of official history, and suggest alternative, egalitarian worldviews? What role does culture play in the struggle for Human Rights? And how can the scholarly methods of Comparative Cultural Studies enable interdisciplinary investigations into the relationship between politics, aesthetics, psychology, and historical crisis? This seminar will take a global view of the ways that these issues have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century and will especially welcome studies that are cross-cultural or transhistorical.

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Medicine and healthcare are central and universal human experiences. Throughout the arts, medicine is represented in ways that are both realistic and metaphorical: from works on epidemics in classical antiquity to Renaissance images of anatomy and healing to modern narratives about illness and health to recent films that question the ethical boundaries of the profession. The complex relationship between medicine and human experience, between patients and practitioners, between medical ideals and practical realities, is explored throughout the arts in ways that provide a reader/viewer both identification and engagement but also some distance for judgment.This panel explores representations of medicine. Papers deal with single texts/authors or general topics, such as how art represents doctor patient relations, public health concerns, healthcare sites and circumstances, crisis intervention, aging, alternative treatments, and mental health issues. Representations across cultures and historical periods, and with a focus on both aesthetic and social contexts, are included.

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In the turbulent 20th century, most of East Asian countries have been radically changed or affected by a series of revolutions: nationalist revolutions for independence, “proletariat” revolutions of class struggle, and various types of cultural, social, and artistic revolutions that aim to modernize social customs, arts and languages. “Revolution” was once such a popular concept that different classes, social movements, interest groups, parties, schools, etc. all competed with each other for the title of “revolutionary.” Revolution hence becomes an open field where different discourses struggle with each other, and it finds others not only among self-conscious conservatives, but also “revolutionaries” themselves. This session aims to discuss the influence of revolution in East Asian countries — both past and present. Possible topics are: What are the different interpretations of “revolution”? What are the permutations of the concept of revolution in today’s world? To what ends is the term revolution used/misused?; How do revolutionary discourses (the democratic idea of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc.) travel to East Asia and among Asian countries? How do the local people receive and revise these discourses?; How do revolutionary theories interpret the nature and function of art? How does revolution affect the production, circulation and consumption of artistic works? How is revolution itself presented in art?

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The metaphysical view of the human involves, it has often been argued, a conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible. If a new understanding of the human implies putting this conceptual scheme into question, it would mean that the senses–traditionally relegated to one part of this division–would have to be reconceived. How are we to understand the senses in a non-metaphysical way, how are we to conceive of the relationship they entertain between them, and how can we think the fact of their multiplicity–the (surprising?) fact that there are several senses? These are some of the questions that guide this panel on the conceptual revolution of the senses, a revolution that we assume contemporary thought is undergoing. Topics include: towards a new empiricism; skepticism and the misconception of the senses; metaphysics and the senses; a politics of the senses; the “outside” of the senses; the privation of the senses, e.g. blindness, deafness, callousness; anesthesia, synesthesia; the question of total art; the relationship between the multiplicity of the arts and the multiplicity of the senses. We welcome work on any historical period and linguistic tradition and in the disciplines of literature, philosophy, film, art history, political theory, psychoanalysis, and music.

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This panel explores philosophical, literary, poetic, musical and cinematic discourses on the revolution of the senses, an examination of the conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible.  Contested sites include theories of the human, literary relations and representations, and intermediality, from the eighteenth century to the present.  Papers address topics ranging from metaphysics and the senses; notions of sensibility, sensuality and sensuousness; the sensory relationship to books and literary formalism; sensory poetics; poetry, psychology and psychoanalysis; artistic translation across media; the relationship between language and image, and language and sound; and postmodern multi-sensory effects.

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