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 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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The papers gathered in this seminar explore various aspects of sexual representation and, in particular, of the permeability between gender boundaries, either in the name of aesthetics (Pei-jing Li and Maria Euchner) or politics (Erin Schlumpf and Louisa Matmati). The participants in this seminar raise in novel fashion issues about gender, moral aesthetics, and political identity in transcultural communities.

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Animal Others play a major role in defining ideas of the human in literature, the visual arts, and culture from prehistoric times to the present. The panel will present broad cultural and theoretical perspectives on this issue as well as specific examples from a number of historical periods, cultural regions, genres, and media.

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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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This seminar takes up the intersections between poetics and choreography. In the context of the ACLA conference on “The Human and Its Others,” we will think about the ways in which the human body can become a figure for issues in poetics, as well as the ways in which various ideas of poetry often invoke the human body: as metaphor, as referent, as audience, as performance. Our papers will range in historical period and literary field, though most will take up issues in modern performance studies. Our conversation will attempt to offer wide-ranging definitions of both poetry and choreography. Dance performances as well as theories of dance, poetic texts as well as theories of poetry will be our subjects. We hope to end our seminar with a workshop performance of a piece by Jonathan Appels, performed by dancers from the American Ballet./p>

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Is the “primitive” human, pre-human, inhuman, superhuman? For whom and in what circumstances? The notions that the alleged “civilized” world has produced about its cultural “other” in different periods and contexts can be said to oscillate between the image of a disturbing savage —an irrational, beastly creature who can only in some cases attain an acceptable level of humanity through exposure to “progress”— and that of an innocent, non-speculative, hence nobler and more powerful model able to offset the discontents of a secularized and alienated modernity that has subordinated its humaneness to material advancement. The purpose of this seminar is to engage with various definitions and uses of the “primitive” in both Western and non-Western contexts. We will explore the relationships (tension? coexistence? partial overlapping?) between apparently contrasting visions that the West has generated about other cultures (chronologically or spatially distant from Western modernity). But we will also compare Western perspectives on “civilization” and the “primitive” to the discourses produced by non-Western cultures on those issues. How and why did the construction of the civilized-vs-primitive dichotomy become production of values? Is it possible to conceive a critique of civilization and of its notion of humanity from a primitivist perspective? What role does the aesthetic play in the consolidation or the problematization of such categories as “civilized”, “primitive”, “savage”? The seminar welcomes papers addressing those and other related questions through texts from various disciplines (literature, critical theory, cultural studies, anthropology, visual arts, film studies, etc.).

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This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a “prosthetic god,” following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke’s seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom. We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the “cyborg” still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its “proper” (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the “post-human” (K. Hayles) or the “symbiont” (G. Longo) any better?

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To view literature and the visual arts as a form of conjuring up the dead, a form of remembering and mourning has a long-standing tradition. In recent years this preoccupation has been supplanted by an interest in literary and artistic modes of coming to terms with and appeasing the undead. Two developments seem to contribute to the present concern with the liminal space between the dead and the living: the general lack of forms and rites when it comes to transforming the biologically dead into the symbolically dead; secondly, the sheer scale of anonymous mass deaths (in camps and on battlefields) which makes this predicament particularly tangible. The seminar seeks to combine multiple disciplinary perspectives: anthropological, cultural-historical and psychoanalytic approaches aim at a more nuanced understanding of the processes of symbolic conversion, its successes and failures; a key aspect is the exploration of the aesthetic dimension of these conversion processes specific to media, such as literature, film, painting, or photography. Taking their cues from writers and artists as diverse as Georges Bataille, W.G. Sebald, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Gerhard Richter, participants examine different modes and models of coping with or coming to terms with the anonymity and persistence of the undead. While we intend to focus this inquiry on German culture, we also included papers dealing with other European, or non-European cultures.

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In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred (Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues. Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) was only the best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples address ethnic/race issues. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s the “Foreigner” (1900) the supernatural element is connected to the foreign identity of the protagonist. This seminar examines and assesses the various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality been used and by whom?

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This seminar will explore treatments of the “human” family in visual culture, e.g., theater, cinema, photography, television, performance art, painting, and other visual arts. In what ways are families portrayed as something other than human? Why is performing the drama of human families and/or the human drama of families a site of contested values? How or why is the visual mode particularly suited to the representation of the human family drama? The goal of this seminar is to compare families and their humanity (or lack thereof) from different cultural and national perspectives and across the ages, from ancient times to the present.

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Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism’s essentializing ethnocentrism. Papers may include: depictions of the relationship between technology, the human, and its other in literature and film; examples of historical and contemporary technologies and how they push at the boundaries of the human (cloning, prosthetic devices, gene manipulation, etc.); how and why science and technology make defining the human a pertinent concern for us today; and the possibility of a critical theory or ethics of technology based on ideas of what it means to be human vs. obligations to the other, we will address the religious, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the use of technology to define what is human and what is other than human.

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This seminar invites reflections on literature and language reform. More specifically, we invite participants to consider how nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist and internationalist language projects at once destroyed and reconstituted —- literally re-formed —- imaginations of language as something (uniquely) human: a double movement manifest in the para-literary and masocritical activities of historical and contemporary avant-gardes, in post-structuralist translation theory, and in current models of and for world literature. Papers might address the consequences for “human language,” and the relevance for literature, of any of the following or related topics in language politics and language ecology: alphabet reform; language purification; orthographic standardization; official language policies; international auxiliary and planned languages; global languages; monolingualism and plurilingualism; machine writing and machine translation.

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In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said defines humanism as “the practice of participatory citizenship” whose “purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny” and thus disclose its “human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present” (22). In a postcolonial and global era that bears witness to a rapid mobility of peoples, it is imperative to rethink humanism no longer as a practice that defines the human to exclude other humans but as the practice that opens to a wide gamut of political and aesthetic forms of representation of the “global hybrid” that emerges in the public realm of the global sphere. As different cultural, linguistic, social and political realities are leaking into each other and the rapid flows of capital and labor force are producing new social, economic and political conditions of co-existence, the reinvention of the public sphere and the active participation in what Etienne Balibar calls the constitution of “a citizenship-in-the-making” are more than necessary. Our seminar thus focuses on humanism as a “democratic practice” and an intellectual praxis in the context of the newly constituting and constituted postcolonial and global conditions and addresses the need to rethink the field of comparative literature as a form of humanistic practice that can contribute to the envisioning of a global community open to hybrid forms of existence and representation.

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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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– 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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Both matter and essence, the timeless memory of the humankind and the ephemeral glimpse of the mind, the eventful being of language has never ceased to captivate our imagination. The multiple ways in which language structures the human have given rise to some of the fundamental articulations of human cognition, individual and social being: the controversial ontological status of language (the aporetic divide between words and things, extending from Plato to Saussure and Foucault), the paradoxes of the language-thought correlation (the approach of Sapir-Whorf and the philosophical-rhetorical deconstruction of cognitive forms), the varied modes of ideological (mis)appropriations of language (the critical tradition from Gramsci to Bourdieu) and others. The heteronomy of our time appears as a good host for much of this intellectual questioning. It, however, also brings forth some new bifurcations and unexpected conjunctions. The panel Language Ideology and the Human addresses the position of language in the multi-paradigm setting of the new humanities: cutting across disciplines, epistemological frontiers, and political practices, it will examine the position and the potential of language as such.

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This seminar aims to explore how the category of the “human” can come to be reformulated through the structure of perversion, especially in the readings of literary texts. The comparative study of literatures has been instrumental in forming the category of “perversion,” as writers such as Petrarch, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have, in their international receptions, helped to shape what counts as “perverse” in relation to the properly human. Lacan’s formula for perversion, a<>$, suggests that the pervert can present him or herself in such a way that would radically restructure relations between the human and its other: in becoming the “other” for a subject’s enjoyment, the pervert can test, contest, and reconfigure the limits of subjectivity. Freud, on the other hand, in insisting upon the perversity infused into the very constitution of the “normal” human subject, destabilized any sharp division that might be made between the properly human and its perverse “others.” Moreover, Deleuze’s work on sadism and masochism suggests that perverse discourses emerge in and through aesthetic categories that separate them from the properly “human.” A good example of the ramifications of this analysis would be Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation of the masochistic “Equus eroticus” in A Thousand Plateaus. We welcome papers that explore the connection between the perverse and the human in literary texts. Papers from diverse theoretical perspectives, and from any period and national tradition, are welcome insofar as they focus on the relation between the perversity of the relation between the human and its others.

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The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

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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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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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This panel seeks to explore the textual construction of Human, Animal, and/or Environmental Subjectivity in relation to each other. Papers from any theoretical approach will be welcomed, especially from: Ecological Criticism, Gender, Postcolonial, Ethnic, Subaltern Studies, Philosophical, or Psychoanalytical perspectives. Different definitions of Subjectivity are also welcomed. Though the object of study can be any text/s, fiction or not, belonging to any period or tradition, the paper should focus on the way the text constitutes the subject (Human, Animal, or Environmental). It should seek to answer these or similar questions:

1. How is the Subject constituted within the text on a formal, structural or aesthetic level?
2. Is there any Subjectivity achieved outside the text?
3. Is this a speaking subject? Who is s/he speaking to? What are the consequences of this speech? Is any kind of agency attained through this speech?
4. What is the relationship between the Subjective (the world of the Subject) and the Objective (the world of the object) world?
5. What is Subjectivity? What is its relation to the environment? Does Subjectivity necessarily imply consciousness and agency?
6. What are some moral consequences of subjectivity?

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The seminar interrogates the notion of “being at the threshold” as an ontologically scripted open (non)-place in conjunction with Agamben’s (2004:92) suggestion that “in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the terms of the operation was also at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new - more effective or more authentic - articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that - within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.” Papers address historical, theoretical, (bio)political, ethical and practical issues arising from various instantiations of the “open” in a zone of indistinction.

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This panel proposes to continue inquiries from previous ACLA conferences which invited the application of post-colonial theories and concepts to the literature and culture of Eastern Europe and related geographical spaces. In previous sessions we discussed the classical empires (the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian) and their cultural influences. Last year’s panel focused specifically on echoes of the “Soviet Empire” on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. Working within the theme of this year’s conference, we can surmise that the empires roaming through the past and looming in the present of Eastern Europe have created not only Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia as a specific kind of Eastern “Other,” as opposed to the more “Human” West (i.e., enlightened, democratic, progressive, etc.), but also that Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia have at different times created their own hierarchies of “Others” (i.e., gypsies, various Asian peoples, etc.). These processes are recorded and reflected, however obliquely, though literary and cultural production, and conversely literature and culture also actively participate in the othering process. We invite papers on various aspects of Othering of and in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. We are interested in the ways that traditional empires “Othered” the peoples of Eastern Europeans, the Balkans, and Eurasia, but also the way in which Eastern Europeans “Other” each other in contemporary literature and culture. We are specifically interested in papers that explore how this creation of “Others” relates to themes of nationalism, violence, class, gender, and identity.

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In light of Giorgio Agamben’s ground-breaking theory of bare life, this seminar seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that re-examines the politics of life and death which produce, police, and define the human in opposition to the animal. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben writes: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83). Following Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power” and his claim that the modern state supplants the sovereign “right of death” by the power to “make live,” Agamben suggests that in the extreme case of the state of exception, sovereign authority propels this power to “make live” to a paradoxical excess; stripping individuals of the significant markers of social and political existence, only bare life can subsist. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben further argues that the anthropological machine itself produces bare life, a life that is neither human nor animal. We invite papers that explore how the dichotomy between man and animal produces a definition of the human that calls into question the relationship between the human and the non-human. Possible topics include: Can the animal respond?; “Biopower,” animality, and humanity; Dasein, the openness to a world, and the animal; animality, voice, and performative; “bare life,” death and the human; procreation, animality, and sexual difference; human, animal, and the (war) machine.

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As suggested by the performative force attached to the Latin “humanitas” and its semantic proximity to ideals of “civility,” “cultivation,” and “urbanity,” premodern literary cultures picture humanity less as a fact of nature than as a fact of art. Indeed, unlike the modern conception of “the human,” whose definite article presumes a kind of categorical imperative, the premodern character of humanity denotes an achievement grounded in mastery of the various arts (of love and war, conduct and conversation, policy and politesse, thought and persuasion) transmitted in the body of texts and traditions still referred to as “the humanities.” One consequence is to identify humanity with “the humanities” themselves: are fully human those (and only those) initiated in the polite culture of humanist, mandarin, or clerical learning. However, a second consequence is that, precisely because human beings make themselves so, humanity announces the family of contrasting yet intimately related modes of being from which it arises. “The human” thus stands in protean relation to what, though “more” or “less,” is never wholly “other” than that: the gods and heroes, beasts and women, madmen and barbarians, prophets and poets, hierarchs and heretics who share the wider conceptual space within which notions of humanity operate. The seminar explores the exchanges, ratios, and metamorphoses this conception makes possible. Proposals are welcome from all fields of literary and cultural study, eastern or western, dating from classical antiquity to the threshold of the global modernity inaugurated in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

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This seminar will explore examples of sacrifice in literature in order to better understand how the human relationship to violence has been structured in a variety of ancient and modern contexts. Papers may discuss theoretical approaches to the issue of sacrifice or literary examples of ritual violence, heroism, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and punishment. Does sacrifice present a particularly human way of dealing with violence? Does sacrifice provide an incitement to violence or a humanizing of violence? How does sacrifice connect a narrative to notions of the sacred?

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Symptomatic reading is one of the most pervasive critical methods in literary studies. Though many literary critics disagree with the premises on which Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson based their influential theories of symptomatic reading, our disciplinary adherence to the procedures of symptomatic reading is so thorough as to go unremarked. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson defines the symptom as that “whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects” (26) and states that what is most “interesting” in a text is what it represses (49). The critic’s task is “diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text” (48). Interpretation “always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code” (60). Symptomatic reading is a surface/depth model of interpretation that defines the text’s true meaning as what it does not say; the text’s gaps, silences, disruptions, and exclusions become clues to the text’s absent cause and determining structures. The critic must therefore reconstruct and reveal the “other scene” (of history, empire, sexuality, gender trouble) whose exclusion shapes the text. The purpose of this panel is to ask what other kinds of reading are possible, and what theories of interpretation and of the textual object those ways of reading imply.

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Despite recent work on theatricality, the term remains too often unexamined. What has “theatricality” been? In what historical contexts does the concept arise? Are there cognate terms? To what extent does “theatricality” relate to the theater? To what extent, on the contrary, does it describe not theater but those moments when other art forms cease to be themselves? Why does “theatricality” so often describe a slipping away from the human, a bestial mimetic practice? Why has theatricality become such an important theoretical term? Why, too, does theory continue to recognize itself as theater – and/or, why does it fail to do so? The aim of this seminar will be to investigate the theoretical and philosophical discourses surrounding theatricality and historical situations in which problems of theatricality arise.

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As an outcome of the Babelic curse, translation and its conundrums have often been associated with the limitations of the human condition. As a recurrent symptom of the nostalgia for the possibility of a language that could transcend difference, the sacralization of the original (as that which should remain forever stable and thus repeatable in its sameness) has pushed translation to the margins of scholarship and built a reputation for translators that is frequently associated with the role of an unwelcome, but necessary, traitor. However, in the wake of postmodern thought, which tends to emphasize the transformational vocation of any reading or interpretation, translation is turning into a privileged site for the understanding of the ways in which we appropriate otherness and renegotiate the traffic between the domestic and the foreign. At the same time, we are beginning to evaluate the many ways in which this negotiation inevitably reshapes and redefines cultural products and identities. From this perspective, we plan to examine how the traditional relationship between the so-called original and the translation, or the source and the target languages and cultures, can be rearticulated, and what this rearticulation might teach us about the ways in which translations and translators reinvent and recombine both the domestic and the foreign. In other words, we are interested in looking into some of the consequences of an “ethics of difference” (in Lawrence Venuti’s words) for translation, and invite specialists to send proposals that address these issues either in translation projects or translation theories.

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This session grows out of the current debate about what does and does not constitute the human in the 21st century. In the current context of the complexity of medical innovation and research, the ways of remaking and repairing military casualties, and the debates about what constitutes the normal or normative in terms both of human bodies and human psyches, this session proposes a broadly comparative approach. Given the obsession with the vampire around 1900 and in our current age, it tracks the limits of the definition of the human in the context of these modern debates and the earlier fascination of the super-predator, the vampire. It seeks to locate this orientalist and gothic archetype at the cross-roads of cultural anxieties, be they intra- or inter-cultural, imperial or post-colonial. The session will interrogate what is entailed ontologically as well as aesthetically and culturally by this atavistic and notorious complement to other variations on the human.

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Is madness necessary to creativity? The myth of the cursed writer embodies two extremes of inspiration: divine vision and insanity. In Plato’s description of the mad poet in Ion, these two qualities of inspiration are elided, and it is the fact that the poet is out of his mind, “in a state of unconsciousness,” that occasions his communion with the divine: “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” The myth of the cursed writer is a constellation of values and prejudices regarding the social position of the artist (marginal), and assumptions regarding the artist’s attitudes and moral stance (anti-utilitarian and rebellious). It posits a hierarchical opposition between rational discourse and unruly “inspired” discourse, and a division between literature and the world. “Was it madness, or a work of art?” Foucault asks in Madness and Civilization. “Inspiration, or hallucination? A spontaneous babble of words, or the pure origins of language? Must its truth, even before its birth, be taken from the wretched truth of men, or discovered far beyond its origin, in the being that it presumes?” This panel will consider the relationship between self, language, and society in terms of the association of creativity and madness, and representations of mental illness in literature. Emphasis will be given to discussion of madness as associated with inspiration; as a rejection of society’s norms; as related to linguistic disjunction or displacement; and as a breach of the boundaries of temporality or self.

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A common literary and dramatic theme in many cultures from many different time periods is the confrontation between humans and divine beings. These confrontations take many different forms, from imparting wisdom to imposing judgments, from playing pranks to threatening death. This seminar seeks papers that address literary and dramatic accounts of the meetings between humans and divine beings. (While papers addressing specifically religious narratives and texts, e.g., the Bible, the Qu’ran, are welcome, they should address these narratives and texts as literary productions rather than sacred scriptures.) We are looking for a slate of papers that examines a range of cultural backgrounds, time periods, and media. Topics of interest include, but are by no means limited to, the following: the status of knowledge/information gained in the divine human encounter; patterns or variations within and across different cultures; gods as dramatic personae; the fictional as revelatory and the revelatory as fictional; film/drama as religious spectacle.

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