ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Arguing for its relevance today, Edward Said asserts that humanism is not an exclusionary stance that reaffirms our certainty in the canon, but rather “a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation.” This seminar will test this understanding against our classroom experience and current transformations of the American and European academy. How do we encourage genuine intellectual exploration in so-called skills courses? How do we invite our students to say interesting things about literary texts? How can linguistic difficulty be a source of interpretive power? How do we confront the corporate turn in higher education? When the humanities are no longer seen as critical, like the sciences and technical fields, what is their future?

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The debate sparked by PETA’s animal “liberation” campaign entitled, “Are Animals the New Slaves?”–which has drawn criticism for comparing the institutional mistreatment of animals to the enslavement of African Americans–illustrates the complex racial dynamics of humanist discourse in American culture. Tim Wise’s Counterpunch article, “Animal Whites,” postulates that PETA’s “blindingly white” and wealthy membership explains its inability to comprehend the dangers of destabilizing the human/animal divide. Yet modern western textual instantiations of that divide historically have been raced, basing the coherence of (white) human identity on the abjection of the (black) other, positioning “negritude” at the limits, as Warren Montag has argued, as “the site of an oscillation between the human and the nonhuman.” This seminar seeks to interrogate the role of racialized discourse, particularly white supremacy, in literary, philosophical, scientific, and political narratives engaging the division between humans and animals, and in the interrelated cultural project of constituting the modern human subject. The focus is literary and cultural productions of the Americas and the Black/Green Atlantic from the sixteenth-century into the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on texts that negotiate racialized disciplinary regimes, including “New World” slavery, civil rights, institutional violence, public education, criminal justice, military training, and religious teaching. The seminar will also pay close attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ability, and socio-economic status as they complicate the racialized production of the human subject. Discussion will address how a discourse of the human can challenge the racism on which it is grounded.

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This seminar will explore the transformations of the human body imagined by the various avant-gardes during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period in which the celebration of technology transformed our understanding of the human: the typewriter transformed women into writing machines; radio stripped listeners of all senses except hearing and electrified our ears; the camera became a prosthetic eye through which the modern world could be seen in a radically new light; modern architecture introduced new possibilities of moving through space. In short, modernity turned human bodies into technologically-determined androids: all senses were now mechanized and the modern world was perceived through a series of equally modern prosthetic devices.
This seminar welcomes paper proposals examining the various androids imagined by the avant-gardes: from the surrealist plot to transform authors into automatic writing machines to the futurist design to accelerate human movement and turn poets into racecars. How were mechanical inventions recorded on the human body? What effects did radio, film, the gramophone, dictaphones, cameras, automobiles and airplanes have on authors? How were these transformations perceived by various avant-garde groups around the world?

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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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Postcolonial theory has frequently asserted the value of positionality in order to foreground the politics of discursive authority. Positionality has generally been thought to include race, gender, sexuality, and class but has more recently come to include geographical and biotic space. In an era of increasing ecological degradation, the mutually constitutive relationship between social inequity and environmental problems has been more starkly illuminated, as the recent tragedy in New Orleans has shown. In an effort to understand how the history of empire has altered both the literal and literary landscape of postcolonial studies, we seek papers that explore these points of contact. This panel engages the connections between postcolonialism and ecocriticism in historical terms as well as their contemporary manifestations in areas of the world that remain particularly vulnerable to environmental crisis, (neo)colonialism, and globalization. Papers will address these, among other questions: Are postcolonial and environmental concerns compatible? What emergent theoretical paradigms are needed to address both fields? How do postcolonial authors imagine and theorize the relationship between human and non-human histories? What is the relationship between ecological imperialism and literature? Why has ecocriticism neglected the (racialized) history of empire, and what might it gain from a thorough engagement with postcolonial studies? How might these knowledges be drawn upon to guide the futures of sovereignty and sustainability?

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Generally, this panel seeks to explore the relations between the human or the post-human subject and its ecologies. The panel seeks contributions from humanists and post-humanists on the ecological, ethical, political, social, and/or economic consequences of such conceptions as “the human,” “nature,” and their variants. One of the goals of the panel will be to debate the extent to which such conceptions themselves already form an or multiple ecology/ies; that is to say, the extent to which they already demarcate and/or engender territories of “real” ecological consequence. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

• How do race, gender, and sexuality shape the ecologies of the (post)human?
• Where do (post)human ecologies end?
• How are ecologies shaped by representations?
• How are representations shaped by ecologies?
• What kinds of ecologies are there? Are there sound ecologies, cinematic ecologies, etc.?
• Where is the ecology of the (post)human to be situated?
• What are the ecologies of empire?
• Are ecologies real? What ecologies?
• Are there significant differences between human and post-human ecologies?
• What do ecologies exclude as part of their self-formation?

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Many twenty-first century European Institutions and individuals deploy symbols of the past to represent themselves in the present. In order to portray Europeans, for example, as democratic successors of the Greek City-States, descendants of the open-minded Renaissance man, or defenders of the Declaration of Human Rights, European Community officials use symbols to represent these values and explicitly or not to exclude others. So as to construct a new transnational identity, the European Union has an anthem and a flag, as well as joint cultural and economic ventures, such as the Erasmus Program and the Airbus industry. The proposed conference panel examines how European and diasporic artists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and singers use and interpret these and similar symbols of European unity. Some, certainly, may embrace them; others may interrogate or even subvert them, revealing inherent contradictions in the construction of a new European identity. Panelists themselves will stake out different positions on the general topic and discuss a wide range of source materials from or about the European Union’s member states (or candidates for membership). Basing their inquiry on concepts of national identity formation (such as Anderson’s “imagined communities”, Hobsbahm’s “invention of tradition”, Nora’s “lieux de mémoire”, Habermas’ “concepts of New Public Sphere”, Balibar’s “Marxian” analyses of “Europeanness”), and other analytical tools, panelists will examine European fictions (novels, theatre, films) and essays produced in the national and regional languages and cultures of Europe to better understand how an imagined community in the making defines itself and its Others.

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This seminar invites papers on the Faustian trope throughout world literature, in particular the concept of the human and its relation to knowledge, immortality, and magic. Papers may include analyses of canonical versions of the Faust story (Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann) as well as non-canonical and interdisciplinary approaches.

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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, Giorgio Agamben, Robert Harrison, and Gerhard Richter, scholars from a variety of backgrounds (literary and religious studies, art history, philosophy and political theory) 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 would also welcome papers dealing with other European, or non-European cultures.

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How can figures of form, rhyme schemes, repetitions, rhythmic elements which pervade literary works - often in so far as they are literary – be distinguished from the formulaic? When does a metaphor become a dead metaphor? When does repetition turn from a literary / stylistic device into cliche, into the hackneyed or everyday? More broadly speaking, how do all of these questions contribute to our (human) ability to recognize repetition as such in its difference from what is being repeated? Papers addressing all aspects of figures which oscillate between the heights of form and the abysses of the formulaic welcome. Topics might include but are not limited to: lists, “received ideas”, rhetorical questions (how can they be distinguished as rhetorical), dead as opposed to living metaphors, and other figures of repetition.

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The familiar letter has been at the heart of a series of humanisms in Europe, from the love story of Abelard and Héloise and its echoes in Rousseau and others, to the inversion of European perspectives in the many novels written in the “Persian Letters” or “Turkish Spy” mode. The letter has also played a role in presenting the post-colonial subject, in works as diverse as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre. In each of these historical instances, letters have played a central role in redefining subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Paradoxically, while the relay mechanisms for mail delivery have become ever faster and more secure, the content of letters has shrunk, along with their projection of human subjectivity. The epistolary novel had become a rarity by about 1850. Though we may not take at face value Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement that “In a social configuration in which each individual is reduced to the level of a function […] the ‘I’ in the letter is always something of a mirage,” the replacement of corrrespondence by e-mail seems to have driven the final nail in the coffin of “letterature.” This seminar will explore the issues emerging from the above exposition, and contest its admittedly one-sided history of epistolary humanisms. Papers that interrrogate theories of epistolarity (e.g., Derrida, Kittler, Siegert), that adduce examples (genuine or fictional) from non-Western epistolary practices, and that treat electronic forms of epistolarity are all especially welcome.

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Since the Enlightenment, the issue of the existence of gods has been a topic of debate. Many have flatly denied the divine. Others have tried to defend the existence of gods in traditional ways against the flow of modern and contemporary speculation. Perhaps more interesting, however, are those positions which attempt to reconstruct arguments for the existence of divinity outside of traditional ontological modes of thinking. Poetry and fiction have always been happy companions of this effort at reconstruction. This seminar explores the manner in which poetry and literature afford means for imaginatively reconceiving the existence of the divine.

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The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of “difference” has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human “difference” such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and “minority” literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of “difference” as it relates to the “human.” How does “difference” operate within the practice of “comparison,” especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as “language,” “culture,” and even the vague notion of “sensibility”? How do various categories of “difference” such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the “human”? Comparative analyses of regimes of “difference” across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome.

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From La Mettrie’s query about the human’s vegetal and mechanical tendencies (Man: A Plant / Man: A Machine) to Heidegger’s assertion (in the lectures on technology) that it belongs to the essence of man to become a tool for Being, definitions of the human have been bound up in vexed and complex ways with definitions of technics and technology. In this seminar, we propose to explore the conjunction of these definitions in literary and philosophical texts of any period or genre. We are particularly interested in submissions that conjugate theories of technics with those of literature or language. What happens when language destabilizes rather than shores up definitions of man as animal rationale? When literature is no longer a space of culture or of spirit but rather susceptible of automatization; thought from the side of the event rather than of the communication of its effects; when it becomes a grafting of living and dead, a space of hybridity or prosthesis? Who speaks or writes in this space?

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A “simple” question: In which language would universal human rights be expressed? That “non-universal” particular, the English language? By diagnosing the plight of stateless peoples and the failures of minority treaties after WWI, Hannah Arendt argued that the possibility for human rights would be inextricably linked with the sovereign power of nation-states. While the bulk of engagements with human rights have focused on the legal machinery of the modern state—the role of the decision and the exception, and the proliferation of extra-juridical territories—the function of language for materially enacting these policies has not borne the same scrutiny. Since Aristotle, sovereign powers like the nation-state have mobilized the category of the “human subject” as a being capable of language. Yet the nation-state adjudicates the limits of the human subject because people can only be recognized as human within a particular national language. A concept of universal humanity seems aporetic. This panel focuses on how language enfigures the human to provide the stable locus around which legal measures such as “rights” can be declared. For example, given the imperial and colonial legacies of the British and American empires, what hegemonic roles may “Global English” play to affect the possibilities of rights before issues of legality, “governmentality,” natural or civil rights could be claimed? What role will translation perform in articulating, defending, or foreclosing the possibility of rights? How will language mediate the emergence of extra-legal zones where some forms of life are thrown into camps? What is ‘lost’ in translation?

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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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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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On numerous occasions Primo Levi —survivor, writer, practicing chemist— frames his understanding of the concentration camp experience in terms of a “laboratory”. Assaying that metaphor and catalyzing its permutations, Levi states that the limit experiences brought to light there are “pregnant, full of significance…[ask] more questions than…[they answer]…sum up…the entire theme of the grey zone and…[leave] one dangling”. In such limit experiences “it is possible,” he claims, “to recognize in an exemplary form the almost physical necessity with which political coercion gives birth to that ill-defined sphere of ambiguity and compromise,” what he calls a “terrible” but “indecipherable” world which must be, “if possible, understood”. Hypothesizing the validity of Levi’s metaphor, our panel proposes to examine the nature of the knowledge that arises out of such “experiments” and experiences of the limit. Examinations of these grey zones raise a series of profound epistemological, ethical, representational and linguistic questions: what can be known of such experiences; how can they be articulated; what are our needs and obligations with respect to them? Since we deem knowledge to be primarily an effect of retroaction, we do not seek to limit the panel’s discussion to the Shoah; rather, we believe that the conditio inhumana made manifest there constitutes a lens, albeit grey, for every articulation of knowledge of the human condition confronted with the non-human of a limit situation.

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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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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, this seminar is focused on papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual,” in the early modern period in Europe.

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Medievalism has for centuries been a tool for defining, but also temporalizing, essential European and by extension “human” traits, and has thereby provided a means for mapping humanity in time. Critical studies of medievalism have focused primarily upon its importance in the writing of European national identities and upon its role in placing colonized peoples “back” in human time. But medievalism was also practiced in European colonies, by the very people against whom Europe and the human were being defined. This seminar seeks to understand the uses, functions, and effects of those Other Medievalisms, specifically those developed outside the geographic and imaginary boundaries of “Europe.” What did medievalism look like from the other side of the colonizer’s “mirror”? To what effect did colonized Others use the tool of medievalism? What were their motives? What was their legitimization and rationale? Did their efforts intervene in the production of “Europe” and the “Middle Ages”? How did their actions interact with the possibility of their partaking in the civilized Human realm?

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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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This panel investigates the crucial role played by faith in the articulation of identity, not only in religious terms but also in geographical and ethnic terms. From the early modern period the incorporation of faith in discourses of imperialism caused religion and race to function as vectors of alterity in dramatically new forms. Already in this period it is possible to observe the ways in which alterity came to be predicated on the basis of a biological or racial nature rather than that of a spiritual orientation, while faith – by definition Christian faith – came to be the exclusive property of the Western subject. This panel examines the ways in which religious, geographic and ethnic categories of alterity and identity have been deployed and reclaimed in imperial and postcolonial contexts. Panelists draw from a variety of disciplinary methodologies, including anthropology, history and comparative literature. Case studies encompass the role of supernaturalism and formation of identity in nineteenth-century America, South Asia and the Middle East and contemporary Britain, Iran, and South Asia.

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This session’s papers cover a wide range of topics, all of which deal with aspects of poetry that at first sight may appear to be “in the margins” of this genre: There is what seems to be conventional ‘courtly poetry’, in the case of Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther Skin, an epic written around 1200 A.D. in Georgia. Suddenly, the convention is undercut by an encounter between a lion and a leopard which begins as a courtship but ends in mortal combat—predicting that love will eventually disappear into mortal hate. Covering a somewhat later period yet retaining the animal image, the second paper presents a comparison of European Renaissance emblem books and Taoist Chinese poetry. Both genres explore ways in which animals were used as symbolic tools to focus the readers’ minds on the ineffable and to bring them into contact with divinity. The third paper focuses on poetry from the modern period: Baudelaire’s and Gertrude Stein’s prose poems can be seen as their authors’ attempts at addressing the increasing isolation of the two poets in their world. They critique thoughtless consumption and link questions of artistic production to self-production and material culture. By choosing the genre of prose poem and refusing a generic identity, both authors can traverse realms, high art and newspaper culture, aesthetic and social phenomena, and negotiate these realms critically.

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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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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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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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What are the limits of theater? Is alienation a necessary part of the experience of theater, and at what point does spectacle become surveillance? Is theatricality necessarily dehumanizing, or are there ways of theorizing theatricality that would allow for a reaffirmation of our humanity? And how might concepts of catharsis, performance/performativity, spectacle, parody, irony, and dramatic monologue be applied outside of the traditional discourse on the theater? The aim of this seminar will be to explore ideas of theatricality in relation to politics, gender, race, and history, and through examinations of theoretical considerations by Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, and Mulvey, among others.

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Space and time have been central, organizing categories in many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic constructions of the human. What it means to be a human subject (or conversely, a subhuman one) have classically been defined along these two axes, in terms drawn from a well-known family of spatio-temporal metaphors and motifs – at one extreme, the human as constituted by limitless horizons and latitude of movement, at another, a providential, purposeful unfolding of history. This seminar invites papers that address and interrogate the centrality of either of these two tropes in representations of the human, in various kinds of texts and media, and across different historical periods and geographical contexts. Some questions that might be posed in this connection include: the privileging of a poetics of space and time, or vice versa, in different literary-philosophical discourses; the differential spatialities and temporalities of raced and gendered subjects within the normative space and time of Western ‘man’; property as colonization of space; the impact of recent transformations in regimes of space and economies of time on contemporary configurations of the human; the body as site and moment of subjection/subversion.

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In this seminar we will explore different conceptualizations of the relation between “affect” and “the body” as a translational mechanism crucial for establishing, producing and articulating the entities generally labeled as “human.” This seminar therefore aims at establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between traditional notions used to describe this crucially “human” dialectic, belonging primarily to different strands of psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics, with other alternative ways of conceptualizing the nature of affect emerging within contemporary post-structuralist critical thinking, cultural studies and film theory. A key objective of the seminar will be to incorporate translation theory to the theoretical constellation at stake here in our attempt to discuss the mechanics of affect between particular “bodies,” since a process of “translatio” seems to take place not only in the production of affect, but most evidently in the different attempts to provide particular interpretations/readings of different modes of affect. Finally, and within this context, we will pose key questions concerning the very category of the “human” as the exclusive realm in which “affects” might be able to operate and thus investigate the possibilities for a more or less technologically sophisticated realm where “affects” manage to translate into their post-human or inhuman form(s).

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This seminar explores how deviance, madness and otherness contour the limits of the “human.” Through their creative work, professed twisted minds have created deviant writings that show reality as a dominant fiction, as a strategic essencialism, and as a struggle between belief and knowledge. Deviant writings have appeared along history. They challenge the category of “difference” as it narrates, shapes, and redefines the “human.” They allow the most unthinkable other to emerge within the self. They redefine dominant social paradigms of the human from the inside. In doing so, they contour a redefinition of individual thought, in relation to a social knowledge of domination/submission, while exhibiting that representation is not solely a reflection of social relations of production but also a social relation itself.

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This panel explores the sites of extreme encounters and/or encounters at the extremes by investigating how humanness and otherness are interrogated, integrated, construed and perceived at the margins and frontiers of material and imagined spaces. At these extremes the seemingly stable category of human comes under fierce pressure to either survive or re-define itself and this enables us to consider: Where are the borders of the human? How and why define this border? How is location or space used to define “the human and its others”? How is human conceived and perceived through or beyond its bodily limits? Why and by whom? How is human constructed and construed within extreme environments? How can experiences at those edges or margins allow us to re-define our notions of human and other? How do the edge-zones of space or experience enable or generate our definitions of human and other?

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