ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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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The term “humanism” has a vexed history, yet one that will not die. Many scholars speak in “post-human” terms, rejecting any concept of humanism on the grounds that the term masks negative agendas and repressive ideas. Yet many others find that they need to hold on to some, perhaps vitiated, concept of humanism, often for political reasons. For example, Edward Said, shortly before he died, wrote a book about humanism. Will any humanism be possible in the future? From this central question a range of questions could emerge. Humanism has been associated with technological and historical progress. Will it continue to be viewed this way? Is humanism possible in the future without progress? Will future humanism(s) hold on to some of the precepts of the humanist tradition, or will it take a different turn entirely, or will it exist at all? Will future humanism(s) be anchored in a tension between religion and secular culture, or is there a way to destabilize such binaries? How do we understand a synthetic approach to diverse cultures after postcolonial critiques to approach a form of global humanism? What are the effects of diasporic phenomena on humanism? Papers are welcome from a variety of critical approaches: Philosophy, Social Theory, Literary Studies, Psychology, Interdisciplinary Studies.

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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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