ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Since its inception in the late sixteenth century, the essay has existed in the space between fiction and fact, between art and science, between the discourses of the human and those of the nonhuman world. Its occupation of this liminal space positions the essay both as a site of the investigation of the human and its others as well as a means for that investigation. The papers in this seminar interrogate the essay in terms of the modes of subjectivity it occasions and in terms of the discursive properties of essayism which orient it for an understanding of the human and its others.

Friday, March 24

Thomas Sebastian, Trinity University
“The Utopia of Essayism: Georg Lukács and Robert Musil”
Tobias Wilke, Princeton University
“IM-/Mediacy: Hand, Object, Text in Simmel’s Essay “Der Henkel”
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, University of Washington-Bothell
“Nothing Doing: Blanchot, Writing, and the Irreal”
Mark M. Freed, Central Michigan University
“Essaying the Nonmodern”

Saturday, March 25

A. C. Goodson, Michigan State University
“Essaying Agamben’s Biosphere”
R. Lane Kauffman, Rice University
“Apostasy, A Post-Essay: The Human in Question.”
Christian Schärf, Universität Mainz
“The Essay and the Bifurcation of Modern Thought.”