ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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.

Friday, March 24

Robert Buch, University of Chicago
“Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing, or the Visibility of the Undead (in Agamben)”
Jianguo Chen, University of Delaware
“Death as the Paradox of Survival in the Chinese Imaginary”
Maya Barzilai, UC-Berkeley
“Mourning as Creation: World War I Resurrections of the Golem”
Johannes Tuerk, Free University/Yale
“Rituals of Dying, Burrows of Anxiety: Writing Death in Proust and Kafka”

Saturday, March 25

Julia Hell, University of Michigan
“In the Shadow of Empire: Hermann Kasack’s City of the Dead and Carl Schmitt’s Reflections on World History (1942)”
Katja Garloff, Reed College
“Stalking Kafka: Homoeroticism and Remembrance in W. G. Sebald’s Schwindel.Gefuehle (Vertigo)”
Sarah Pourciau, Princeton University
“Infernal Poetics: Peter Weiss and the Problem of Postwar Authorship”
Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College
“Gerhard Richter’s Stations of the Cross: On Martyrdom and Memory in Postwar German Art”

Sunday, March 26

Sarah Lauro, UC-Davis
“Premature Resurrections: Emily Dickinson’s Zombie Poetics”
Yvette Louis, New Jersey City University
“Phantom Signs in Morrison’s Beloved and Parks’ The Death of the Last Black Man”
Charlton Payne, UCLA
“Voicing the “Many”: Figurations of the Undead in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea”
Kendra Drischler, University of Chicago
“Impossible Entombment: Writing the Dead Child in Mallarmé”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Figures and Figurations of the Undead II