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, 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.

Friday, March 24

Jonathan Jones, University of California, Los Angeles
“Walking among the Dead: Guenter von Hagens’ BodyWorlds”
Jianguo Chen, University of Delaware
“Death as the Paradox of Survival in Chinese Cultural Imaginary”
Jennifer Wenzel, University of Michigan/Princeton University
“Ancestors without Borders: Figures of the Dead in Colonial and Post-apartheid South Africa”
Maureen Moynagh, St. Francis Xavier University
“Slavery’s Undead: The Melancholic Structure of Memory in Postslavery Fiction”

Saturday, March 25

Roy Brand, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Experiencing Loss: Variations on Gus Van Sant’s Elephant”
Maureen Chun, Princeton University
“The Poetics of Fascination in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz”
Barbara Hui, University of California, Los Angeles
“Internal and External Memory in Sebald’s Historical Narrative”
Christina Kraenzle, York University
“Haunted Spaces: Place, Landscape and Architecture in the Works of W. G. Sebald”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Figures and Figurations of the Undead