ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Confronting his creator Victor Frankenstein, the monster exclaims: “My form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.” Taking our cue from the monster, we invite proposals that explore the relationships between reproduction and monstrosity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print and visual culture. The areas we are interested in exploring include:

1. the relationships between technologies of reproduction and concepts of the monstrous copy or “filthy type”;
2. the ways in which technologies of reproduction transform and/or deform the human;
3. the ways in which technologies of reproduction produce “filthy types,” i.e., bad writing and/or bad characters;
4. the ways in which “filthy types”—the criminal, the pornographer, the revolutionary—employ technologies of reproduction like the printing press;
5. seditious literature and criminal biography;
6. conceptions of the reproductive body in scientific and medical discourse.

The seminar welcomes contributions from scholars doing work on print culture and literature; popular and visual culture; media theory; the history and sociology of reading; feminism and gender studies. We also welcome papers addressing broader questions regarding monstrosity in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century: How do technical and scientific innovations affect conceptualizations of monstrosity? What do conceptualizations of monstrosity tell us about changing definitions of the human/non-human during the period? What defines a monster as such? Are monsters necessarily singular or can there be a community of monsters? Can monsters reproduce themselves?

Friday, March 24

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, The University of Chicago
“Hugo and the Monstrosity of Feminine Agency”
Barry McCrea, Yale University
“Marriage and Reproduction in Stoker and Austen”
Kate Oestreich, The Ohio State University
“Dangerous Dressing: Reversing the Appearance of Chastity in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk”
Alexandra Neel, Princeton University
“Mary Shelley’s Bad Books and ‘that Ugly Picture’”

Saturday, March 25

Elizabeth Hoiem, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Maturin’s Hypothesis: Repeatable Experiments in Melmoth the Wanderer”
Matthew Pangborn, University at Albany, SUNY
“The ‘German Epidemic’ in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”
Dermot Ryan, Columbia University
“‘Systematic Unsociability”’: Edmund Burke and the Technological Production of Revolutionary Monstrosity”
Julia Carlson, University of Michigan
“Emphatic Effects: Marking Self on the Topographical and Verbal Page”