ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore the uncertain place of economic thought in the contemporary study of aesthetics and material culture. In the social sciences, human agency has increasingly come to be understood in terms of acts of consumption rather than acts of production or self-production. Does this suggest that philosophical conceptions of self-determination have been abandoned in favor of economic models of rationality? How do these developments alter our view of the human being as an essentially historical entity? Might the critical force of aesthetic analysis rest on its capacity to prompt a rethinking of the relationship between mental and material labor? Participants are invited to consider the ways in which literary discourses offer unique insights into the powers–and dangers–of paradigms of production, utility, or value. Do traditional distinctions between the economic and the social still prove adequate where the relationship between aesthetics and politics is concerned? To what degree has the conceptualization of signification always relied on notions of money or material exchange?

Friday, March 24

Rebecca Handler-Spitz, University of Chicago
“The Unstable Value of Language in Li Zhi and Montaigne”
Alisa Hartz, Haverford College
“Reflecting on Value: Middlemarch, Adam Smith, and Neo-Classical Economics”
Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University
“Aesthetics of Self-Interest in Nineteenth-Century Germany”
Naomi Reed, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“The Economics of Self-Possession: Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson”

Saturday, March 25

Michael Mirabile, Reed College
“Rival Economies in Henry James’s The Sacred Fount”
Eyal Amiran, University of California at Irvine
“Capitalism, Universalism, and the Loss Narratives of Beckett and Bernhard”
Jan Mieszkowski, Reed College
“Permanent War Economies”
Christine Nadir, Columbia University
“Human Garbage: Economy and the Nature of Ethics in Marge Piercy’s
Ecotopic Fiction”