ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar invites reflections on literature and language reform. More specifically, we invite participants to consider how nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist and internationalist language projects at once destroyed and reconstituted —- literally re-formed —- imaginations of language as something (uniquely) human: a double movement manifest in the para-literary and masocritical activities of historical and contemporary avant-gardes, in post-structuralist translation theory, and in current models of and for world literature. Papers might address the consequences for “human language,” and the relevance for literature, of any of the following or related topics in language politics and language ecology: alphabet reform; language purification; orthographic standardization; official language policies; international auxiliary and planned languages; global languages; monolingualism and plurilingualism; machine writing and machine translation.

Friday, March 24

Firat Oruç, Duke University
“Literary Modernity, Global Plebianization and Human Language”
Aaron Johnson, McGill University
“Language Reform, National Identity, and Literature in Ottoman and Republican Turkey”
Nergis Ertürk, Columbia University
“The Anatomy of Alphabets: Surrealism and Turkish Script Arts”
Lan Xu, University of Pennsylvania
“Language Planning and Language Reforms in China in the 1950s”

Saturday, March 25

Brian Daniels, University of Pennsylvania
“The Standardization of Language Use: The Use of Ethnographic Texts in Language Revitalization”
Séverine Rebourcet, University of Maryland
“Les Soleils des Indépendances by Ahmadou Kourouma and Quartier trois-lettres by Axel Gauvin: Poetics and politics of plurilingualism”
Kevin Hollo, Miami University, Oxford
“Monster Slang: The Metonymic Functions of Textual Archivation
Ashvin Pulinthitta, SUNY, Buffalo
“ID-entity: Mathematical Signatures of Human Incompleteness”

Sunday, March 26

Franz Peter Hugdahl, Cornell University
“Arno Schmidt’s Radio Essays”
Christopher Leslie, CUNY Graduate Center
“Science Fiction and Global English”
Ketevan Kupatadze, Emory University
“Reflections on Future of the Language or Language of the Future”
Brian Lennon, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
“Unicode and Totality”