ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

From La Mettrie’s query about the human’s vegetal and mechanical tendencies (Man: A Plant / Man: A Machine) to Heidegger’s assertion (in the lectures on technology) that it belongs to the essence of man to become a tool for Being, definitions of the human have been bound up in vexed and complex ways with definitions of technics and technology. In this seminar, we propose to explore the conjunction of these definitions in literary and philosophical texts of any period or genre. We are particularly interested in submissions that conjugate theories of technics with those of literature or language. What happens when language destabilizes rather than shores up definitions of man as animal rationale? When literature is no longer a space of culture or of spirit but rather susceptible of automatization; thought from the side of the event rather than of the communication of its effects; when it becomes a grafting of living and dead, a space of hybridity or prosthesis? Who speaks or writes in this space?

Friday, March 24

Kevin Spencer, University of Alberta
“The Only Good Metaphor Is a Dead Metaphor: The Savage Effects of New Media”
Alastair Hunt, University of Wisconsin
“Human Rights, Species, Technics”
Jocelyn Holland, University of California at Santa Barbara
“Old Tool, New Technology: Contemporary Perspectives on the Romantic ‘Werkzeug’”
György Fogarasi, University of Szeged
“Man, Monument, Mill: Wordsworth’s Hydroelectric ‘Plant’”

Saturday, March 25

Astrid Vicas, Saint Leo University
“Perfectionism and Machine Agency”
Laura Chiesa, Yale University
“Technically Tender?”
Esra Atamer, Binghamton University
“The Dialectical Image of the Cyborg”