ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

“Spirits”: ghosts, faeries, demons, and their teeming brethren have never quite made the transition to humanity, yet writers from all epochs have attempted to “embody” them in literature and explain their interactions with humankind. This panel solicits papers that discuss the peculiar magic inherent in attempting to define spiritual beings in anthropomorphic ways, chronicle contact between the human and spirit realms, or describe the paranormal in earthly terminology. Questions to explore: How do spiritual beings “translate” from older genres like the folktale and epic to more modern genres/audiences? From animistic cultures to non-animistic ones? Have spirits become an obsolete or irrelevant in postmodern writing? How have they evolved, faded, or transmogrified?; How do “culturally specific” spirits (e.g. ban sidhe, Dryads, animal spirits, rada and petro of Vodun, gandharvas of Sanskrit poetry, La Llorona, hathors of ancient Egypt) transmit the beliefs, memories, and Weltanschauung of the cultures to which they pertain? How do they function when transplanted to other cultural audiences through the medium of texts?; How do Eurocentric and Native American spirit mythologies impact Native/American literature?; Are there such things as “spirit imperialism”–texts in which the spirits of a colonized people are supplanted (linguistically or otherwise) by those of their conquerors, or texts in which spirits act as symbols of conquest/possession?; How do spirits support, resist, or redefine literary definitions of femininity and masculinity? How do they relate to earthly geographies and chronologies? How do they participate in what Harold Bloom has called “the invention of the human?”

Friday, March 24

Masaki Mori, University of Georgia
“When the Shadow Renounces the Human”
Shawn Salvant, Vanderbilt University
“Something like life”: Transfusion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Steve Adisasmito-Smith, California State University, Fresno
“An (Ig)Noble Thirst for Blood: Aryan Heroes and Monstrous Rakshasas in the Mahabharata and Ramayana”
Hongmei Sun Sun, Universtity of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Boundary Violator / Protector: Domestication and Rehabilitation of foxes and ghosts in Liaozhai zhiyi”

Saturday, March 25

Yoko Chiba, St. Lawrence University
“Spiritual Odyssey from the Fairy Kingdom to Tibetan Buddhism”
Ilit Ferber, Tel-Aviv University
“Figures of the Ghostly in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel Book”
Nathan Devir, The Pennsylvania State University
“Paranormal Phenomena as Symbolic Cohesion in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies”
Steven D. Scott, Brock University
“Angels and Cyborgs”

Sunday, March 26

Niles Tomlinson, The George Washington Univerisity
“Othering the Lesser Monster: The Fluid Sister and the Brother of Stone in Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities”
James Ramey, UC Berkeley
“The Vampire and the Funeral: Parasitism in Ulysses”
Galina Siarheichyk, University of Colorado at Boulder
“On her way to the Styx: Transgression in the poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva”
Naqaa Abbas, University of Western Ontario
“The Dark Sublime: Monstrosity and Terror in Caleb Williams”