ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

George Eliot writes in an 1859 letter that the primary task of art is to “enlarge men’s sympathies,” enabling us to “imagine and to feel the pains and joys” of people utterly unlike ourselves. Thus, she promotes a literary ethics, one based in the individual experiences of the artist and audience over theoretical principle and abstraction. Along with the possibility for compassionate understanding, this model brings with it the very real possibility of violation–for instance, the collapse of a distinction between the self and other people and the consequent subjugation or effacement of these others. The focus on individual experience also risks obscuring political and historical concerns. How do we confront these dangers? Is there an attendant danger in not imagining? As writers and readers, how can we imagine the other ethically? Although anxieties about failures of empathy and ethics may arise with urgency when we confront moments of crisis, such as war, terror, agony, or grave loss, how is the ethical imagination also challenged by mundane and everyday otherness? Responding to critics and philosophers such as Nussbaum, Sontag, Scarry, and Bakhtin, this seminar will explore the limits of the imagination, what lies beyond the boundaries of the imaginable, and how literature limns this boundary. The impulse to imagine others appears inherently human. Can we assure ourselves that it is also humane?

Friday, March 24

Joseph Benatov, University of Pennsylvania
“An American in Prague: Imagining America’s Cold War Others”
Cristina Dahl, Cornell University
“Given Time, Given Voice: Narrative and the Ethics of Exchange in Elena Garro’s ‘La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas’”
Colene Bentley, Rice University
“Narrating Ethics in Coetzee’s Disgrace”
Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Miami
“Yehuda Amichai: The Poetics/Politics of Empathy”

Saturday, March 25

I-Chun Wang, National Sun Yat-sen University
“Terra Incognita and Border Transgression: Milton’s Comus and ‘The White Ape’ of the Chinese Tang Dynasty”
David Shaun Morgan, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
“Critical Distance: V.S. Naipaul and the Ethics of Saidian Exile”
Suzanne Gauch, Temple University
“‘Sampling’ Europe and Its Others”
Helene Sicard-Cowan, University of Virginia
“Intimate Exoticism and the ‘Savagery’ of ‘Civilization’ in Gustave Flaubert’s Par les champs et les grèves”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Imagining Our Others: A Philosophical Ethics
• Imagining Our Others: A Literary Ethics