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

Alice Brittan, Dalhousie University
“Empathy and Disgrace”
Katrina Harack, University of California, Irvine
“The Ethical Imagination: Toni Morrison’s Sense of History, Responsibility, and the Ethics of the As-If”
Patricia Rae, Queen’s University
“Orwell on Proletarian Suffering”
Amanda Irwin Wilkins, Princeton University
“Failures of the Imagination: Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the Interwar Years”

Saturday, March 25

Christopher Mole, Washington University in St. Louis
“Attention and the Source of Imagination’s Value”
Anne Caswell Klein, Princeton University
“‘Aesthetic Bliss’: Vladimir Nabokov and the Risks of Imagination”
Nanette Clinch, San Jose State University
“ Duty, That Shameful Poacher of Fruit!: Longing and Belongings in Jane Austen’s Persuasion”
Stephanie Johnson, University of Puget Sound
“Imagining the Self Imagined: Aurora Leigh’s Ethic of Reading”

Sunday, March 26

Tara McGann, American University
“Intimations of Mortality: Pain, Suffering, and an Ethics of Reading in ‘Janet’s Repentance’”
Ann Jurecic, Rutgers University
“Too Painful for Words: The Problem of Pain and the Literary Imagination”
Hina Nazar, University of Illinois
“What’s in a Face? Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Turn to Ethics”
Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
“Bakhtin and Poetics in the Shadow of Pain”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

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