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, Agambem, Arendt, Wittgenstein, 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

Nancy Ruttenburg, New York University
“A Comparative Ethics: The Homines Sacri of Agamben and Dostoevsky”
Val Vinokur, The New School
“Isaac Babel’s Ethics of Defilement”
Kenneth Kraszewski, The University of Chicago
“‘Normal Men Do Not Know That Everything is Possible’: Borowski, Agamben, and Arendt”

Saturday, March 25

Will Buckingham, Staffordshire University
“In an Alien Element: A Naïve Phenomenology of the Story”
Mai-Lin Cheng, University of California, Berkeley
“Towards a Genealogy of Human Interest”
Mark Coeckelbergh, Maastricht University
“Imagination, Morality, and World Citizenship: A Critique of Nussbaum”
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, University of California, Berkeley
“Puzzle, Parable, and the Limits of the Imagination: The Literary Ethics of Kafka and Wittgenstein”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

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