ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

– Mon semblable, mon frère – From Petrarch, who wrote familiar letters to his classical models, to Derrida, who could elide the boundary between his own voice and the voices of his texts to powerful effect, a disarming sense of intimacy between reader and text has been a consistent aspect of humanistic practise. Yet beside the extraordinary proximity achieved in humanistic reading there always seems to open a great distance, as though we are never so far away from our texts as when we are closest to them. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism Edward Said referred to this twinning of intimacy with exteriority under the headings of receptivity and resistence, but analogous formulations can be found in ethnography, ethics, political theory, and fiction. This seminar explored the simultaneity of intimacy and exteriority in three constellations.

Friday, March 24

Anne Marie Guglielmo, Stanford University
“Sin and Skin: Flaying and Same-Sex Desire in Michelangelo’s Poem Forty-Nine and The Last Judgment”
Michelle Syba, Harvard University
“Raillery’s Strange Intimacies”
Madhvi Zutshi, Rutgers University
“The Economy of Affect: “The Man of Feeling” and sensibility in eighteenth-century England”
Colin Benert, Reed College
“Immanence and Ecstasy in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister”

Saturday, March 25

Andrea Leavey, University of Texas at Dallas
“Audience and Human Intimacy: The Theatre of Disruptive Dialogics in Contemporary American Women’s Poetry”
Arina Rotaru, Cornell University
“The Visible and the Third.”
Lydia Kerr, SUNY Buffalo
“Thinking the Letter: Heidegger’s Intimate Unfamiliarity”
Kristin McCartney, DePaul University
“Signifying Intimates and Strangers.”

Sunday, March 26

Cristina Vlatescu, Harvard University Society of Fellows
“Police State Intimacy”
Kieran Aarons, University of Western Ontario
“The Other and the Impossible; Notes on Bataillean Communication”
Nidesh Lawtoo, University of Washington
“On the Affective Side of Interior Experience: George Bataille’s Communicative Mimesis”
Eric Trudel, Bard College
“The Intimacy of Resistance. “Reading Paulhan with Nancy.”