ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar aims to explore how the category of the “human” can come to be reformulated through the structure of perversion, especially in the readings of literary texts. The comparative study of literatures has been instrumental in forming the category of “perversion,” as writers such as Petrarch, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have, in their international receptions, helped to shape what counts as “perverse” in relation to the properly human. Lacan’s formula for perversion, a<>$, suggests that the pervert can present him or herself in such a way that would radically restructure relations between the human and its other: in becoming the “other” for a subject’s enjoyment, the pervert can test, contest, and reconfigure the limits of subjectivity. Freud, on the other hand, in insisting upon the perversity infused into the very constitution of the “normal” human subject, destabilized any sharp division that might be made between the properly human and its perverse “others.” Moreover, Deleuze’s work on sadism and masochism suggests that perverse discourses emerge in and through aesthetic categories that separate them from the properly “human.” A good example of the ramifications of this analysis would be Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation of the masochistic “Equus eroticus” in A Thousand Plateaus. We welcome papers that explore the connection between the perverse and the human in literary texts. Papers from diverse theoretical perspectives, and from any period and national tradition, are welcome insofar as they focus on the relation between the perversity of the relation between the human and its others.

Friday, March 24

Sorin Cucu, University at Buffalo
“The Anatomy of Solitude (Monstrous Writing/Perverse Politics: Michel Tournier)”
Estelle Noonan, The University of Sydney
“Binding and Unbinding: Dickinson, Masochism, Textuality”
Wesley King, University of Virginia
“Emily Dickinson, Literary Perversion, and the White Symbolic”

Saturday, March 25

Ganina Lagodsky, Temple University
“The Perverse Narrator in James Joyce’s Ulysses”
Shane Herron, SUNY Buffalo
“Towards an Informatics of Shitflows: Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Tragicomic Digital Subject”
David Sigler, University of Virginia
“To be or not to be?: Why Hamlet takes center stage in Lacanian mechanics of perversion”
J. Jennifer Jones, University of Rhode Island
“The Nature of Perversity in Romanticism; or, Perverse Wordsworth”

Sunday, March 26

Alison Syme, University of Toronto
“Anatomy of the Electric Feel”
Robin Chamberlain, McMaster University
“The Orality of Melancholy: Melancholic Desire as Regressive Narrative in Mary Shelley’s Matilda and John Keats’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’”
Mathias Nilges, University of Illinois at Chicago
“God’s Repressive Death: Perverse Pleasure in Palahniuk, Ellis, DeLillo and Tyree”
Frederic Conrod, University of Colorado, Boulder
“‘The Sexual Exercises’: Sade and the Parodying of Christianity in Libertinage”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Twisted Minds, Deviant Writings