ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

Friday, March 24

Zubin Meer, York University
“Gramsci, Italian Modernity, and the Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Individualism”
John Rogers, Yale University
“Milton and the Heresy of Individualism”
Blair Hoxby, Harvard University
“Possessive Individualism Reconsidered”
Guinn Batten, Washington University at St. Louis
“Ethics in Crisis: Romanticism, Subjection, and the ‘Crisis Poem,’ from Wordsworth to Muldoon”

Saturday, March 25

James Cruise, Northwestern State University of Louisiana
“Secrecy and Spies: London, 1650-1800”
Nancy Armstrong, Brown University
“The Other Side of Modern Individualism: Locke and Defoe”
Philip Weinstein, Swarthmore College
“Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction”

Sunday, March 26

Judith Marcus, SUNY, Potsdam
“Exploring the Problems and Possibilities of the Individual in Times of Cultural Crisis in Literature and the Social Sciences”
Deborah Cook, University of Windsor
“The Rise and Decline of the Individual in Adorno: Exit Hamlet, Enter Hamm”
Cyrus Patel, NYU
“Emergent Literatures, Speculative Fiction, and the Lure of Humanism”