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

Timo Günther, Freie Universität Berlin,
“The sovereign individual and the body of Dionysus”
Monica O’Brien, Chester College of New England
“Bombed-Out Consciousness: The Failure of the Subject in Adorno and Beckett”
Veronica Alfano, Princeton University
“Parts That Are Wholes”: Adrienne Rich’s Fearful Asymmetry”
David Jenemann, University of Vermont
“Camouflage Work: The Hidden Subject of Modernism”

Saturday, March 25

Tom McCall, University of Houston, Clear Lake
Leaving us in Stitches: the “Individual” in the Switchboards”
Ori Rotlevy, Tel Aviv University
“Benjamin’s Baudelaire: A True Individual in a Modern Capitalist City”
William Junker, University of Chicago
“A Poor Sovereignty: Lukács’s Two Visions of the Individual in ‘The Theory of the Novel’”
Jonathon Penny, University of Ottawa/University of Lethbridge
“Eschatology and the Apocalypse of Self in the ‘Other’ Modern Novel”