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, this seminar is focused on papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual,” in the early modern period in Europe.

Friday, March 24

Julie Orlemanski,
“The First Absence: Transgressing Priority in Silence”
Megan Heffernan,
“Exile and Social Subjectivity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New Word, Called the Blazing World”
Joanne Myers,
“Infectious Fictions in A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe and the Empirical Self”
Steve Martinot,
“The Novel as Common Experience”

Saturday, March 25

Vivasvan Soni,
“(Un)happy Subjects: The Narrative Politics of Happiness and the Emergence of Modern Subjectivity in the Eighteenth Century”
Michael House,
“The Skeptical Subject around 1800: Considering the Self Alone with Itself in Nothingness”
Tobias Boes,
“The Apprenticeship of the Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Invention of History, ca. 1770-1820”
Elena Ilina,
“Three Hundred Years of Solitude: the Puritan, the Victorian and the Post-Modern Robinsons of Defoe, Butler and Coetzee”