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

Avram Alpert, Columbia University
“I Have Something Inside of Me Talking to Myself”: The Ethics of Hospitality and Interdependence in Finnegans Wake
Gabor Molnar, Rutgers University
“Human Memory, Inhuman Memories”
Audrey Wasser, Cornell University
“Beckett’s Automatons”
Nicolas Di Méo, Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux
“The ambivalent contestation of individualism in Marguerite Yourcenar’s works”

Saturday, March 25

Sean Witters, Brandeis University
“Disunity: Mary McCarthy and the Branded Self”
David Anshen, University of Texas-Pan American
“Norman Mailer’s Unfinished Novel, Harlot’s Ghost: The Writer who came in from the Cold War”
David Russell, Princeton University
“’My Frail Opium-Shattered Self’ Thomas De Quincey as a Subject in Crisis”
Kyle Wiggins, Brandeis University
“Detective Out of Time: Individualism and Future Noir in Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music”
Jonathan Kemp, Goldsmiths College
“The Penetrated Male: A poetics of perversion”