ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In Histoire de la Folie, Michel Foucault writes: “As death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, madness is its limit in the realm of animality.” This seminar will examine how writers, across disciplines and genres, utilize states of madness to interrogate such limits on the human. In questioning the meaning of madness, writers such as Kant, Rhys, Melville, Naipaul, Feldman, and Fanon also question the meaning of the human. While acknowledging the connection between madness and writer, the seminar focuses more specifically on the connection between madness and writing in various time periods and genres.

Friday, March 24

Lars Bernaerts, Ghent University
“The Writer in the Madhouse”
Brian Ingraffia, Calvin College
“Madness and the Mystic in Louise Erdrich and Ron Hansen”
Scarlett Marquette, Harvard University
“‘I Think What You Think’: Madness, Russian Culture and an Alternative to Cogito”
Richard Olehla, Charles University, Prague
“‘Paranoiding’ for the Word: Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father, Paranoia and Possible Madness in the Works of Thomas Pynchon”

Saturday, March 25

Daniel Colleran, City University of New York Graduate Center
“Wandering the Borders of Madness: Psychoanalysis and Differance in Hitchcock’s Vertigo”
Melanie D. Holm, Rutgers University
“Abject Scientia”
Oliver Kohns, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University, Frankfurt
“‘A Sensible Kind of Madness’: The Limits of Enthusiasm in Shaftesbury and Kant”
Cynthia Wachtell, Stern College, Yeshiva University
“Melville, Madness, and ‘Pierre’”

Sunday, March 26

Kelly Baker Josephs, Rutgers University
“Manias and Messiahs: The Madness of Miguel Street”
Louise Bernard, Georgetown University
“Melville, Madness, and the Meta-physical”
Susan Joseph, Howard University
“Exundat Furor: Overflowing Madness and the Need for Social Change in New Versions of Medea”