ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will address the notion of the monstrosity of language. Vico, for instance, stated that all “poetic monsters and metamorphoses” take place as a particular kind of trope, one that creates new ideas by putting together incongruent figures. The problem, for Vico, is not necessarily the fact that these “poetic monsters” happen as a result of a “composition” or the positing together of two distinct forms. After all, it could be said that poetic language is always a way of subsuming diversity under one figure. Rather, Vico defines the monster as a poetic figure forged by an uncertain or illegitimate relation. For example, children born of prostitutes are “monsters,” according to Roman law, since they have a human nature crossed with the “bestial characteristic of having been born of vagabond or uncertain unions.” This seminar therefore invites papers that focus on the monster as a formation of an “uncertain” or illegitimate relation. What is an “uncertain” relation? What would be a “legitimate” relation? More generally, we invite papers that focus on the way rhetoric is theorized as “monstrous” or is figured as somehow threatening. Furthermore, we invite papers that study a specific rhetoric of monsters in a wide range of texts. How does the monster play a part in conceiving other relations to the human, to politics, to law, to literature, or to language in general?

Friday, March 24

Nathan Gorelick, State University of New York at Buffalo
“‘May We Be Forgiven’: Redemption and Monstrosity in Sade’s ‘Eugénie de Franval’”
Joshua Gold, Johns Hopkins University
“Reading Deformity: Benjamin, Poe, and the Little Hunchbacked Man”
Karen Steigman, University of Minnesota
“Monstrous Rhetoric and the Political Thriller: Mothers and Sons in The Manchurian Candidate”
Jennifer Ballengee, Towson University
“Facing the Monstrous: the Rhetoric of Terrorism and the Inhuman”

Saturday, March 25

Trevor Jockims, Stony Brook University, SUNY
“Monsters in Motion, Monsters in Place: Spenser’s Rhetoric of Uncertainty”
Jon Baarsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Monstrous Analogy in Paradise Lost”
Robert Alexander, Brock University
“Aggressive Incongruity: Exorbitant Bodies and Linguistic Monstrosity in the Scriblerian’s ‘Double Mistress’”
David Kelman, Emory University
“Monstrous Allegory: ‘Non-Fiction’ in Poe and Borges”

Sunday, March 26

Jennifer Glaser, University of Pennsylvania
“Golems and Other Monsters of the Jewish American Racial Imaginary”
Rachel Trousdale, Agnes Scott College
“Monstrous Alternatives: Incest versus Hybridization in Nabokov and Rushdie”
Letitia Guran, College of William and Mary
“‘History’ and ‘Humanity’ Rewritten: The ‘Monstrous’ Language of Trauma in Toni Morrison”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Monstrous Rhetoric, Part II