ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will examine instances in which the monstrous impinges into the field of language-use, especially where rhetoric overlaps with poetics, eloquence, or systems of communication. Monsters are marvels and omens, impossible combinations stretching human imagination and possibility, troubles for beauty and action; how do they enter language or emerge from it? How are they “constructed” in and through literature? Are the word of mouth, the written testimony, the invention of fiction, the origins or originals of the monstrous? Do literature and monstrosity feed off of one another? We shall also consider qualities that the monstrous bring to language — bridity, contingency, inhumanity, the overabundance of humanity. Or is it the other way around?

Friday, March 24

Firat Karadas, Middle East Technical University
“The Imaginative and Ideational Character of Language in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’”
Effie Rentzou, Princeton University
“Rhetoric and the ‘formless’: Bataille and Surrealism”
Sarah Mann-O’Donnell, Rosemont College
“Opening Writing: Between Nietzsche and Blanchot”

Saturday, March 25

Brian Burns, Kettering University
“Rousseau and Frankenstein’s Monster: Confessing Anthropology”
Georgia Christinidis, University of Oxford
“Monstrosity and Bildung in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus”
Jessica Crabill, University of Rochester.
“Literary Firsts: The Vampire in British Literature”
Daniel Nolan, Northwestern University
“Terribly Candid: Kleist’s The Marquise von O….”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Monstrous Rhetoric, Part I