ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

As suggested by the performative force attached to the Latin “humanitas” and its semantic proximity to ideals of “civility,” “cultivation,” and “urbanity,” premodern literary cultures picture humanity less as a fact of nature than as a fact of art. Indeed, unlike the modern conception of “the human,” whose definite article presumes a kind of categorical imperative, the premodern character of humanity denotes an achievement grounded in mastery of the various arts (of love and war, conduct and conversation, policy and politesse, thought and persuasion) transmitted in the body of texts and traditions still referred to as “the humanities.” One consequence is to identify humanity with “the humanities” themselves: are fully human those (and only those) initiated in the polite culture of humanist, mandarin, or clerical learning. However, a second consequence is that, precisely because human beings make themselves so, humanity announces the family of contrasting yet intimately related modes of being from which it arises. “The human” thus stands in protean relation to what, though “more” or “less,” is never wholly “other” than that: the gods and heroes, beasts and women, madmen and barbarians, prophets and poets, hierarchs and heretics who share the wider conceptual space within which notions of humanity operate. The seminar explores the exchanges, ratios, and metamorphoses this conception makes possible. Proposals are welcome from all fields of literary and cultural study, eastern or western, dating from classical antiquity to the threshold of the global modernity inaugurated in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

Friday, March 24

Alexander Beecroft, Yale University
“Qu Yuan: Shaman, Cabinet Minister, Protean and Poetic Human”
Wiebke Denecke, Columbia University
“Instruments of Fate and Identity: How Aeneas and Prince Shôtoku Made Rome and Japan”
David Damrosch, Columbia University
“Human/Divine/Animal Metamorphoses in the Ancient Egyptian ‘Tale of Two Brothers’”
Stephen Owen, Harvard University
“Non-Humans and Their Other”

Saturday, March 25

Zina Giannopoulou, University of California, Irvine
“Godlikeness as Knowledge and Actualization of the Self in Plato’s Theaetetus”
Scot Douglass, University of Colorado, Boulder
“Protean Isaac: Pauline, Rabbinic, and Augustinian Narrative Constructions of Identity”
Jordana Aamalia, Monash University
“Medieval Cyborgs: Sense Experience and the Technological Body of Christian Mysticism”
Rosemarie McGerr, Indiana University, Bloomington
“Protean Humanity in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival”

Sunday, March 26

James Nohrnberg, University of Virginia
“Separated at Birth: Sameness and Otherness as Biblical and Shakespearean Twins, and the Guest-Host Relation”
Daniel Selcer, Duquesne University
“Chance and the Discord of Bodies: Ovid and Lucretius in Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique”
Susan Wiseman, Birbeck College, London
“Transformation and Human Others: The Early Modern Wild Child”
Brenda Machosky, Cornell University
“The Humanity Beneath: The Female Image of the All-Male Stage”