ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In “Printers’ Correctors and the Publication of Classical Texts,” Anthony Grafton remarks: “The corrector seems a preeminently modern figure… For the modern literary system, as Michel Foucault and others have taught us, is collaborative.” That Grafton, whose eloquent vision of Renaissance humanism is grounded largely in the traditional methods of the Geisteswissenschaften should nonetheless assume a familiarity with Foucault, is emblematic of the ways critical theory has influenced scholarship on Renaissance humanism. This seminar, accordingly, invites papers exploring how the Renaissance ideal of the Studia humanitatis might be rethought and redescribed in the wake of the great waves of critical and literary theory. And while Foucault’s reading of “that strange figure of knowledge called man” may well be a central topic of the seminar, papers could also address, for instance, how Certeau’s “mystic fable” has affected the study of Renaissance mysticism or how Derridean différance has influenced views of Renaissance philology. We also invite papers reconsidering the work of Burckhardt, Kristeller, Warburg, Yates, and Baron in the light of theory. Finally, papers examining the revalorization of hitherto ignored or neglected figures and topics as a result of theory’s influence are also welcome. In sum, with the recent deaths of Derrida, Said, and Ricoeur, and with the many conferences and publications marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Petrarch’s birth and the four-hundredth anniversary of the first part of Don Quijote, the moment is particularly ripe for comparatists to survey the state of the field.

Friday, March 24

Yasser Derwiche Djazaerly, Sam Houston State University
“Moral Indeterminacy: Burckhardt and Renaissance Individualism”
Ariadna Garcia, Université Marc Bloch.
“The Homo Geographicus: Mapping the Path”
Christopher Johnson, Harvard University
“On the Bricolâge of Warburg and Blumenberg”

Saturday, March 25

Hillary Kelleher, University of Rhode Island
“Repining Restlessness: Herbert’s Human Différance”
Erika Boeckeler, Harvard University
“The Renaissance human-alphabet relationship and the objet petit a of Derridian différance”
Regina Schwartz, Northwestern University
“Herbert’s Mystical Eucharist”
Andrew Hui, Princeton University
“Petrarch on Ruins”