ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore examples of sacrifice in literature in order to better understand how the human relationship to violence has been structured in a variety of ancient and modern contexts. Papers may discuss theoretical approaches to the issue of sacrifice or literary examples of ritual violence, heroism, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and punishment. Does sacrifice present a particularly human way of dealing with violence? Does sacrifice provide an incitement to violence or a humanizing of violence? How does sacrifice connect a narrative to notions of the sacred?

Friday, March 24

Sebastian Wogenstein, University of Connecticut
“Jerusalem or Athens? Sacrifice and tragedy in Hermann Cohen’s, Franz Rosenzweig’s, and Hans Ehrenberg’s writings”
Angelina Ilieva, Independent Scholar
“Fratricide and National Identity: Some Russian and Balkan Case Studies”
Natascha Kruger, Pennsylvania State University
“Women Bonding in Bondage: Barbed Wire and/or Shackles”
Gloria Fisk, Princeton University
“Tragedy and Cosmopolitanism in J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace”

Saturday, March 25

Derek Hillard, Kansas State University
“Sacrificial Selves: The 19th-Century German Discourse”
Kai Evers, University of California at Irvine
“To Sacrifice the Other: The Relationship of Violence, Politics, and Modernist Aesthetics in Robert Musil’s Early Writings”
David Pan, Pennsylvania State University
“Humanity and Sacrifice in Bertolt Brecht’s Plays

Sunday, March 26

Daniel Medin, Stanford University
“Verantwortung. On Kafka, Paternity, and the Price of All in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound”
Charles Del Dotto, Duke University
“Martyrdom, Nonconsequentialism, and Anagogical Temporality: Interrogating Ends and Means, Transcending Endings and Beginnings in T. S. Eliot”
Sara Armengot, Pennsylvania State University
“Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and the Figure of the Zombie in Caribbean Literatures”