ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This panel will examine the manner in which aesthetic form is rendered, and variously conceived, as external to patterns of normalcy. Formal experimentation proceeds from pre-established artistic, social and political criteria, and both shares with, and reacts to, dominant discourses. Subsequently, novel art forms are attacked on the particular grounds of debasing these accepted standards, of being degenerate or decadent. Papers are sought that analyze and critique techniques, styles and aesthetic forms that have been vilified as monstrous, particularly when their relationship to contemporary artistic, social and political paradigms establishes the grounds for this moral or critical opprobrium. Proposals are sought analyzing both literary and non-literary artistic media.

Seminar sponsored by the journal Studies in Philology.

Friday, March 24

Marta Napiorkowska, University of Chicago
“The Post-Modern Grotesque in Dorota Maslowska’s The Russo-Polish War Beneath a Red-White Flag”
Tiffanie Townsend, Georgia Southern University
“Dreadful Pleasure: The Renaissance Reformulation of Monsters.
Sarah Adams, Ohio State University
“Beasts, Men and Fallen Angels”
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Santa Clara University
“Gods and Monsters: The Metaphysical Struggle with Language in Mallarmé and Symons”

Saturday, March 25

Marsha Collins, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
“Mainstreaming the Gongorine Monster”
Leonard Tennenhouse, Brown University
“Shakespeare’s Tragic Monstrosities”
Michael Baltasi, University of Chicago
“The Monstrous Technicalities of Bildung: Nietzsche’s Early Lectures”
Paul Fox, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
“The Criminal Art of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan”