ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar explores how deviance, madness and otherness contour the limits of the “human.” Through their creative work, professed twisted minds have created deviant writings that show reality as a dominant fiction, as a strategic essencialism, and as a struggle between belief and knowledge. Deviant writings have appeared along history. They challenge the category of “difference” as it narrates, shapes, and redefines the “human.” They allow the most unthinkable other to emerge within the self. They redefine dominant social paradigms of the human from the inside. In doing so, they contour a redefinition of individual thought, in relation to a social knowledge of domination/submission, while exhibiting that representation is not solely a reflection of social relations of production but also a social relation itself.

Friday, March 24

Lawrence Loiseau, University of Victoria
“Joyce, Transgression, Pathology: A Study of the Relation Between Perversion and Neurosis in James Joyce’s Dubliners”
Christine Cynn, University of Abidjan-Cocody
“‘…the ludicrous transition of gender and sentiment’: Chinese Labor in The Haunted Valley”
Susan Hall, Cornell University
“The Dissolution of the Dialectic of Domination and Submission: The Writing of Jouissance on O’s Body”
Francisco Villena-Garrido, Princeton University
“Sons of Cain: On Deviance and Dissidence in the Works of André Gide, Thomas Bernhard, and Fernando Vallejo”

Saturday, March 25

Amy Emm, University of Washington
“The Perverse Perfection of German Romantic Drama”
David Johansson, Brevard Community College
“How to Make Love to a Freak: The Fiction of Harry Crews”
Qinna Shen, Yale University
“Humanize the Witch: Christa Wolf’s Medea”
Raphael Comprone, Saint Paul’s College
“The Erotic, Otherness, and the Human in Carlos Fuentes’ Aura and Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Literary Perversions: Reconfiguring the Limits of the Human