Figure 1. Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock
The Turn to the Post/human: Desires, Bodies, Selves, Histories
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer
Craig Dionne (Eastern Michigan University), Presider
1. Craig Dionne, Professor
Editor, Journal of Narrative Theory
Department of English
Eastern Michigan University
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
cdionne@emich.edu
The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night, Stewards of the Post/human Desire, and the Problem of Aesthetics
This paper will argue that Twelfth Night stages the problems associated with the latest turn to ethics in the field of literary studies. Following the work of Derek Attridge’s Singularity of Literature, critics want to establish a more concrete relationship between the traditional artistic ideals and the reader’s ethical awareness. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Romantic aesthetics, critics like Attridge have attempted to carve out a critical language to examine how the social importance of a piece of work resides in its ability to proffer distinct visions of Otherness and replay for the reader an uncommon experience that exercises our ability to appreciate social difference. This paper will argue that Twelfth Night offers a kind of parable of the problem of the return to post/human aesthetics. Malvolio’s attempt to acquire “singularity” by internalizing aesthetics of distinction blind to its institutional tethers exposes the perils of such a return.
2. John Twyning, Literature Program Director
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
526 Cathedral of Learning
4200 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260-0001
twyning@gmail.com
The Last of the Motley Fools
Shakespeare's drama has often been the proving ground for humanistic values, his stage the very womb of modern subjectivity. This has, it sometimes seems, made him the poster boy of the Renaissance; the writer whose work can always speak to moderns and post-moderns. Few characters have suffered more from this function than his clowns, his motley fools; and, in many ways, such characters are antithetical to humanistic concepts. In the eighteenth century, his fools were expunged from the stage and published play-text. A century later, they were trotted out to preside over a ribald interlude or provide the counterpoint to other characters. Nowadays, in the BBC productions or recent films, the clown appears stiff, starchy, lacking in vitality, or simply a buffoon. Yet it is worth remembering that Shakespeare's plays figure the fool more prominently and numerously than any of his contemporaries. In this paper, I want to examine the role and history of the fool in Shakespeare, and chart his demise and survival on and off the stage, in relation to question of Shakespeare’s “humanism.” I will focus mainly on Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
3. Anna Klosowska, Assoc. Professor
Department of French and Italian
Miami University at Oxford, Ohio
207 Irvin Hall
Oxford, Ohio 45056
roberta2@muohio.edu
Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Post-Human Desire: The Instrument, the Animal, and the Landscape, Lyric and Pornographic
A newly discovered woman poet, Madeleine de l’Aubespine, assembled one of the most influential literary salons in 1570s Paris with her husband, powerful royal secretary and diplomat, Nicolas de Villeroy. L’Aubespine’s love and sexual poems are both daring and queer: she describes a romance triangle involving a rivalry between one man and two women (possibly the first “lesbian poem” authored by a woman in France). In her sexual poems, the lyric voice (often explicitly feminine) objectifies and instrumentalizes her partners, to the extent that the boundary between subject and object, human and animal, human sexual partner and instrument are blurred. I propose a reading of that blurring in the context of a poetic tradition that relies on magic, love potions, and other transcendent technologies of desire, as well as queer and transgender contexts. And I propose a connection with l’Aubespine’s pious poems, where the desire for a stable subject whose various rifts are healed and bridged, is linked to non-human, transcendence-based technologies.
4. Eileen Joy, Asst. Professor
Department of English
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Peck Hall, Room 3206
Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431
ejoy@siue.edu
He Did Not Know Him by the Visage: Nomads, Combinards, and the Knight with Two Swords
With reference to Malory's fifteenth-century Tale of Balyn and Balan, from his Morte dArthur, as well as to current theories in sociology regarding the nomadic, disembedded precariousness of the late modern individual (pace Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Ulrich Beck, and Zygmunt Bauman), this paper argues for a longer history of the compulsive and obligatory self-determination, and fractured space-time relations, thought to be unique features of late modernity. This paper also explores the social terms and anxieties (both personal and more broadly social) attendant upon the precariousness of the individual in different historical time periods, both early and late, in order to grapple with what I believe are very important and troubling ethical questions that have always been at stake and remain unresolved: how is it possible, for example, for the individual to be moral without recourse to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called the "social imaginary"--broadly speaking, how a given group of persons imagines their collective social life and shares common understandings, without which a moral order of any sort is not possible? At the same time, how to protect the individual when, as political theorist George Kateb has written, "groups are imagined too vividly" and individuals "lose sight of themselves and are lost sight of," leading to a situation where ordinary persons "cooperate with their undoing and the victimization of other ordinary persons"?