Association of University English Teachers
of Southern Africa Conference
Interrogating the Human:
Literary and Epistemological Interchange
9-11 July 2013
Rhodes University
Grahamstown
This conference will consider the interrelationship between formal
structures of knowledge and literary writing / discourse. It will
interrogate the deep discursive interplay between non-fictive and fictive
forms and address critical issues associated with this historical division.
How are paradigms for the collection and transmission of knowledge about
the natural world informed, transmitted, and transmuted by literary means?
How might literary criticism play a role in the interrogation of
epistemological genres associated with the categorization of the human, including but not limited to philosophy, jurisprudence, anthropology and biology?
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
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Travel writing, Empire, and the making of natural history and
ethnography; Social Darwinism, race and gender.
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Early Modern/Enlightenment philosophical paradigms for human
classification.
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Law in/as literature; science in/as literature; the literary
genealogies of secular epistemological paradigms and their conception of the
human self.
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Narratives of human origin in the human sciences (and beyond);
'first contact' accounts of culture in the human sciences; ethnography as
genre; human science and popular culture.
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Primatology and the human self; human and animal selves in
classificatory epistemologies; animals and human selves in premodern
epistemologies.
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The body in medical discourse; patient testimonies vs. medical
case histories in the creation of medical knowledge; the body and pathology.
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The body as specimen; historical conceptions of the body and the
self in epistemological and literary intersections.
Keynote speakers
Robert Young is a Professor of English at New York University. His work is
primarily concerned with people and cultures on the margins and peripheries
of society. Publications include The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003) and White Mythologies (1990).
Laura Otis is a Professor of English at Emory University. Her work focuses
on the ways that scientific and literary thinking coincide and foster each
other's growth. Publications include Müller's Lab (2007), Membranes:
Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and
Politics (1999) and Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1994). Laura is also editor of Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002).
Submission of abstracts:
Abstracts for papers of not more than 300 words should be submitted
electronically by 1 March 2013, via the AUETSA website at http://auetsaconference2013.co.za/ where more information about the
conference will be available. |
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