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digest 2006-03-13 #001.txt
litsci-l-digest Monday, March 13 2006 Volume 01 : Number
142
In this issue:
Invitation to Attend Conference
reminder: ballets due March 20
Fwd: CFP "Historicide and Reiteration" Symposium
SUB 06: evo-psych and discourse of social reform
SUB 06
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 13:33:04 -0500
From: "Orion Anderson"
Subject: Invitation to Attend Conference
Psychoanalysis & the Strategies of Resistance
A Conference at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
April 8-9, 2006 (Saturday & Sunday)
=20
We invite you to attend a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary conference =
on
"Psychoanalysis and the Strategies of Resistance"-featuring an =
international
group of scholars and clinicians exploring the notion of resistance as
reflected in psychoanalytic theory, practice, and in the sociopolitical
domain.
The term "resistance" is understood in a broad sense-from a particular
treatment-dynamic in the analytic setting through its ramifications in
culture. This conference will address the implications of this concept =
in
philosophy, literature, political science and gender =
studies-investigating
the meaning of resistance to psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis as a =
form of
resistance.
=20
Scholars from diverse fields-together with distinguished practitioners =
and
activists-seek to bridge the gap between theory and practice to present
novel ways in which psychoanalytic thought can enter society and impact
=
upon
the world.
=20
To learn more or to register, =
please CLICK HERE.
=20
**Seating at this exciting event is limited. Please register now to hold
your place.**
=20
For information on the conference program, location and accommodations,
please click here:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~bahunic/psychoanalysis.html
=20
For further information please contact Orion Anderson at (718) 393-1104
=
or
send an email to
oanderson@ideologiesofwar.com
=20
_____ =20
INVITED SPEAKERS INCLUDE
*=09
Ben Sifuentes-J=E1uregui, Rutgers University, "Primal Scenes and
Colonialism: Conrad's Heart of Darkness"
*=09
Novica Mili=E6, University of Belgrade, "Displacement of Resistance"
*=09
Carole Allamand, Rutgers University, "Is Freud Cramping Your Style?
Autobiography and Psychoanalysis"
*=09
Jerry Aline Flieger, Rutgers University, "Freud and the Millennial
Knot, Culture as Heraldic Field"
*=09
Martin Gliserman, Rutgers University, "Psychoanalysis and Practice"
*=09
Peter Fraenkel, CUNY/The Ackerman Institute, "Overcoming Resistance
by Engaging Families as Experts, Collaborative Family Program =
Development"
*=09
Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University, "The Shadow of
Heterosexuality"
*=09
Richard Koenigsberg, Library of Social Science, "Who Created the
Symbolic Order?" The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Ideology"
*=09
Laurence Rickels, UC-Santa Barbara, "Politics and Psychosis"
*=09
Tom Cohen, SUNY at Albany, "War Bonds-Family Plots, Archival Wars,
Re-Inscription, Hitchcock's 'Psychoanalysis' from a Post-Global =
Perspective"
*=09
Anna Ornstein, M.D., Harvard Medical School, "The Relationship
Between Method (Empathy), Theory and Practice, Comments on Iatrogenic
Resistances"
*=09
Deborah Luepnitz, University of Pennsylvania Medical School,
"Working With Homeless Adults, Thinking with Winnicott, Lacan, and =
Orwell"
*=09
Ranjana Khanna, Duke University, "Indignity"
*=09
Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group, "Racism and
Sexuation, Tales from the Other Side"
*=09
Annie Lee Jones, The Harlem Family Institute, "The Dilemma of the
Embodiment of the 'Noir Mother' in the Session"
_____ =20
=20
To learn more or to =
register,
please CLICK HERE.
=20
**Seating at this exciting event is limited. Please register now to hold
your place.**
=20
For information on the conference program, location and accommodations,
please click here:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~bahunic/psychoanalysis.html
=20
For further information please contact Orion Anderson at (718) 393-1104
=
or
send an email to
oanderson@ideologiesofwar.com
=20
_____ =20
+-+-+-+-+-+
Please see the following URL for the LITSCI-L archive, Web resource
links and unsubscribing info:
http://www.law.duke.edu/sls
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 13:26:12 -0500
From: Carol Colatrella
Subject: reminder: ballets due March 20
Current SLSA members have been sent ballots in the newest print issue of
Decodings, mailed last month.
Ballots are due March 20 and should be sent to me at the Georgia Tech
add=
ress
indicated.
Decodings also appears online at
http://slsa.press.jhu.edu/decodings/index.html.
For information about SLSA 2006 in NY, see
http://www.dactyl.org/SLSA.htm
To renew membership in the society, see the SLSA Johns Hopkins site
http://slsa.press.jhu.edu
thanks,
Carol
- -
+-+-+-+-+-+
Please see the following URL for the LITSCI-L archive, Web resource
links and unsubscribing info:
http://www.law.duke.edu/sls
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:44:08 -0500
From: "Wayne Miller"
Subject: Fwd: CFP "Historicide and Reiteration" Symposium
HISTORICIDE AND REITERATION:
Innovation in the sciences, humanities and the arts
Symposium, February 9-10, 2007
Faculty of Arts and Culture
Maastricht University
The Netherlands
?¨Unlike art, science destroys its own past?Æ, or so Thomas Kuhn argued
in his ?´Comment on the Relations of Science and Art?? (The Essential
Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, 1977,
340-351, p.345). In the arts, older works continue to play a vital and
formative role in contemporary innovations. In the sciences, however,
out of date theories and practices are generally thought to have no use
whatsoever to the development of new insights: science continually
destroys its own past. Hence, museums are crucial to art (but not to
science), while five-year-old books become obsolete in science (but
certainly not in literature). Poetical and aesthetic themes, motifs and
representational strategies are forever undead, it seems, ready to
reappear on the cultural scene at any time.
The contrast between historicide and reiteration holds out the promise
of leading us beyond sterile, hackneyed terms such as fact versus
fiction, objectivity versus subjectivity, or experience versus
speculation in our efforts to come to terms with the interrelations
between the sciences and the arts. Nevertheless, we cannot rest content
with Kuhn??s treatment of the issue, for the following reasons:
- First of all, it needs to be more finely attuned to actual practices
in art and science. What are we to make of, for example, contemporary
mathematicians?? ongoing interest in Fermat??s centuries-old theorems?
And how are we to understand the famous avantgarde dictum that all
museums should be burnt down?
- Second, the categories of ?´art?? and ?´science?? are too broad to be
of any use to empirical inquiry. It seems useful to at least
differentiate between the natural and the social sciences. Likewise, we
should ask ourselves whether the concept of art as a reiterative
practice applies equally to literature, music and the visual arts, and
if the humanities should also be taken into account. Do the humanities
share the reiterative nature of the arts, or do they embody yet another
culture of innovation?
- Third, we must pay closer attention to the fact that scientific and
aesthetic innovations often materialize through interdisciplinary
exchange, that is, by amalgamating concepts, theories and methods from
diverse intellectual domains. Thus, Martha Nussbaum innovated ethics by
reiterating an old master, Aristotle, and by importing concepts from the
neighbouring discipline of literary studies into philosophy. Likewise,
Weber and Durkheim succeeded in founding sociology by combining elements
from the natural sciences and from the realist novel into a new field
that distinguished itself from both science and literature. The
elaboration of evolutionary theories necessarily depends on literary
metaphors and narrative models for its articulation, while it is no less
true that evolutionary perspectives on man??s place in nature have
functioned as an important source of innovation for literary modes of
emplotment As these examples demonstrate, processes of interdisciplinary
exchange may even transgress the borders between the ?´three cultures??
of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities/arts
(cf. Wolf Lepenies, Die drei Kulturen, 1985). Border traffic between art
and science has become an important feature of various innovative,
late-twentieth-century research practices such as genomics and brain
research. The arts may turn their position at the margins of society to
good use by functioning as a free space for independent inquiry,
embarking upon investigations ignored or discredited by commercial
interests and academic science. This is exactly what happens in various
forms of collaboration between artists and scientists (cf. Si?Äôn Ede,
Art and Science, 2005). If the boundaries between the three cultures are
permeable, and if artists and writers actively contribute to the shaping
of scientific knowledge at times, doesn??t this at least open up the
possibility that scientific innovation may also proceed through
reiteration?
- Fourth, the tenet that the leading edge of science is untrammelled by
the burden of the past somehow smacks of the discarded concept of
autonomous science, which would be immune to external influences and
hence, to tradition. Over the last few decades, however, the supposition
that science would have no significant cultural, political, social or
aesthetic dimensions has been seriously questioned within the burgeoning
field of Science and Technology Studies.
This symposium wants to investigate the convergences and divergences
between the sciences and the arts by taking our cue from the ways in
which they position themselves vis-??-vis their past. It aims at a
thorough evaluation of the contrast between historicide and reiteration
as a potentially fruitful perspective on the interrelations between the
three cultures. We propose the following levels of inquiry:
a. The actual practice of art and science. Do specific instances of
scientific innovation corroborate or falsify the idea that the creative
reappropriation of the past has nothing to contribute to scientific
discovery? Is historicide in the arts confined to the occasional
exception of the historical avant-garde, or does it constitute a more
substantial part of aesthetic innovation?
b. The prototypical images of art and science. Are they supposed to be
reiterating or destroying their pasts, and how do such assumptions
figure in the public self-fashioning of scientists, writers and artists?
Do such attitudes toward the past also work internally as codes of
proper artistic or scientific behaviour? If it would be the case that
scientific innovation may be prone to reiteration as well, does this
mean that scientists unwittingly reiterate the past and therefore
cultivate a deluded self-image? Would a similar argument apply to the
iconoclastic self-fashioning of avant-garde artists?
c. The contents and products of art and science. How do views of the
significance of the past relate to scientific theories, literary novels
or the subject-matter of painting? Are scientific accounts of, say, the
human life span or biological evolution more inclined towards linear,
progressivist accounts than literary genres which also cover these
domains such as the Bildungsroman or the regional novel?
This symposium invites contributions from the history and sociology of
science, the history of art, the history of literature, literary theory,
and philosophical aesthetics. A selection of the papers will be
published in a peer-reviewed volume, to appear in the series Arts,
Sciences and Cultures of Memory, edited by Kitty Zijlmans, Lies
Wesseling and Robert Zwijnenberg (publisher: Equinox, London). If you
are interested in contributing, please send a 300-word abstract before
May 15, 2006 to: Lies.Wesseling@LK.Unimaas.NL. We will select the
contributors to the symposium before July 1, 2006. You may subsequently
be asked you to pre-circulate your paper before January 14, 2007. Please
make sure your abstract contains the following items:
a. a concretely delineated case study
b. a specification of the level of inquiry of your case study (a, b
and/or c)
c. an interdisciplinary scope: contributions that engage in a
comparative analysis which crosses the borders between the ?´three
cultures?? will be given priority.
The organizing committee:
Dr. Ren?à Gabri?éls, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and
Culture, Maastricht University
Dr. Geert Somsen, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Culture,
Maastricht University
Dr. Elisabeth Wesseling, Department of Literature and Art, Faculty of
Arts and Culture, Maastricht University
Prof. dr. Robert Zwijnenberg, Department of Literature and Art, Faculty
of Arts and Culture, Maastricht University, Department of the History of
Art, Leiden University
==============
>>> "Howell, Yvonne" 3/8/2006 1:30 PM >>>
key words: sociobiology (evo-psych), discourse analysis, science and
ideology, comparative history
When sociobiology emerged as an intellectual movement in the early
1970s, critics of the new paradigm argued vehemently that the malleable
human mind, together with the unique force of culture, had severed the
connection between our behavior and our evolutionary roots. In the U.S.,
this position was often tied rhetorically to the idea that
?¨malleability?Æ and ?¨cultural construction?Æ could be opposed
?¨determinism?Æ and ?¨social darwinism,?Æ therefore leaving the doors
open to enlightened social policy.
Because of the peculiarities of disciplinary and ideological boundaries
in the USSR, what we call "sociobiology" was framed by its earliest
Soviet proponents in a utopian discourse of scientific vindication for
diversity, pluralism, individual difference, heterogeneity, human
rights, and ultimately, individual responsibility for one's own actions.
In short, the same scientific discipline that in the West was associated
from the outset with racism, reductionism, and social determinism
developed in the USSR as a kind of code for alternative social and
political views.
Does anyone want to construct a panel or roundtable on the metaphors we
use to talk about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology? (in a
cross-cultural context)
Yvonne
-
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Please see the following URL for the LITSCI-L archive, Web resource
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==================
>>> 3/13/2006 9:34 AM >>>
Literature and Medicine Session
"Rolling Up Out of Chaos?Æ: Diagnosis as Pharmakon in
William Carlos Williams?? Prose and Poetry?Æ
ABSTRACT
The diagnostic disciplines of literature and medicine, as
demonstrated in William Carlos Williams?? works, aim to analyze,
organize, and manage human disease and death through the medium of
rhetoric, while entertaining and informing readers. However, as
Williams shows, the nature of language complicates the processes of
diagnosis and composition. Just as physicians must attempt to read the
symptoms of a misfunctioning body for signs of disease and health, the
writer must choose words carefully to reflect a correct interpretation
of meaning to readers. Accurate diagnoses can be illuminating while
misdiagnoses can be disastrous. By applying Jacques Derrida??s Platonic
argument that language is a pharmakon (both remedy and poison), along
with Julie Connolly??s theory that ?¨physicians through their writing
attempt to bring order to disordered situations,?Æ I intend to show that
diagnosis within both disciplines reveals its double nature: that
diagnosis and writing in the medium of language can be either remedy or
poison, depending upon the doctor??s or writer??s intention and choice
of diction, and his/her own interpretation of signs, so that bodies and
texts as systems can either suffer a spin toward the equilibrium of
death or benefit the patient/reader with illuminative and orderly
information.
Dr. Jill Clark, Assistant Professor of British Literature
English Department
Fisk University
1000 17th Ave. N.
Nashville, TN 37208
(615) 329-8695
jclark@fisk.edu
