ASECS Panel, Montreal 2006
"Eighteenth-Century Multitudes"
        
        
Current developments in our field force us to rethink widely accepted
paradigms in eighteenth-century studies. Dror Wahrman's The Making of
the Modern Self, for example, fundamentally revises our assumptions
about the singularity of modern forms of identity. Recent theorizing
about 'multitude' by Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno and others
has widened the possibilities for reimagining agency and identity
further. This panel wants to take advantage of these developments and
explore the role of the plural, the multiple, and the collective in
eighteenth-century culture and history. If the philosophical concern
with multitude originated in seventeenth-century thinkers such as Hobbes
and Spinoza, what other philosophers or philosophies might be
preoccupied with this concept? Is there an aesthetic of multiplicity?
What are the manifestations of the collective or of collectivity in
eighteenth-century culture? How does the crowd and ideas of crowding
affect the eighteenth-century imagination? What are the promises (and
limits) of using multitude or hybridity as methodological categories in
our approaches to the eighteenth century? The panel hopes to explore
these and related questions from a variety of disciplinary vantage
points, including philosophy, history, science studies, and literature.

Please submit paper proposals by fax or email to:
        
Wolfram Schmidgen
Department of English
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
          
Fax: 314 935 7461
E-mail: wschmidg_at_wustl.edu

The deadline is September 15.

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Received on Thu Aug 25 2005 - 07:42:31 EDT