CALL FOR PAPERS.
ACLA CONFERENCE 2006
Please submit paper proposals to this seminar through the following website
by November 30th. www.princeton.edu/~acla06
<http://www.princeton.edu/~acla06>
 *Anthropomorphizing the World*
Seminar Organizer(s): Ophelia Selam, Binghamton University

This seminar will focus on the actual act of defining "the human" in
opposition to the deemed "other." This act anthropomorphizes the world both
through its acceptance and its rejection (you are human, you are not human)=
;
it shapes the way we view ourselves and the rest of the world. Exploring
this act of "defining-through-opposition/the other" in terms of what has
been deemed "non-human," directly puts into question the very structures
that hold the concept of "the human" in place. In the end, it can
potentially be seen as an act of oppression, particularly through its
rigidity and its way of masking itself as "truth." The interest here lies i=
n
the actual consequences of this discourse and, more importantly, the
consequences that befall the "others." In other words: how do these
definitions affect the ways in which we treat ourselves and the (so-called)
outside? In this seminar, I would like to emphasize the anthropomorphizing
of the so-called "rejects" of the world: womyn, "minorities," animals and
nature (through this rejection "methodology"). Some possible topics can
therefore be, but are not limited to:

- oppression of animals, womyn, and/or nature through their position as
"other"
- the place of the human (or hu-man) within an ecofeminist approach
- the position of the so-called "natural" within the definition of "the
human"
- identity and categorization/anthropomorphization
- definitions and oppression
- definitions as an act
- the role of comparative literary theories in the act of defining

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Received on Thu Nov 03 2005 - 12:47:01 EST