A seminar on "The Idea of the Holocaust and the Human" will be held at the
American Comparative Literature Association meeting at Princeton
University from March 23-26, 2006. The seminar format allows for as many
as a dozen 15-20 minute papers. Abstracts may be submitted at the ACLA
website: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4.
The deadline for submissions is November 30.

Announcement for "The Idea of the Holocaust and the Human":

What is the portrait of the human (and inhuman) that may be drawn from the
Holocaust? How did the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics redefine not only
the human, but self-reflection? How did the Nazi perversion of Darwin and
Spengler in order to create the Aryan ideal disturb the human sense of
balance? Did the Nazis use Nietzsche's superman or reinvent him? and for
whom, the captor or the slave? How did Nazi euphemisms distort the
language, the people to whom these euphemisms were applied, and the people
who applied them, when dead people became no more than "schmattes" (rags)
and the prospective death of millions a "final solution"? Can the
experience of the camp inmate in good conscience be spoken of in the same
terms as the journey of the hero, as Primo Levi would have it, without
doing permanent damage to the human spirit? Do we turn this crime "against
humanity" into a crime "of humanity" when we attempt to study and
understand those who perpetrated the Holocaust, as Claude Lanzmann states.
How is it that such horror could produce such beauty as Celan's
"Todesfugue" and art of the calibre of Imre Kertesz _Fateless_ without
creating absolute revulsion of the artist and reader for their own
carnivorous and cannibalistic appetites. Papers addressing these and other
questions of what the Holocaust has done to and for the human being are
welcome.

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Received on Fri Nov 11 2005 - 08:46:26 EST