[Discussion] CFP: Cyborgs Old and New (11/30/05; ACLA, 3/23/06-3/26/06)

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From: Stefani Engelstein <engelsteins@MISSOURI.EDU>

Call for papers for a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association
Annual Convention

March 23-26, 2006 at Princeton University.

Cyborgs Old and New

Panel organizers:
Stefani Engelstein (engelsteins@missouri.edu) and
Carsten Strathausen (strathausenc@missouri.edu)

This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual
augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that
the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate
technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of
cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This
development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we
strive to become what Freud called a "prosthetic god," following the path toward
a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke's seventeenth century
paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit
acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical,
and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at
times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no
accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment
that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of
the primate order in the animal kingdom.

We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be
human without losing sight of the past. Is the "cyborg" still a useful term or
has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its "proper" (i.e. hybrid)
meaning? Are terms like the "post-human" (K. Hayles) or the "symbiont" (G.
Longo) any better?


Please submit 250-word abstracts online before November 30, 2005 at the
following link:

http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4

The conference is organized primarily into seminars (or "streams"), which
consist either of twelve papers, if they meet on all three days of the
conference, or eight to nine papers, if they meet on two days. Papers should be
15-20 minutes long-no longer-to allow time for discussion.

For more information on the ACLA or the conference go to:
http://www.acla.org/

Stefani Engelstein
Assistant Professor of German
Department of German and Russian Studies
University of Missouri
454 GCB
Columbia, MO  65211, USA

Telephone: (573) 882-9450
Fax: (573) 884-8456
engelsteins@missouri.edu



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