Constructing the Body, Constructing the Text: Literary and Scientific Discourses of the Human Body
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Keynote: Judith Halberstam, USC
Conference Theme
This year's conference will explore the intersections of literature and science of the human body in Western culture. Throughout much of history, the body has been a priority for writers of philosophy, science, and literature. Indeed, prior to modernity, inquiry about the body was a vital part of philosophy in its broadest sense. From prolific thinkers as varied as Hippocrates and Judith Butler, Jonathan Edwards and Marquis de Sade, Foucault and Luce Irigaray, the body and its behavior have generated a sprawling discourse in the humanities which has lead to an evolving understanding of the body's importance to notions of subjectivity.
Problems posed by writers, physicians, and philosophers of the body quickly leave their textual confines to become central concerns for the culture at large, in many ways dissolving the binary composed by what we have traditionally considered as either "scientific" or "literary" discourses. The ways in which the body gets written into society define how we think about pain and suffering, torture and corporal punishment, reproductive rights, war, and poverty. Part of this conference's task, inevitably, will be to provoke the boundaries of literature, philosophy, medicine, and law today, to see where responsibility for the discursive body lies. Our aim will not be to assent to one conceptualization of the body; rather, participants should offer new ways to understand how study of the body remains vital to the humanities today.
The conference will feature panels and papers on any aspect of bodily discourse, although particular topics might include:
Contact: egsoalbany@yahoo.com