-- "Figuring the Self, Figuring the Citizen: Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century Rhetorics of 'Character'"Proposed panel for the 2002 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, November 14-17, 2002, Houston, Texas,
This proposed panel will explore the ways that identity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American culture is rendered legible, is socially positioned, and is culturally and economically authorized by the concept of "character." Papers are invited which explore in particular the epistemological and political dimensions of the concept of character and which ask how rhetorics of character negotiate the public presentation and author-ization of personal identity. What kinds of judgments make character legible as a social object? What kind of "stuff" is character and how is "having it" understood as a prerequisite of political authority? How does character organize a system of racial and class "types," and how does an aesthetics of bodily marks and manners delineate such a system?
Prospective panelists might also consider: Technologies of reading and writing character in literature and racial science; character as the medium of "success"; "freaks," "curiosities," and taxonomies of character; national character; character and community uplift; "having" character vs "being" a character; character as the object of social reform; the semiotics of character; what genders character; pedagogy and the discipline(s) of character; taste and the good judge of character; phrenology and the visible marks of character; the politics of literary character; "ethos" in rhetorical theory, character and bodily fetishes; Puritanism and the legacy of visible character.
Send 1-2 page abstract and 1 page c.v. by *January 4, 2002* to:
James Salazar Department of Rhetoric 7408 Dwinelle Hall University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-2670
e-mail submissions preferred to: wordsdo@socrates.berkeley.edu
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