X-posted from C18-L
"Reason, Difference, and the Enlightenment Subject"
I am seeking papers for panel for NEASECS, October 17-19 in New York City
at the CUNY Graduate Center. My inspiration comes from the debate between
Marshall Sahlins and Gannaneth Obeyesekere over the death of Captain Cook.
In brief, Sahlins suggests the Cook was killed as a result of a clash in
cultural ways of thinking; native Hawaiians, holding a fundamentally
different perspective than Europeans, incorporated Cook as a god into their
mythology. Obeyesekere has suggested that Hawaiians, rather than thinking
through a mythological structure, actually attacked Cook for rational and
political reasons. Sahlins provocatively has responded that Obeyesekere
has in his analysis universalized the Enlightenment subject.
For this panel, I welcome papers that take up the general question of
universalizing the Enlightenment subject in any context (literary,
philosophical, historical, cultural, etc) including, but not at all
restricted to, travel literature. Does recent work on passion and sentiment
offer alternative readings of "contact zones"? Does Obeyesekere's critique
of Sahlins (and implicitly of a particular form of anthropology) indeed
universalize the rational Enlightenment subject, or does it recognize a
form of reason that is in fact practiced in a range of cultures and
subcultures? How do eighteenth-century texts confront this question? Do
they represent the Other (racial, gendered, class, sexual, etc.) as
speaking in "a different voice" or do they represent reason as differing in
degree but not in kind? Did the Enlightenment universalize the
Enlightenment subject? Are attempts to universalize the Enlightenment
subject enlightened or benighted?
Please send email abstracts (not attachments, please) to Laura J. Rosenthal
at lrosenthal@english.fsu.edu
Laura J. Rosenthal
Associate Professor Assistant Dean
English Department College of Arts and Sciences
850-644-5815 850-644-0517
FAX 850-644-0811
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
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