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italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Call for papers:



University College London (UCL)

Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies



*Humanity and Animality in 20th and 21st Century Culture:*

*Narratives, Theories, Histories. An Interdisciplinary Conference*



*15 September, 2014*



This interdisciplinary conference takes up an important debate in a field
of growing importance in the humanities, where animal studies,
post-humanism, and eco-criticism have surged in recent years. The
definition of mankind seems necessarily to pass through an understanding of
what constitutes the animal. Philosophically, what distinguishes, or indeed
brings together humanity and animality has been the subject of debate from
Aristotle’s understanding of man as ‘*zôon logon echon*’ and from Kant’s
view of man’s treatment of animals as an insight into the true nature
of humankind,
Derrida’s seminars on ‘the beast and the sovereign’, up to Agamben’s recent
theory of ‘bare life’ as the breakdown of the barrier between man and
animal.

Artists, authors and filmmakers, such as Kafka, Dalí, Borges, Coetzee,
Primo Levi, Margaret Atwood, Karl Appel, Paula Rego, Werner Herzog
(‘Grizzly Man’), and Benh Zeitlin (‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’) to name
but a few, have also grappled with the significance of the divide or
symbiosis of humanity and animality. Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and
Andrew Benjamin are also redefining ways in which humanity and animality
can be thought together, or apart. The violent upheavals of the 20th
century, with its global wars, unprecedented genocides and totalitarian
experiments led to a re-evaluation of notions such as humanism and
humanity, which has made way for new hopes and anxieties relating to the
subhuman and the post-human.

By hosting a varied programme of papers and debates chaired by high-profile
contributors to this emerging field of inquiry, this conference aims to
establish a forum for researchers throughout the UK to discuss this
important theoretical issue.



Topics of discussion may include but are not limited to the following
questions:



·         Is it possible, or even desirable to distinguish between
animality and humanity?

·         In which ways does the dialectic of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ shape
our identities, culture and morality?

·         Why is the comparison with animal world so important for our
culture?

·         Shame, pride, sorrow, fear, anxiety, fascination, awe: how do
emotions acknowledge the relation between humanity and animality?

·         How do literature, art, philosophy and other disciplines
negotiate the changes undergone by the concept of the ‘human’ in the last
century?

·         How have our perceptions of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ changed in
relation to violent and extreme events such as genocide, widespread
atrocity, world war etc.?

·         What does the persistence of the fascination with animals suggest
about specific cultural and historical moments?

·         Are we really a Darwinian species, or do technology, morality and
creativity separate us from the rest of the natural evolution?

·         Evolutionary theory and the human condition

·         How can we rethink the binary opposition between humanity and
inhumanity?

·         Have we entered into a post-human era?





*Deadline for Abstracts:  *



Please send an abstract (300 words maximum) and contact information (name,
affiliation, contact email address) to [log in to unmask] by *August
1st, 2014*.

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