Abstracts for Wednesday, 22 May
3:00-5:00 Session
- Yota Batsaki (Comparative Literature, Harvard University):
Eighteenth-Century Confessional Autobiography and the Rise of the
Privilege Against Self-Incrimination
- My paper examines eighteenth-century confessional autobiography in
relation to the quasi-simultaneous rise of the legal privilege against
self-incrimination. I argue that both modern autobiography and the right to
silence are made possible by the legitimation of self-interest, in the
course of the eighteenth century, as the groundwork of the modern
individual. The paper analyses the workings of self-interest in Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's Confessions and William Godwin's Caleb Williams
against the
contrasting common-law and continental legal systems of England and France.
- Dirk Oschmann (German Dept, Univ of Wisconsin-Madison): Karl
Philipp Moritz's Dialectics of Self and Language
- Moritz's theory of language is based on the idea that originally all
words referred to the bodily self. As soon as the process of abstraction in
the development of language starts, this original source of words is lost.
Accordingly, by being expelled from language that way, the human being also
loses its position in the center of the world. Only literature, due to its
figurative methods of representation, can re-establish it.
- Elliott Schreiber (German, Indiana University): Reorienting the
Self: Spatial Configurations of Subjectivity in Rousseau and Moritz
- This paper is concerned with a seminal shift in the concept of
subjectivity in the second half of the eighteenth century: a shift from a
notion of a self that is clearly delimited and self-contained, to one of a
self that continually transgresses its own boundaries. My study focuses on
two authors, each of whom influentially formulated one of these positions:
respectively, Rousseau in "Émile" (1762), and the German writer Karl Philipp
Moritz, most prominently in his popular psychological novel, "Anton Reiser"
(1785-90).
- Commentator: Michel Chaouli (German, Indiana University)
