Abstracts for Thursday, 23 May
9:00-10:30am Session
-
Konstantin Dierks (History, Indiana University): What Is the
Opposite of
'the Self'? Problems in Conceptualizing and Historicizing Selfhood
- This paper distills the welter of recent scholarship concerned with
"the self" found in the fields of history, literary studies, anthropology,
sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, etc. It pinpoints their
various conceptual limitations in defining "selfhood" vis-a-vis interiority,
alterity, subjectivity, performativity, narrativity, embodiment, etc. The
paper deconstructs these conceptualizations by scrutinizing especially what
is posited as the opposite of "the self," and then proposes a corrective
conceptualization of "selfhood."
- Daniel Rosenberg (History, Univ of Oregon): Sign and Self in
Condillac
- In a time when philosophers concerned themselves actively with
questions of sign and self, perhaps no thinker so persistently thought these
questions together as did the Enlightenment philosopher Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac. Condillac refused the Cartesian proposition of a foundational and
indubitable knowledge of self, arguing that the sign creates conditions
under which such a thing as self can be thought.
- Commentator: Sarah Maza (History, Northwestern University)
11:00-12:30 pm Session:
- Dana Rabin (History, Univ of Illinois): The Self and Sensibility in
Eighteenth-Century England
- In the eighteenth-century courtroom defendants presented their
states of mind as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment.
Witnesses and the accused distanced the "true self" from the criminal act by
portraying the confused, drunk, or impoverished offender and the repentant,
sober defendant as two distinctly different selves. This vocabulary of
mental excuse emerged in a new landscape of emotion and sensibility that
affected the ways in which judges and jurors heard and responded to
psychological pleas. This paper probes conceptions the self in the
eighteenth century with regard to law, gender, and emotion.
- Cornelia Dayton (History Dept, University of Connecticut): The
Frames of
Distraction: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Sane Self in Early New
England
- What constituted sanity and selfhood in a cultural climate in which
classifications for mental disorders were very few and ideas about how body
and mind functioned were very different from our own? In a linguistic world
in which normal and abnormal were not adjectives in use, what made a person
whole? This paper will examine three aspects of white New Englanders'
debates over the signs of madness: the panoply of popular idioms for mental
distress and their links to humoral medicine; the equation that local
officials made between the word "self" and bodily health; and episodes when
claims arose that a man or woman was pretending to be mad.
- Commentator: Constance Furey (Religious Studies, Indiana University)
2:45-4:45 Session:
