Abstracts for Friday, 24 May

11:00-12:30 Session:

Sarah Knott (History, Indiana University): Sensibility and the Socially-Turned Self

As both theory and practice, 18th century sensibility implied a (distinctly un-modern) self without a stable, inner core. Rather, it invoked a social self - one made in the very act of social interaction. This paper examines the implications of the 'socially-turned self' in one particular historical setting: late 18th century Philadelphia.

Dror Wahrman (History, Indiana University): Proteus Unbound: Personal Identity before the Self

My paper will suggest a sharp contrast between two very different historical configurations in the understandings of identity and selfhood. It will first describe an "ancien regime of identity" that prevailed for most of the eighteenth century, characterized by the relatively commonplace capacity of many to contemplate - without necessarily facing some inescapable existential crisis (and often the reverse) - that identities, or specific categories of identity, could prove to be mutable, malleable, unreliable, divisible, transferable, manipulable, and occasionally escapable. But then, in the last two decades of the century, these pre-modern understandings were suddenly superseded by a distinctly different and more recognizably modern identity regime. The paper will demonstrate this transformation within three rather different cultural contexts - those of the eighteenth-century masquerade; of contemporary acting theory; and of the philosophical debate on personal identity. It is only within the new late-eighteenth-century configuration, I would finally suggest, that we can talk about "selfhood" in the modern understanding of the term.

Commentator: Felicity Nussbaum (English, UCLA)

2:30-4:30 Session:

Amelia Rauser (Art and Art History, Skidmore College): Unmasking the Modern Self in 18th-century Caricature

Caricature was a newly-invented visual language in the modern period, distinguished by its satire of subjects through ironic, deformative public portraiture. As a portraiture of unmasking, caricature participated in the larger Enlightenment project of stripping away old orthodoxies to reveal new, natural truths beneath. Because caricature found "truth" in what was most individual and most private, it is linked with new notions of the interiority, individualism and privacy of the modern self-- yet caricature's skepticism with appearances also called into question the adequacy of representation itself.

Scott Juengel (English Dept, Michigan State University): Oroonoko's Scar

In order to begin a discussion of how the conditions of mimesis shift with the consolidation of a concept of "race," I linger over the revelation of Oroonoko's scarified face midway through Aphra Behn's 1688 novel. Occupying a blindspot in a colonial visual economy that wishes to give European lineaments to African honor, the belatedly acknowledged scars expose the novel's anxious relationship to physiognomics (e.g. the fantasy of an interiority verifiable through the body's surfaces), and, by extension, the representation of character. Mindful of how Erich Auerbach uses Odysseus' scar to work the interstices of narrative and history, I want to argue that Oroonoko's telltale "carvings" offer an anterior writing that the novel can never fully assimilate, and that they finally disable the articulation of character at text's end.

Felicity Nussbaum (English Dept, UCLA): The Scarred Self of Smallpox

The eighteenth-century "self" is a fiction, and the concept of the contingent, situated subject-- located within asymmetric power relations and caught within its own assumptions of freedom--is more exactly applicable to the period than a "self." In autobiographical narratives of all sorts, authors write and rewrite themselves to underscore or to unpick earlier versions, and to query "self" as definitive or permanent. This paper contributes a chapter to the genealogy of the eighteenth-century subject rather than the prehistory of the self by focusing on the scarred and mangled subject, one transformed by smallpox and crippling. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Satturday," Sarah Scott's Agreeable Ugliness, Frances Burney's Camilla (written in 1796, the year Jenner's cowpox vaccine was invented) and other texts testify to the way that disfiguring smallpox scars, lameness, or a crooked back dramatically alter the course of women's lives. Gendered and racialized identity are deeply bonded to impairment, degeneration, and contagion. By the end of the century the irregular and atypical enable the formation of "normate" identity and afford a measure of the nation's physical and moral health; but these texts also embrace mangled femininity in ways that lead us to rethink the formation of the "self."

Commentator: Deidre Lynch (English, Indiana University)

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