Abstracts for Saturday, 25 May

9:00-10:30 am Session:

Natania Meeker (French and Italian, University of Southern California): Lire et devenir: The Woman Reader and the Social Transformation of the Self in Eighteenth-Century France

This paper examines two significant eighteenth-century French debates around the social and material effects of acts of reading in order to show how these acts were understood as constituting and reshaping female "selves." The first debate focuses on the nefarious consequences of novel reading, the second on the power of the pregnant woman's imagination to produce changes in the bodily organization of a developing fetus. The paper discusses how the imagination in both cases is thought to have the potential to initiate material transformations in the very fabric of the self; moreover, this desiring imagination is either generated by an act of reading or reflected in one.

Mary Catherine Moran (History, Queens College, CUNY): Partial and Impartial Spectators: Self Scrutiny and Self Governance in Eighteenth-Century Female Conduct Literature

This paper demonstrates that eighteenth-century conceptions of spectatorial selfhood applied to women as well as to men, but argues that the imperative to internalize the "man within the breast" meant that for women the spectatorial self could never be truly "impartial." The literature of female conduct, I propose, reveals a similar concern to reconcile theatricality and interiority that has been identified as one of the principal issues of the period's canonical and male-oriented works of moral philosophy, but stops short of endorsing a completely "impartial" spectator who could operate in a sphere of moral autonomy. While this reliance on a spectatorial model can be seen as an attempt at the policing not only of female behaviour but even of feminine desires, the emphasis on self-discipline and self-governance, I suggest, also opened up the possibility of a female self as moral agent in her own right.

Commentator: Mary Favret (English, Indiana University)

11:00-12:30 pm Session:

Adriana Benzaquen (History Dept, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada): Childhood and Identity in Enlightenment Human Science

This paper explores the part played by childhood in conceptualizations of identity and selfhood in Enlightenment human science. The first section examines the debate on human nature and human identity between Buffon and Rousseau from the late 1740s until the late 1770s, while the focus of the second section is the anthropological programme of the Société des Observateurs de l'Homme ten years after the French Revolution. The different views of childhood proffered by Buffon and Rousseau and the various studies of children proposed and undertaken by the Observers of Man both signal the origin and point to the limits of the modern concept of the (adult) self.

Fritz Breithaupt (Germanic Studies, Indiana University): The Origin of Trauma as an Idea

The paper examines how eighteenth-century writers came to consider the lasting effects of certain childhood events for one's later identity. While writers first viewed the individual simply as a victim of these shaping and molding events, writers in the 1780s suggest strategies how the individual can actually profit from his or her trauma: precisely where the wounding events are not merely repeated but are actively "reduplicated," the individual is able to institutionalize itself as a true self. Thus, an empirical and therapeutic psychology becomes possible. The paper considers pedagogical and psychological writings as well as literary works (Rousseau, Moritz, Goethe, Wordsworth, Balzac, etc).

Commentator: Jonathan Sheehan (History, Indiana University)

1:30-3:30 pm Session:

Daniel Gross (Rhetoric Dept, University of Iowa): The Politics of Pride in David Hume and David Simple

In the act of self-constitution that Hume describes in his Treatise, the soul is revealed in its basic vulnerability. For the very passions such as love and hate, pride and humility that constitute identity turn out to be political in the most literal sense, woven as they are in particular relations of "government and subordination." So what exactly are the politics of pride and humility according to Hume? How do pride and humility map onto available regimes of government and subordination? Answering these questions help us historicize particular forms of self in the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and, as I demonstrate via Sarah Fielding's novel David Simple, help us read its literature.

Benjamin Bennet (Germanic Studies, Univ of Virginia): The De-Theorizing of the Cartesian Self in "Classical" Weimar

Harold Bloom blames the tormented, competitive condition of the modern poet-as-self on Descartes. He is right to the extent that Descartes is the first major theorizer of the self (he defines the strict ego in terms of the possibility of doubt), hence the inventor of the universally self-reflecting self, the self that reflects upon itself in universal terms. And this Cartesian self is in turn, among other things, the necessary basis for social-contract theory, in which the community is constituted by its reflection in every individual member. But is this self really a self, really an "Idiot," as Herder puts it? Does it have a strictly private aspect, or is it utterly thrown open to those universals by which it reflects upon itself? I will suggest that 18th-century aesthetics is an attempt to deal with this question, to rescue the universally self-reflecting self as a real self immersed in experience. And I will contend, in my main argument, that Goethe and especially Schiller carry out a radical critique of aesthetics in this sense. In the aesthetic Letters, namely, Schiller experiments with Kantian aesthetics and finishes by arriving at paradoxes that show the futility of that project; in the essay on Naïïve and Sentimental Poetry he builds the same basic paradoxes around the figure of his colleague in Weimar; and in the figure of Wilhelm Tell, finally, he dramatizes the de-theorized self, a self that is as much beyond aesthetics as it is beyond politics. For Goethe--whom Bloom, incidentally, exempts from anxiety of influence--the issue is less pressing, but can still be traced clearly in such major works as Iphigenie auf Tauris and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

Commentator: Hans Adler (German Dept, Univ of Wisconsin-Madison)

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