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>ACLA Panel announcement
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>Materialist Aesthetics
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>When the German philosopher Baumgarten first devised the term "aesthetics"
>in the eighteenth century, he hoped to launch a new scientific discipline,
>dedicated to a form of knowledge that was mediated through the senses
>(from "aisthanomai," to perceive).  Some recent theoreticians of
>aesthetics--Terry Eagleton foremost among them--have detected in
>Baumgarten's venture the beginnings of a modern materialist tradition,
>committed to a politics of the body, which soon was to be overshadowed by
>the spiritualizing program of Idealism.  The project at the center of this
>two-day seminar is a thorough examination of what "materialism" in the
>cluster "materialist aesthetics" might refer to: does it signify a turn to
>the body; to the senses; to history; to the dialectic between economic
>base and cultural superstructure; to the materiality of the letter? The
>seminar welcomes contributions from Western and non-Western literatures
>and from a wide spectrum of fields and disciplines, including critical
>theory, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, feminism, cultural theory,
>discourse analysis, political theory, psychoanalysis, and architecture.
>However, preference will be given to theoretical proposals that genuinely
>help to unpack the history of the cluster "materialist aesthetics."
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>E-mail submissions _only_ to the seminar's coordinator, Professor Beatrice
>Hanssen, at [log in to unmask]  Submission deadline: September 20,
>2002.
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