Call for Papers
States of Change in Early Modern France
A proposed seminar of the American Comparative Literature Association conference
(Cambridge, MA, 17-20 March 2016)
“Tout est changé et doit changer encore” the abbé Raynal states at the beginning of his Histoire Philosophique des Deux Indes (1770-80). For Raynal the inevitability of change unites seemingly disparate registers of experience: from the movements of glaciers and landmasses, to the rise and fall of nations, to the patterns of human interaction. Taking Raynal’s dictum as a point of departure, this seminar will investigate the role of change in the culture, philosophy, and politics of early modern France from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
We are particularly interested in exploring how theories of change inform—or are informed by—theories of motion during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century. Debates over theories of motion—and rest—are important within the development of early modern philosophy, while the question of how and why bodies move plays an animating role in the evolution of early modern (and modern) literary genres and the visual arts. The figure of matter in motion cuts across the new theories of materialism that emerge in the seventeenth century, while recent scholarship has explored the extent to which states of suspended animation (and the ability of bodies and things to arrest their motion) are key to emerging ideas about human agency and subjectivity, particularly in the eighteenth century.
How do theories of movement (or stasis) interact with (and indeed become or determine) modes of historical change? How do figures of motion—arrested and animated—come to hold interpretive sway or exert ideological pressure? What effect might the rise of new kinds of circulation of people and goods, objects and subjects have on representations of motion more generally? How does matter in motion and at rest figure in representations of social change (or decay)?
Contributions might approach these questions through a number of topics, including (but not limited to): theories of the body, the passions, affect and sentiment; political economy; architecture; topography; work and leisure; poeisis; and craft.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions. Paper proposals must be submitted by Wednesday, September 23rd via the ACLA website: http:// http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper
Organizers:
Anna Rosensweig
University of Southern California
Natania Meeker
University of Southern California