CONF: Early Modern/Postmodern: Inventing the Political Subject

8th Annual West Coast Conference on Law and Literature "Early Modern/Postmodern: Inventing the Political Subject", at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, University Park Campus, Musick Law Building, Faculty Lounge, Room 433,
13 January 2010, 2-6 pm

http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/32/event/871394

The West Coast Conference on Law and Literature explores how the early modern period invented the political subjecthood we inhabit to this day.

How do contemporary studies in political theory, ranging from Hannah Arendt to Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault, transform our understanding of these debates, and how are the postmodern thinkers in turn inflected (or is it infected?) by those of the earlier period? Are we modern, pre-modern, postmodern, or somehow residing in all three moments at once?

The organizers' goal is not only to return to central questions of the relationship between the individual and the political and turn them a little onto their heads, but to draw anew the connections between law, literature, and the social.

Speakers for the conference include: Julia Reinhard Lupton (English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine), "Arendt in Italy: Or, The Taming of the Shrew"; Victoria Kahn (English and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley) who will also turn to Arendt, this time in the context of Spinoza, Old Testament law, political theology, and literature; Bernadette Meyler (Law, Cornell University), connecting law and literature, in her case drawing on Schmitt, Foucault, and Hobbes.

The conference will be followed by a reception.

Organizers: Center for Law, History and Culture, in collaboration with the Early Modern Studies Institute at USC.

RSVP: clhcserv@law.usc.edu