This page contains a description
and readings for the workshop. For the login for the password-protected
readings, please contact Alan Liu (ayliu@english
dot ucsb dot edu). (This page last revised
10/3/05
)
Workshop Topic
This workshop on "Development,
Creativity, and Agency" explores
new approaches to romantic and post-romantic
understandings of "development" (Bildung)
and "creation" (including
today's much-valued "creativity" and "innovation").
How did romantic-era paradigms
of development or innovation
arise, change, and yield to today's
paradigms? For example, do
developmental or innovational models
rooted in notions of the subject,
agent, self-generation, differentiation,
variation, reflexivity, or complexity
(and their attendant institutions,
disciplines, and ideologies) still
apply in a "posthuman"
age when the ultimate "builders," so-called,
are the elementary, self-oblivious
agents of emergence theory?
Does nothing, in other words,
originate or develop by "deviation
and defiance" because
it is all a matter of subject-agnostic "processing"?
Or does the contemporary paradigm of processing
need to be molded to at least some of the
older notions of origination and development
in order to be humanly meaningful?
Workshop Readings
The
following two writings (downloadable
in PDF format) are the basis of
the workshop. Please read in advance
if possible, since time will not
permit more than an extract of
these works to be presented for
discussion at the session itself.
(Access
is password-protected
and restricted to 2005 NASSR conference-goers
signed up for the workshop
with the conference organizers. If
you have signed up but have not
received a password, please write
to Alan Liu at .
Please also write to Alan if you
have any trouble getting the downloads.)
Thomas Pfau, "Theses
toward an Interdisciplinary Theory
of Development ('Bildung')" (30
pp., plus notes) (Pfau-2005NASSR-Workshop.pdf,
576 Kb)
Alan Liu, "'A
Forming Hand': Creativity and Destruction
from Romanticism to Emergence Theory" (37
pp., plus notes) (Liu-2005NASSR-Workshop.pdf,
215 Kb)
Figures/illustrations
for Liu's essay (7 pp.) (Liu-figures.pdf,
750 Kb)
Workshop Format
1 .
At the workshop, Pfau and Liu will
each start by taking 10-15 minutes
to
review/reflect on their
own papers. (They will not be reading
the papers.)
2. Each will then
give a 15-minute response to the other
that addresses areas of overlap
or divergence between such topics as development,
creativity, emergence,
and agency.
3. Discussion with the
workshop audience will follow for approximately
30 minutes.
