La prochaine séance de A19, le vendredi 17 janvier à 14h, en salle 830, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, est organisée en conjonction avec un nouveau groupe de travail sur la littérature et le pragmatisme dont le descriptif suit.
Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre Nicholas Gaskill (Oriel College, Oxford) dont la communication s’intitule : The Will to Disbelieve: Pragmatism and Method in Literary Studies.
Nicholas Gaskill’s research focuses on American Literature from around 1830 to the present, Pragmatism, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature, Critical Methods. His first book, Chromographia, looks at the ways that U.S. writers imagined color experience between 1880 and 1930. It reads a diverse array of writers – from Stephen Crane and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to L. Frank Baum and Nella Larsen – in light of the material history of chromatic technologies and all the things that bright color came to stand for at the turn of the twentieth century: commodity culture, “civilization,” racialized sensation, avant-gardism, the perceptual lives of small children, and much else besides.
More broadly, Nicholas Gaskill is interested in American pragmatism, both as a historical phenomenon and as a resource for thinking about literature and criticism. One branch of his research has focused on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, not a pragmatist per se but an important figure in the reception and reinvention of pragmatism over the past several decades. Other strands include essays on the idea of aesthetic form (as opposed to other types of form), on pragmatist theories of experience and their relevance to methodological debates in the literary humanities, and on the uses of metaphysics and ontology in contemporary theory.
Nicholas Gaskill is currently in the early stages of writing a book about the ideas of reality and aesthetic construction that have shaped American literature, especially of the past hundred years. Tentatively titled Reality in America, the book will focus on novels and poems that explicitly question the relation between literary artifice and metaphysical reality, and it will ask what literary writers can teach us about the task of building a common world.
https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-nicholas-gaskill
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/chromographia
Le reste de la séance sera résolument collaboratif, et nous lirons ensemble des textes de Whitman en regard de quelques essais de William James.
En espérant vous y retrouver,
Bien amicalement,
Cécile
PS : pour accéder à la salle 830, et surtout aux ascenseurs qui y mènent, il faut demander un badge à l’accueil.
Cécile Roudeau
Directrice du LARCA-UMR8225
Professeur de littérature américaine
Université de Paris
Textes sur lesquels portera la discussion :
William JAMES, “Is Life Worth Living?” (Part I); “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm
–, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 1899. https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jcertain.html
–, “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. https://www.owleyes.org/text/varieties-religious-experience/read/lecture-iv-and-v-the-religion-of-healthy#root-4
–, “Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy”; “Lecture 8 “Pragmatism and Religion,” in Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907.https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm
Walt WHITMAN, “To You,” “Song of myself” (Sections 1- 5); “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “Song of the Broad-Axe,” “Song at Sunset,” “So Long,” Leaves of Grass, 1891-2 https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/whole.html
“Pragmatic Crossings”
“Autres Objets du Pragmatisme” / “Pragmatist Crossings” (Hélène Cottet, Antonia Rigaud, Cécile Roudeau) is a work group which we constituted following our AFEA workshop on that same theme last spring. It will meet several times during the year to discuss texts and hear a few invited speakers. We hope that this will eventually lead us to undertake broader projects together (conferences and publications).
This interdisciplinary workshop will look into the works of intellectuals affiliated to pragmatism in the U.S. (John Dewey, Alice Dewey, William James, Charles Saunders Peirce, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois…) and hopes to measure the impact of pragmatism beyond philosophy and more largely beyond the boundaries of disciplinary thinking. We are interested in intellectual genealogies or entanglements that will open to new understandings of the objects we work with – within the arts and literature of the United States, intellectual and institutional history, politics.
The first session will take place at Université de Paris, room 830, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 2pm-5pm.
Nicholas Gaskill (U. Oxford, Oriel College) will give a talk on “The Will to Disbelieve: Pragmatism and Method in Literary Studies.” The second part of the workshop will consist in a collective discussion of a selection of texts by Walt Whitman that we would like to read in conversation with essays by William James.
Texts we will be discussing:
William JAMES, “Is Life Worth Living?” (Part I); “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm
–, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 1899. https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jcertain.html
–, “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. https://www.owleyes.org/text/varieties-religious-experience/read/lecture-iv-and-v-the-religion-of-healthy#root-4
–, “Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy”; “Lecture 8 “Pragmatism and Religion,” in Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907.https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm
Walt WHITMAN, “To You,” “Song of myself” (Sections 1- 5); “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “Song of the Broad-Axe,” “Song at Sunset,” “So Long,” Leaves of Grass, 1891-2 https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/whole.html
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Aurore Clavier (13 janvier 2020). Autres Objets du Pragmatisme (AOP) / Pragmatic Crossings — Friday, Jan. 17, 2020, 2pm-5pm/. A19. Consulté le 22 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/agwp