Friday, November 26, 2pm-4pm: Tom Wright (University of Sussex/LARCA UMR 8225) ‘Orenda and the Indigenous Roots of Charisma’

Where does ‘charisma’ really come from? In the century since Max Weber’s adoption of the word, it has become an indispensable crutch for scholarly and popular thinking about authority. Yet despite the growing interdisciplinary literature on the concept, its history remains poorly understood and its debts to global intellectual traditions overlooked. This essay offers one route into this line of thinking by exploring a context that lurks unacknowledged in the background of the theory itself: that of Native American philosophy. Focusing on the Iroqouis concept of orenda, the paper shows how the stories this word tells can both re-think both nineteenth century transatlantic intellectual history and offer new ways of thinking about authority and power for our own era.

Respondent: Stephen W. Sawyer.

Tom Wright (www.tomfwright.academia.edu)  is Reader in Rhetoric (English and American Studies) in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, at the University of Sussex. He is a cultural historian of nineteenth century Britain and America, specialising in the role of rhetoric and speaking in politics, education and the history of ideas.

An elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Tom is the author of three books : ‘Transatlantic Rhetoric’ (Edinburgh UP, 2020) is a critical anthology of pivotal speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes, complete with a series of extensive contextual essays. ‘‘Lecturing the Atlantic’ (Oxford UP, 2017) is a monograph offering a new reading of the phenomenon of Victorian popular lecturing. ‘The Cosmopolitan Lyceum’ (UMass, 2013) is a collection of essays bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines to think about the American lecture hall as a global cultural space.

He is currently working on two projects. For the first, he is Principal Investigator on ‘Speaking Citizens: The Politics of Speech Education 1850-Present’, a three year project (2020-23) funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is leading a team of five interdisciplinary researchers from Oxford, Leeds, Edinburgh and Sussex to work with educators and partners such as the English Speaking Union and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Oracy to shape debates on citizenship and curricular reform. To find out more visit www.speakingcitizens.org.

His second project is a book entitled ‘Charisma Before Charisma: the Pre-History of Our Most Magnetic Idea’. The book offers a re-evaluation of Max Weber’s famous and misunderstood concept. Focusing on the century before the term’s modern currency, it offers a “rhetorical” pre-history of ideas about non-rational authority in nineteenth century British, American and French sociological, literary, ethnographic and scientific writing. Focusing on five pre-charismatic key words, the book offers a new vocabulary through which we can grapple with twenty-first century populism and democratic crisis.

 

Stephen W. Sawyer (https://www.aup.edu/profile/ssawyer) is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at AUP. He is a specialist in political history and theory,  The core of his project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. He is the author of Demos Assembled :Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Demos Rising, the second volume, is under review.

A19, LARCA-UMR8225, Université de Paris, Friday, May 21, 2pm : John Tresch, the Warburg Institute at the University of London, “Edgar Poe and the Forging of Modern Science”

A19 invites John Tresch, Professor and Mellon Chair in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, for a communication titled Edgar Poe and the Forging of Modern Science. 

Respondant: Bruno Monfort, CREA/LARCA-UMR8225.

Q&A will be in English and French.

John Tresch is Professor and Mellon Chair in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. Before that he taught for 12 years in the department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was trained in Chicago, Cambridge, and Paris, where he studied at the ENS- Rue d’Ulm and the EHESS. He is the author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)which examined intersections between romantic arts and philosophy and the early industrial revolution in France before 1848. The book deals with such figures as Auguste Comte, Francois Arago, Pierre Leroux, Alexander von Humboldt and Balzac. His most recent book, to be published in June, is a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, which is the basis of this presentation.

Edgar Poe and the Forging of Modern Science 

Edgar Allan Poe has been understood as the master of mystery and imagination, and the founder of a literary criticism focused purely on the text as a realm of ideal abstraction. This talk examines Poe in the material reality of his time and uses his work to reflect on relations between literature, science, and politics in the early 19th century United States. Poe invented stunning forms of literary sensationalism; yet he had trained at West Point Military Academy and wrote constantly about the sciences. His work in both literature and science reflected two contradictory tendencies: an explosion of unruly public claims and hoaxes in new periodicals and lecture halls, and elite strategies to control knowledge through centralised institutions. P. T. Barnum’s “American Museum” typified the first; the U.S. Coast Survey, directed by Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, exemplified the second. Seen in context, Poe’s works offer incisive, prophetic, and dramatically conflicted commentary on cultural authority, science,  and the stories we tell about the universe.

 

Edgar Poe et les sciences modernes, entre savoir et mystification

Considéré comme maître du mystère et de l’imagination, Poe passe aussi pour le fondateur d’une critique littéraire centrée uniquement sur le texte en tant que domaine de l’ idéalité abstraite. Cette conférence se propose de situer Poe dans la réalité matérielle de son époque afin que son oeuvre serve à réfléchir sur les relations entre littérature, science et politique au début du 19e siècle aux États-Unis. Inventeur de formes étonnantes de sensationnalisme littéraire, Poe, qui avait fait des études à l’Académie militaire de West Point, ne cessa jamais d’écrire sur les sciences. Son travail concomitant dans les domaines de la littérature et de la science reflétait deux tendances contradictoires : la diffusion immodérée de canards, canulars et supercheries venait duper les lecteurs des nouveaux périodiques et l’auditoire des conférenciers, tandis que des stratégies élitistes s’emparaient des savoirs par l’entremise d’institutions centralisées. L’American Museum de P. T. Barnum est un bel exemple du premier cas de figure ; le U.S. Coast Survey, dirigé par l’arrière-petit-fils de Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Dallas Bache, illustre le second. Rapportées à leur contexte, les œuvres de Poe offrent des commentaires incisifs, prophétiques et exacerbés sur ce qui fait autorité en matière de culture et de science et dans les récits que nous racontons à propos de l’univers.

Registration:
https://u-paris.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqduCrqT4oE9Dw-NtMv8k_Qksiv7wxt49U

You will receive a confirmation and directions to connect via email.

 

Friday, April 9, 2pm Bruno Monfort (Université Paris Nanterre- CREA/ Délégation LARCA CNRS), “The Universe is a Plot of God : E.A. Poe, l’intrigue sans récit, le récit sans intrigue.”

 

Bruno Monfort est ancien élève de l’ENS-Ulm. professeur de littérature américaine à l’Université Paris Nanterre. Spécialiste du XIXe siècle, Bruno Monfort est l’auteur de nombreuses publications, notamment sur Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau et Poe. Il travaille actuellement à un ouvrage intitulé « Poe et la science :  du monde physique à sa dématérialisation ».

Sur Poe, Bruno Monfort est l’auteur de:

« Le Sphinx dénaturé : Une Écologie du discours ? » Revue Française d’Études Américaines 129 (2011): 19-34.

« Sans les mains : Vérité achéiropoiète chez Poe ». Théorie, Littérature, Epistémologie. « La Vérité en fiction ». 28 (2012) : 35-50.

« La Dynamique de l’obsession dans ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ d’E. A. Poe ». Formes de l’obsession II. Paris : Michel Houdiard, 2007. 30-48. 

 

Nébuleuse Oméga, John Herschel, 1837

Voici deux exempliers.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ja1hlwjz1n4qziz/Exemplier%20n%C2%B02.pdf?dl=0

 

Bonjour,

vous êtes invité à une réunion Zoom.
Quand : 9 avr. 2021 02:00 PM Paris

Veuillez vous inscrire à la date et l’heure qui vous conviennent le mieux :
https://u-paris.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtf-6trDsqG9EMcplskrpGSyd7qDiXoRcE

Après votre inscription, vous recevrez un e-mail de confirmation contenant les instructions pour rejoindre la réunion.

Friday, March 26th, 2021, 2pm. Thomas DUTOIT (Université de Lille/Délégation CNRS LARCA-UMR 8225): “Can we emigrate?”: Kettles, Pebbles; Roses, Weeds; Ruskin, Melville

https://u-paris.zoom.us/j/81059185231?pwd=NEVIakNRajF1dEtOVmdDWGQwRkRDdz09

ID de réunion : 810 5918 5231

Code secret : 895639

Thomas Dutoit is Professor of Literature in English at Université de Lille. His research focuses on literary texts from the 18th century to the present. He has written on Gothic literature, Romanticism; literature and the environment, climate-changed literature; literature and philosophy, deconstruction. His latest book project is provisionally entitled Reading Worlds, Geo-writing.

 

 

Friday, February 12, 2021, 2pm, Zachary Seager, Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, “Henry James’s Portrait Painting”

In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) Henry James suggested that the analogy between painting and fiction was, so far as he could see, ‘complete’. Taking him at his word, critics have tended to focus on what the novelist learned from painting, or have fixed on instances in which he ‘chose to elevate the art of the painter,’ as one commentator has recently put it. Contrary to this critical trend, I argue that throughout his corpus James stages a contest between painting and fiction, consistently emphasising the ways in which the latter might be considered the superior art. 

Focusing on The Portrait of a Lady, I argue that at key moments in the novel James dramatizes the distinction between the art of painted portraiture and fictional representation. Portrait repeatedly stages a disjuncture or, in certain cases, an ironic gap between the experience of the characters and the paintings which surround them. In particular, the novel ironises the viewing habits encouraged by painted portraiture (what I term gendered ekphrasis), which often serve to freeze Isabel Archer into a recognisable and aesthetically-pleasing mould. Portrait, I suggest, counters the ekphrastic traps laid for Isabel by distinctly literary means—that is, through the novel’s capacity to unfold in time.

This technique relates to James’s broader objective. The repeated staging of gendered ekphrasis indicts a coercive way of seeing the world deployed by men to control women; at the same time, it is one of the means through which Portrait, in articulating a contest between painting and the novel, argues for the final superiority of the art of fiction. 

Sari Altschuler @A19 Friday, March 13, 2PM, room 340, OdG, Univ. de Paris – CANCELED

The A19 seminar (LARCA-UMR8225) invites Sari Altschuler (Northeastern U., Boston, invited professor at Université de Paris) on Friday, March 13 (2pm; bâtiment OdG, room 340).

Her talk is titled:

Civic Signs: Race, Disability, and Citizenship in Antebellum America.

The American Revolution ushered in an unprecedented optimism about the abilities of individuals—at least white men—to participate in civic life. Using Enlightenment-inspired rhetoric, Americans in the new nation espoused the belief that almost all such individuals could be made good citizens, and in the first decades of independence they created institutions for people with particular impairments to do this work. This had unanticipated reciprocal effects: As the institutions began to define what it meant to be Deaf, blind, or mad in America, they also gave individuals with particular disabilities a stronger sense of shared identity, community, and common experience that, in turn, shaped the very ideas of American citizenship and belonging. In this talk, Sari Altschuler will examine the particular case of the Deaf community and its relationship to the development of civic rights for white and black individuals in the United States—particularly the role of sign language in determining what it meant to have a voice before the law.

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society minor at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on medical humanities, disabilities studies, and antebellum US literature. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (under contract with NYU press) with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald. Her work has appeared in Early American LiteratureNineteenth-Century LiteratureAmerican LiteratureAmerican Literary HistoryPMLA, and the medical journal the Lancet.  Currently she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, an award-winning multi-site and online exhibition about the multi-sensory experiences of reading with David Weimer, and chairs the Critical Health Humanities seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center with Amy Boesky and David Jones.

Sari Altschuler will also give a talk on her book The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (U Penn, 2018) and her recently published PMLA essay co-authored with David Weimer and titled “Texturing the digital Humanities: A Manifesto on Wednesday, March 4, 12.30pm-2pm at campus U. de Paris, room 888C, bâtiment Les Grands Moulins.

 

 

 

Alexandre Mendès (Faculté de Droit de l’Université d’État de Rio de Janeiro – UERJ) “William James and the Deep South”) – Friday, February 7th, 2pm, OdG 829

Alexandre Mendes – Professeur Adjoint à la Faculté de Droit de l’Université d’État de Rio de Janeiro – UERJ. Doctorat en Droit (UERJ, 2012). Stage post-doctoral à l’Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre la Défense (2018). Il a publié le livre Vertigens de Junho: os levantes de 2013 e a insistência de uma nova percepção (Revan, 2018) et, avec Bruno Cava, A constituição do comum: antagonismo, produção de subjetividade e crise no capitalismo (Revan, 2016). Domaine de recherche: Droit et Philosophie Politique, Droit et mouvements sociaux, Droit et Littérature.

On Friday, Feb. 7th, 2PM (Room TBA), Prof. Alexandre Mendès will give a talk entitled: “William James and the Deep SOuth.”

All welcome!

Please note that you will need to ask for a badge at the reception to access the 8th floor.

Autres Objets du Pragmatisme (AOP) / Pragmatic Crossings — Friday, Jan. 17, 2020, 2pm-5pm/

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 Believeand 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 PragmatismA 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 Believeand 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 PragmatismA 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

A19 –“Tyranny in America: David Walker and Victor Séjour” (Elizabeth Duquette) @ Univ. Paris Diderot, vendredi 6 décembre, 14h.

Chers et chères collègues,

 

Le vendredi 6 décembre, à 14h (salle OdG 829, Univ. Paris Diderot), Prof. Elizabeth Duquette (Gettysburg College, editor of J19) donnera une communication intitulée  Tyranny in America: David Walker and Victor Séjour”

 

Le texte de Victor Séjour (Richard III, drame en cinq actes, en prose, 1852) qu’elle étudiera est disponible au lien suivant :

 

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=P05SAAAAcAAJ&hl=fr&pg=GBS.PA1

 

 

Elizabeth Duquette is Professor of American literature at Gettysburg College. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University. Her teaching interests include nineteenth-century US literature, transatlantic literary culture, intellectual history, and critical theory. Her first book–Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2010)–explored the idea of loyalty in the postbellum United States. More recently, she and Claudia Stokes (Trinity University) published an edition of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best-selling novel, The Gates Ajar (Penguin 2019). Working with Gettysburg graduate Cheryl Tevlin, Duquette also edited Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (U of Nebraska P, 2014).

Her current book project, America’s Napoleon Complex: Tyranny and Ubiquity Across the Long Nineteenth Century, offers an alternative history of the American political imagination in the nineteenth century, recovering the close, but often ignored, relationship between democracy and tyranny. In addition to these books, Duquette has published articles on a wide range of subjects; the most recent include “The Confidence-Man Between Genres,” The New Herman Melville (2019); “Reform in The Silent Partner,” The Nineteenth-Century American Novel (2018); “The Man of the World,” American Literary History (2015); “The Pleasures of Occasional Vitriol,” J19 (2015); “The Office of The Dead Letter,” Arizona Quarterly (2013); “Making an Example: American Literature as Philosophy,” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2012); and “Pierre‘s Nominal Conversions,” Melville and Aesthetics (2011).

With Stacey Margolis, she edits J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

 

Pour accéder au 8e étage, vous êtes priés de demander un badge au poste de sécurité, au RDC du bâtiment.

 

Très cordialement,

 

Cécile Roudeau
Directrice du LARCA-UMR8225
Professeur de littérature américaine
Université Paris Diderot
https://a19.hypotheses.org/

“Nature Repairs Our Ravages? George Eliot’s Novel Ecosystem”-Jesse Oak Taylor, OdG 165, 5pm-7pm

A19, Victorian Persistence and the LARCA invites Dr. Jesse Oak Taylor on Wednesday 6 November 2019. The joint sesssion (5pm-7pm) will take place at the Université de Paris (bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, salle 165).

Dr. Jesse Oak Taylor will give a paper entitled “Nature Repairs Our Ravages? George Eliot’s Novel Ecosystems.”

Jesse Oak Taylor is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington. His research focuses on industrialization and empire in the nineteenth century and their relevance for tracing the emergence of the Anthropocene. His recent book, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) traces the conceptual emergence of climate change on the soot-laden London fog (i.e., “smog”) in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. It argues that aesthetics, especially the novel, re-frame our perception in order to come to terms with an environment in which everything, including the weather, bears the imprint of human action. 

His current research explores the concept of the Anthropocene, especially in terms of the way it opens new methodological intersections between the humanities and the sciences, an approach Tobias Menely and himself have been calling the Earth System Humanities. At present, he is approaching this topic through Victorian evolutionary theory, asking how nineteenth century debates around species, geologic time, extinction, and the fossil record must be re-evaluated in light of the human species’s emergence as a geologic agent at planetary scale during the same period.

Pr. Sara Thornton (University of Paris) will be his respondent. 

We will be working with the following texts:

– Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category’, Critical Inquiry, Volume 46, Number 1 | Autumn 2019.

– George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860. (Book First, Chapter 1, Book First, Chapter 12, Book Fourth, Chapter 1, Book Sixth, Chapter 5, Conclusion)

– Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, 2016.

– Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (eds.), ‘Introduction in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2017.

All are welcome!

 

 

Wednesday, Oct. 9, 5pm- Olympe de Gouges, Room 165, Poe’s Magazine Materialism (Paul Huhr)

A19 and LARCA-UMR8225 invites Paul Huhr at the LARCA séminaire commun.

Paul Hurh is Associate Professor, and Director of  Undergraduate Studies at the University of Arizona.

Paul Hurh’s research and teaching is primarily in the field of nineteenth-century American literature.  His work has focused on questions of literary aesthetics, philosophy, and intellectual history.   His book, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford 2015), charts the relation between models of Enlightenment method and the development of literary terror as a philosophical affect.  His current projects have taken a cosmological turn, and include studies of E.A. Poe’s astronomical aesthetics, spacetime in Herman Melville, and planetary conceptions of death in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  His essays have appeared in Nineteenth-Century LiteratureStyle, and Novel. 

 

“Thoreau’s Wild Thinking” (Michael Jonik), Friday, Sept. 27 2019, 2pm, room 131 (Olympe de Gouges, Paris Diderot)

A19 invites Michael JONIK (Univ. of Sussex) on Friday, September 27, 2019, @ Univ. Paris Diderot (room ODG 131)

Michael’s talk is titled:

THOREAU’S WILD THINKING

Michael Jonik teaches American literature and contemporary critical theory at the University of Sussex. He recently published Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and he writes on pre-1900 American literature, continental philosophy, and the history of science. Michael was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. He has won research grants from the Spanish government, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice

 

 

Plan Paris Campus Rive Gauche

Friday, May 17, 2019, 2.30pm, OdG 202, Université de Paris New Perspectives on the Nineteenth-Century

A19 is pleased to announce its next session to be held on Friday, May 17, at 2. 30pm. We have invited two colleagues to talk about their current projects on the nineteenth-century.

Philipp Löffler (Université de Heidelberg): “Hawthorne and his Mosses: Reading Pace and Literary Value in Antebellum America”

Philipp Löffler is assistant professor of American literature. His work concentrates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction and poetry, with a particular interest in the uses of history in literature, the history of reading, and the connection between literature and education. He has published on Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Richard Powers, amongst others, and has edited two books on the connections between institutionalized reading habits and the production of literary value:  Reading Practices (Narr)and Reading the Canon(Winter). His first monograph is Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (Camden House). His next book will be a cultural history of US literary professionalism in the nineteenth century, tentatively titled Publishing Scoundrels: American Literature and the Professionalization of Authorship, 1790-1915.

http://www.as.uni-heidelberg.de/personen/Loeffler/

Edward Sugden (King College, London): “The Genealogy of Beyond”

Edward Sugden joined King’s in September 2013 after completing his PhD at the University of Oxford. His first book Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture was published by New York University Press in 2018. His work has appeared in journals such as J19 and Leviathan, and in a number of essay collections. His “Marginal States: Herman Melville in the Marquesas, 1842” was recently published in The New Herman Melville Studies (dir. Cody Marrs, Cambridge UP, 2019) and he has an essay in the forthcoming edited collection Neither The Time Nor The Place (dir. Susan Gillman et Christopher Castiglia, University of Pennsylvania Press)

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-edward-sugden

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-edward-sugden

Emergent Worlds

Friday, October 19- Making Oscar Wilde — Michèle Mendelssohn (Oxford). 2.30pm, OdG 165, Université Paris Diderot

The next session of our seminar will take place on Friday 19th October, 14h30-16h30 at the Université Paris Diderot (bâtiment Olympe de Gouge, room 165).

The session is open to all and is a jointly-organized collaboration between A19 and Victorian Persistence.

Michèle Mendelssohn (University of Oxford) will present her new book “Making Oscar Wilde” (Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

 

Her respondents will be Camille Martin-Payre (Université Paris Diderot, LARCA) and Pr. Sara Thornton (Université Paris Diderot, LARCA.

Dr Michèle Mendelssohn is Associate Professor in English Literature; Deputy Director, Rothermere American Institute and Fellow of Mansfield College. Dr Mendelssohn’s research ranges from the late 19th century to the present day and covers both sides of the Atlantic. It encompasses British, American and Canadian literature. She has published widely on Victorian literature, 20th century cultural history, and contemporary writing. She is the author of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh UP, 2007 ; 2014). Dr. Mendelssohn is also the co-editor with Laura Marcus and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr of Late Victorian into Modern (2016). She is the co-editor with Denis Flannery of Alan Hollingshurst: Writing Under the Influence (Manchester UP, 2016).


Making Oscar Wilde draws on new archives and rare documents to tell the story of Oscar Wilde’s life tumultuous rise, fall, and resurrection. It explores the social trends and controversies that rocked nineteenth century Britain, Ireland, and the United States as they moved towards modernity and exposes the intimate connections that bind together national histories.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-oscar-wilde-9780198802365?cc=fr&lang=en&

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-oscar-wilde-9780198802365?cc=fr&lang=en&

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/05/making-oscar-wilde-by-michele-mendelssohn-review

A19 June Seminar Series around Chad LUCK (California State University at San Bernardino), invited professor at the LARCA.

Lien

A19 is pleased to announce a seminar series around Chad LUCK.

Chad LUCK is Associate Professor at California State University at San Bernardino. His research focuses on 18th- and 19th-Century American Literature and Culture; Literature and Philosophy; Critical Theory; Phenomenology and Phenomenological Criticism; Law and Literature; Property Theory. He is the author of The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession (Fordham UP, 2014).

Chad Luck has also published a number of essays, among which

  • “George Lippard and the Rise of the Urban Gothic.” A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles Crow. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
  • “Re-Walking the Purchase: Edgar Huntly, David Hume, and the Origins of Ownership.” Early American Literature 44.2 (2009): 271-306.
  • “The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby-Dick, and the Marvelous.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies1 (2007): 3-23.
  • “A Liberal Inheritance: Biology, Property, and the Limits of the Possessive Individual in Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association1 (2007): 37-48.

  • Wednesday, June 13.    On Interest and the Interesting, 12pm-2pm (OdG 209, Paris Diderot) :

Chad LUCK (Associate Prof., California State University at San Bernardino): The Point of Interest: Economics and Aesthetics in Irving’s The Money-Diggers and Melville’s The Confidence-Man.

  • Friday June 15.  A19/LARCA. SYMPOSIUM, 10.30am-4pm (OdG 164, Paris Diderot)

10.30 am : Chad LUCK (Associate Prof., California State University at San Bernardino) : Sheppard Lee and the Utilitarian Social Body

Respondents : Antoine Traisnel (Assistant Professor, U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor) & Stephen Sawyer (Prof., American University of Paris)

14pm-16pm : Giorgio MARIANI (Prof., Sapienza, Roma): Are Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce the Inventors  of the American “Anti-War” Story?       

Antoine TRAISNEL (Ann Arbor): The Stock Image: Eadweard Muybridge and the Animal in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. 

Giorgio MARIANI is Professor of American Literature at the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, where he coordinates the Doctoral Programin English-language literatures. His work has concentrated on nineteenth-century American writers (Emerson, Melville, Stephen Crane, and others); on contemporary American Indian literature; on literary theory; on the literary and cinematic representation of war. He has published, edited,and co-edited several volumes, including Spectacular Narratives. Representations of Class and War in the American 1890s (1992), Post-tribal Epics.The Native American Novel between Tradition and Modernity (1996) and Le parole e le armi (Words and Arms), a collection of essays on US discourses of war and violence from the Puritans to the first Gulf War. His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including American Literary History, Studies in American Fiction, RIAS, RSA Journal, Stephen Crane Studies. His latest book is titled Waging War on War. Peacefighting in American Literature (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

Antoine TRAISNEL is assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He has published in the fields of American, French, and German literature and philosophy. He is the author of Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (2015), coauthor of Donner le change: L’impensé animal (2016), with Thangam Ravindranathan, and translator of Sheppard Lee (2017). He is currently completing a book titled Life in Capture: Animal Pursuits and the New Logic of Life in Early America.

http://next.liberation.fr/livres/2017/09/29/sheppard-lee-ne-manque-pas-de-peaux_1599839

  • Wednesday, June 27. Literature and American (Literary) History. 12pm-2pm (OdG 209, Paris Diderot) :

Chad LUCK (Associate Prof., California State University at San Bernardino), about his book The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession (Fordham UP, 2014), more specifically about the chapter “Anxieties of Ownership: Debt, Entitlement, and the Plantation Romance.”

Caroline LEVANDER (Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, Rice University). De-Ciphering American Literature: 1945-1840-2016

 Caroline LEVANDER is Carlson Professor of Humanities and English at Rice University, and Vice President for Global and Digital Strategy. She is author of, amongst others, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1998, paperback reprint 2009), Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke University Press, 2006), Where is American Literature? (Wiley, 2013) and co-editor of a number of edited collections such as Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers UP, 2008) and Companion to American Literary Studies (Wiley, 2011), both of them with Robert Levine. Levander’s current book is an alternative cultural history of American political life, entitled Confounding Fathers: The Hidden History of the Men Who Threatened to Make America Great. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Brown Foundation, the Moody Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science’s National Leadership grant. Her latest book, with Matthew Pratt Guterl, Hotel Life: the Story of a Place Where Anything Can Happen (UNC Press, 2015) is about the everyday work of one of the world’s most fascinating and strange institutions.