A propos jamiefenton

Jamie Fenton researches American Literature, mainly poetry in the nineteenth century. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2021. He joined VALE in January 2024 as part of Project AmHealth.

Thursday 6th March // Dr Alice de Galzain // ‘Cultivating the Roots of Feminism’

A19 in association and Boundaries of Literature are pleased to announce a seminar with Dr Alice de Galzain, postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne Université. She will give a paper called ‘Cultivating the Roots of Feminism: Health, Gender and Reform at Brook Farm and the Fruitlands’. Please see below for an abstract and bio. 

6th March, 4:30pm, Room 830, Olyme de Gouges Building, Université Paris Cité

Zoom link 

Abstract

At the end of her life, Caroline Healey Dall returned to the topic of Margaret Fuller’s feminism, commenting, almost sixty years after the latter’s death, on the solidarity that marked her relationships with other women: “My lectures had made me very well known as a friend of Margaret Fuller, and many persons came to me, who owed safety and a home to her care, asked and granted, when they were strangers to each other. They never shrank from telling what they owed to her.”

The fact that Dall chose to anchor Fuller’s memory in the impact she had on her
community counters the tendency to see her as an exceptional woman, almost in isolation from her contemporaries, which, for a long time, was a defining element of how Fuller was remembered. In this paper, and more generally in my projected monograph, provisionally entitled Cultivating the Roots of Feminism: Health, Gender, and Reform at Brook Farm and the Fruitlands, I will examine how the notion of “community” was central to the writings produced by the women who lived in Transcendentalist utopias. While mapping the influence that Margaret Fuller had on these women, I aim to demonstrate that their writings were much more a reflection of Fuller’s Transcendental feminism than they were of an Emersonian type of disembodied (male) individual. I will discuss the meaning of “community” through the lens of four different relationships in the context of these Transcendentalist utopian experiments, paying particular attention to these women’s reformist discussions on health and the environment. First, I will look at Margaret Fuller and Sophia Ripley’s relationship, focusing on how the two women bonded over pedagogy while discussing the best way forward with regard to (Fuller’s brother) James Lloyd’s learning difficulties, when he was a student at the Brook Farm school. Then, I will comment on Marianne Dwight Orvis and Anna T. Q. Parsons’s friendship, of which Letters from Brook Farm provides a detailed record, expanding my reflection to the meaning of Mesmerism for Transcendentalist women and its impact on these women’s relationship with their bodies. Thirdly, I will look at Fuller and Georgiana Kirby Bruce’s relationship, examining the impact that Fuller’s mentoring and moral support had on Bruce’s long, feminist career. Finally, I will briefly discuss Abigail Alcott and Ann Page’s relationship at the Fruitlands (where they were the only women, juggling caring responsibilities and a heavy agrarian workload)—a relationship about which a lot of archival “discovery” (rather than “recovery”) work is still needed.

Bio

Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne University. Her research project, entitled “Women Networks and Transcendentalist Utopias: Health, Gender, and Reform”
(TransUTOPIA), aims to uncover the feminist subculture that existed within Transcendentalist utopias (Brook Farm and the Fruitlands). More broadly, Alice specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, with a focus on feminist women’s writing. She has taught American Literature at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex, where she worked as Lecturer in American Studies and English. She is the Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and the Associate Editor of Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller. In 2022, her article “Transcendentalist Women in Conversation: Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, and ‘Woman’” appeared in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal. More recently, her work on “Woman [and] Artist’: Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship” was published in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and she has an essay due to appear in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers in the coming months.

Friday 14th March // New Work in the Nineteenth Century // Katie McGettigan, James Dorson, Nicholas Gaskill, Lloyd Pratt // Université Paris Cité

On Friday 14th March, A19 will hold a colloquium on new work in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. We hope you will take this opportunity to hear from leading scholars and contribute to their emerging research.

Provisional Program

14h-14h30: Katie McGettigan (Royal Holloway): “Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, Simon
Pokagon and the Environmental History of American Books”

14h30-15h: James Dorson (Freie Universität Berlin): “The Aesthetics of Organization in
American Literary Naturalism”

15h-15h30: Response by Tom Nurmi (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Q&A

Coffee break

16h-16h30 : Nicholas Gaskill (Oriel College, Oxford): “Edgar Allan Poe and the Origins of
Intensity”

16h30-17h: Lloyd Pratt (Oxford): “Black Aesthetic Education and Self-Reliance”

17h-17h30: Response by Jamie Fenton (Sorbonne Université) and Q&A

Room 830, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, Université Paris Cité, Place Paul Ricoeur, 75013, Paris

Zoom link (passcode: 251530)

 

Friday 14th February // 14:00hr // Dr Aaron Anthony-Pillai // Infectious Disease Beyond Biomedicine (in association with Project AmHealth)

Project AmHealth presents an intervention session on infectious disease and the medical humanities. Dr Aaron Anthony-Pillai (clinician at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and graduate of King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) will give a paper on the social and epidemiological history of tuberculosis. This will be followed by a conversation with Dr Jamie Fenton (Sorbonne Université, Project AmHealth) on the present and future of the medical humanities, both in humanities departments and clinical schools. As the ‘value’ of the humanities comes under increasing scrutiny, literary scholarship is being asked to find new ways to market itself even as it resists this disciplinary re-ontologising. We hope this session will catalyse a discussion of this pressing issue, as well as informing our literary-historical practice. 

Room S001, Maison de la Recherche, Rue Serpente. 

Zoom link (passcode: 357480)

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Health Humanities: Scholars in Conversation

28 May 2024, Université Paris Cité, Olympe de Gouges Building, Room 830
 
2pm-2:15pm: Introduction: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université) and Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité)
 
2:15-2:40: Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University): “Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America”
 
2:40-3:05: Shari Goldberg (Franklin and Marshall College): “Figuration, Literalization, and Biopolitics”
 
3.05-3.25: Responses by Sari Altschuler & Shari Goldberg
 
3:25-3.45. Q&A
 
3:45-4:00: break
 
4:00-4:25: Cynthia Davis (University of South Carolina): “‘On Pain, Pleasure, and Private Feeling”
 

4:25-4:50: Justine Murison (University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign): “Reading and Reproduction in the Age of Comstock”

4:50-5:10: Responses Cynthia Davis & Justine Murison
 
5:10-5:30: Q&A
 
 
 

 

 

Tuesday, April 30th, 2-4pm, Université Paris Cité, OdG Building, Room 830, ‘African American Letters’, with Erin Forbes and Bridget Bennett

Report // Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) & Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds), “African American Letters,” 30 April 2024

This meeting will host two talks about new work in African American Literature. 

Erin Forbes (University of Bristol), “The Convict’s Corpus in the late 18th Century US”

This talk will be drawn from the second chapter of Criminal Genius in African American and
U.S. Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024). After briefly outlining the contours of the larger
book, the talk will offer a close reading of the print culture surrounding one late eighteenth-
century executed convict: Abraham Johnstone, a falsely accused free Black man found guilty of murder in New Jersey. Johnstone used his criminal status to communicate his vision of collective Black thriving, exemplified by his relationship with and final letter to his wife.

Erin Forbes — University of Bristol

Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds), “Epistolarity in the Slave Narrative: Love Letters
Written in Extremity.”

This talk develops an essay titled “England/New England: A British Quaker and a Fugitive
from Slavery Encounter Each Other on a Train, 1850” in Crossings in Nineteenth-Century
American Culture ed. Edward Sugden (Edinburgh UP, 2022). It focuses on an epistolary
exchange between Rynar Jones, and her husband Thomas H. Jones, collected towards the end of his 1850 narrative. The correspondence, during a separation along lines of freedom and enslavement, articulates the most profound expression of love and longing in a period of precariousness and danger. At every point in their construction, reception and subsequent reproduction in print, their letters were subject to scrutiny. Thomas’ letters had to be read to Rynar, who was not literate, while she used an amanuensis to dictate her letters. Knowing that her letters might be seized and read by his enslaver, they crafted an elaborate form of double speak in order creating the possibility of freedom.

Professor Bridget Bennett — recent publications | School of English | University of Leeds

 

Report // Laird Hunt, 18 January 2024

Link to original event here.

This session was chaired by Anne-Laure Tissut and Anne-Julie Debare.

A few days before this meeting, Joe Biden (or at least his comms team) felt moved to tweet about the Civil War:

This was, to use a phrase potentially beneath the office of President, a subtweet, calling out the then Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley (she suspended her campaign in March 2024). At a December 2023 town hall meeting in New Hampshire, Haley had been asked, in simple terms, what had been the cause of the Civil War. As The Guardian put it, Haley ‘reacted as if she were being physically threatened’. She seemed to have to gather herself before giving her brief answer: ‘I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.’ The questioner pressed her for more, but she continued to spiral around ideas of government overreach: ‘Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.’ The news media was happy to report on this peculiar interaction, which gained enough memetic value that Biden’s team thought it worth taking to Twitter to put Haley right. And so another skirmish of the Civil War began, as the President’s replies devolved into a bizarre discussion thread on anti-bellum politics.

The Civil War didn’t end at Appomattox. That’s not news. But Biden’s tweet, while fundamentally uneducative in its actual content, proved by its form that there has been a shift in gears. The argument about the Civil War’s causes, real and Lost, has bubbled up from forum threads and onto a national (and therefore global) stage. The tweet was, essentially, bait, and the Twitter reply-bucket quickly filled up with a swirling mass of ‘um actuallys’, from both the website’s endemic right-wing reactionaries and its host of historical pundits, leaning on their undergraduate credentials to point out that President Biden didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

The fact is that people on both sides of this argument are equally unwilling to dig up America’s bones. Slavery was the cause of the Civil War, as it was the cause of so many other lasting structures which continue to plague the country, and which neither party are willing to face up to. The implications of Biden’s entirely correct statement are not bound out in his policy. Haley, meanwhile, when she was asked the cause of the Civil War, gave a meandering, slightly panicked answer about freedom from government interference, without a single mention of slavery, as the questioner was quick to point out. It was a meta-interrogation, a posturing by both parties. ‘What do you want me to say about slavery?’ Haley asked, which about sums it up. Historical debate under TV lighting comes in pre-packaged boxes, void of curiosity. As so often, The Simpsons cut to the core of this problem in the 1990s. When Apu (himself a battlefield of the culture war) is taking his citizenship test, the examiner asks him the cause of the Civil War. ‘Actually,’ he replies, ‘there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, economic factors, both domestic and international, played a significant role. Here the examiner cuts him off: ‘Hey, hey. Just say slavery’.

Search the clip on YouTube, and you’ll find the website’s right-wing house band playing the same tune they did under Biden’s tweet. The joke, they seem to think, is that you’re not allowed to think for yourself in America, that the ‘woke’ answer is the only one that’s allowed. I’d say the joke is more obviously that Apu has a more nuanced understanding of the country he has immigrated to than his natural-born neighbours. Knowing about America is, ironically, a good way to fail a citizenship test.

Some of these thoughts were with me at the start of Laird Hunt’s session, which was prefaced with a word of regret for its long postponement, the seminar having originally been planned to coincide with and celebrate the publication of Tissut’s French translation of Neverhome, Hunt’s 2014 Civil War novel. But nothing about it felt late, or stale. So it is with the Civil War: always timely, never done with. The session was a moderated Q&A interspersed with readings. Hunt, and his questioners, were wide-ranging, but the talk had a consistent undertone which pulled at the edge of elegy. Inevitable, perhaps, when war is the topic, but that tone came out in other, less expected places. One loss mourned was the library. Neverhome is the first-person account (the quasi-memoir, Hunt proposed) of Constance or Ash Thompson, an Indiana farmer who disguises herself as a man to go to war for the Union. It was written with the library stacks, Hunt recalled, and he offered a vignette of his bookish archaeologies, his happy accidents in the shelves. It’s true that the Civil War makes a lot of books. I remember at the start of my own Civil War PhD tracking the subject holdings of my university library across tens of meters of shelves, and wondering: a) how I was ever going to get myself up to speed, and b) what the worth would be in adding yet another brick to this already stalwart edifice. Hunt’s answers reminded me, though, that such an overbearing volume of material can in fact be creatively and academically freeing. When there’s that much to go on, each encounter will be a unique kind of alchemy.

This joy, though, was tinged with a sadness at libraries lost. Access to university libraries, while a privilege, often comes and goes at the mercy of contingent, short-term posts. The smaller public libraries Hunt grew up with are becoming scarcer, and increasingly asked to perform multiple social functions, often at the expense of the quality of their collections. I had been speaking to someone before the session about the (as of March 2024) ongoing disruption to the British Library, after the cyber attack of October last year. They had only just got a temporary catalogue running again, and the scope of the damage to their digital collections has not yet been divulged. Libraries are fragile repositories. They can’t protect themselves, or guarantee their own accessibility. But we need them if history isn’t going to be reduced to campaign speech dogwhistles and Twitter bait. The exchange at Haley’s town hall didn’t need footnoting. I think you could learn the manoeuvres, of both sides, in a short half hour.

This was the substance of the profounder elegy brimming from the talk: a rueful look at America’s feeble knowledge of its past. Feeble, despite the odds. As Hunt said, you don’t need to dig very deep to find America’s bones. But it still feels like an act of resistance, if not quite of protest, to hold them up to the light. Neverhome is part of what Hunt offers as his ‘dark America’ quartet: a set of novels which turn over the soil on the deep violences of slavery, war and witchcraft. They are insistent, haunting, and highly present. In talking of his undergraduate years, Hunt described himself as a history student who studied literature, and this two-sidedness has carried through the intervening years. His novels are superb research pieces, but in a different way, I think, to other kinds of historical fiction. While Hunt does more than his due diligence on the facts (he was distraught, he recalled, to be told that a heifer can’t be milked, as one of his novels had it), his books are voice and style-led, in the extreme. Style is what does the work in Neverhome, forcing a close encounter with the war by offering it in strange, divergent terms. The novel is difficult. But the difficulty is shared between author and reader, who both discover as they go the darker world on the reverse side of the American present. We would do well to push for this difficulty when we can.

Jamie Fenton