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

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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 :
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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.