C19 Americanists Abroad-Article Spotlight (E. Forbes and E. Marsoin)

A 19 is happy to share a second event of the C19 Americanists Abroad group, of which A19 is a member.

It will take place online on Friday, June 17th at 1 pm (Paris) and will feature two articles:

Erin Forbes, “Do Black Ghosts Matter? Harriet Jacobs’ Spiritualism,” awarded the 1921 Prize in American Literature (2021)

and

Edouard Marsoin, “‘No Land of Pleasure Unalloyed’: Economies of Pleasure and Pain in Melville’s Typee and Omoo” awarded the Hennig Cohen Prize (2021)

Here’s the link to Erin and Édouard’s articles:https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/jvsk5mz8x7qaxnvze9qg5/h?dl=0&rlkey=9t2ydn8942gjwsf29g92dbx84

 

 

Vendredi 8 avril, 14h (OdG + zoom) — Hélène Valance (U. de Franche-Comté): « Inconséquences historiques : Les visions anachroniques de Susan Fenimore Cooper dans “A Dissolving View” »

Ce séminaire aura lieu à l’Université Paris Cité (ex-Université de Paris), bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, salle 830 à 14h.

Hélène Valance est maîtresse de conférences à l’Université de Franche-Comté. Elle est spécialiste de l’histoire visuelle des États-Unis (plus particulièrement 19ème-20ème siècles). Elle est l’autrice de Nocturne. Night in American Art, 1890-1917 (Yale Université Press, 2018, à reparaître en 2022). Son projet actuel est consacré aux représentations de l’histoire nationale dans la culture visuelle des États-Unis au cours du long 19ème siècle. 

Cette communication examine « A Dissolving View », un essai de la naturaliste et écrivaine Susan Fenimore Cooper, qui considère le paysage naturel américain dans une perspective historique, transatlantique, et médiée par les technologies de l’image, dont la lanterne magique qui lui donne son titre. Il met en scène le regard de l’autrice contemplant depuis le sommet d’une colline la petite ville de Cooperstown, fondée par son grand-père sur les rives du lac Otsego dans l’actuel état de New York. Cooper part du spectacle de la vallée « s’étendant à [ses] pieds comme une magnifique carte » (« like a beautiful map ») pour déployer une réflexion sur les rapports entre histoire et paysage, sous-tendue par une comparaison entre l’Europe et l’Amérique du Nord. Après avoir retracé les grands moments de l’humanité et de son impact sur le paysage (des tumuli anciens aux ruines médiévales), Cooper souligne combien les édifices américains, marqués par une logique capitaliste et utilitaire, semblent précaires au regard de l’histoire longue. Les dernières pages du texte voient ces considérations généralisantes culminer en une vision inattendue : abandonnant le ton formel de l’essai, l’autrice plonge le lecteur dans un moment de pure fantaisie, dans tous les sens du terme. Armée d’une branche d’hamamélis (witch-hazel), elle projette sur le paysage une fantasmagorie qui rejoue l’inévitable comparaison entre Europe et Amérique, mais en remontant le passé. L’illusion fait disparaître, d’abord, toute trace d’occupation par les colons pour retourner le paysage à son état « sauvage ». Mais l’autrice va plus loin encore, et superpose sur cette nature américaine un paysage européen imaginaire. Le paysage naturel devient ainsi le terrain d’une histoire alternative, décalée et re-cadrée dans un « jeu de cadavre exquis architectural » (« a game of architectural consequences »). La communication reviendra en particulier sur les enjeux esthétiques de l’essai, en le replaçant dans la culture visuelle et artistique de son époque.  

 

 “Playing with historical consequences: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s anachronistic vision in ‘A Dissolving View'”. 

This paper examines “A Dissolving View,” an essay by naturalist and writer Susan Fenimore Cooper, which considers the American natural landscape from a historical, transatlantic perspective mediated by image technologies such as the magic lantern. It stages the author gazing from a hilltop at the small town of Cooperstown, founded by her grandfather on the shores of Otsego Lake. Cooper begins with the sight of the valley “stretching out at [her] feet like a beautiful map” to develop a reflection on the relationship between history and landscape, underpinned by a comparison between Europe and North America. After tracing major moments of humanity’s history and their impact on the landscape (from ancient burial mounds to medieval ruins), Cooper emphasizes how American buildings, marked by a capitalist and utilitarian logic, seem precarious in the face of long history. The last pages of the text see these generalizing considerations culminate in an unexpected vision: abandoning the formal tone of the essay, the author plunges the reader into a moment of pure fantasy. Armed with a branch of witch-hazel, she projects a phantasmagoria on the landscape, replaying the inevitable comparison between Europe and America, but going back in time. The illusion makes all traces of occupation by European settlers disappear in order to return the landscape to its “wild” state. But the author goes even further, and superimposes an imaginary European landscape on this restored wilderness. The natural landscape thus becomes the terrain of an alternative history, shifting and reframed in a “game of architectural consequences”. The paper will focus on the aesthetic issues of the essay, by placing it in the visual and artistic culture of its time.   

Cécile Roudeau vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.

Sujet : A19 -H. Valance
Heure : 8 avr. 2022 02:00 PM Paris

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Friday, March 18th, 2pm (zoom + OdG 830): Antoine Traisnel (U of Michigan) and Michael Jonik (U of Sussex) in conversation

Antoine Traisnel (University of Michigan) In the Doldrums: Plastic and the Sea” (with the Environmental Humanities Research Group)

In this creative-critical essay, co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan (Brown University), we reflect on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of marine debris spanning 1.6 million kilometers in the North Pacific Ocean. The 87,000 metric tons of non-biodegradable plastic bits and particles gathering in this span of ocean—due to a particular confluence of marine currents in the subtropical convergence zone and the “trapping” of litter in the stable center of the resulting vortex—occupies today the exact zones that used to be known in the Age of Sail as the doldrums—the “dead calm” described by sailors and writers, most famously in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some of Melville’s writings and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. In the doldrums, due to the complete absence of wind for weeks at a time, ships would be stranded, both space and time seemingly at a standstill. If technologies for “annihilating space and time” (Marx), and specifically fossil-fuel-powered motorized speed, took humans decidedly out of the doldrums, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch stands as a testament to the fact that no speed is fast enough for a metaphor to transcend its own material remainder. From the fuel that powered the ships and factories and fast urban lives of industrial modernity came also petrochemicals, notably plastic, that will not biodegrade—or “go away”—within actionable time. The tons of plastic in the North Pacific gather as the indelible waste of mass consumer culture and pose an extremely toxic danger to marine ecosystems. This talk, experimenting with the formal conceit of an interstitial chapter to Moby Dick (where the Pequod finds itself mired in a sea of debris), meditates on the impeccable if submerged chiasmus-like operations linking dematerialization and matter, the metaphorical and the earthly, transcendence and disposal, that work at the heart of capitalist modernity, and that make the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a haunting “hyper-object” (Morton) of our space-time. 

Michael Jonik (University of Sussex) A Dictionary of the Indian Languages”: Thoreau’s Ecopoetic Ethnobotany”

At the end of his Maine Woods, Thoreau adds a brief “Appendix” containing plant and animal names (including Latin nomenclature and common English names), advice for those who would “outfit” an excursion upriver in Maine, and a “List of Indian Words.” The latter list relates primarily to place names or to geographical or topographical features of the Penobscot valley, and signals Thoreau’s diverse yet intense interests in cartography and toponymy, geology and hydrodynamics, botany and zoology, anthropology and Colonial history, and, indeed, philology and poetics. Thoreau had compiled this multilingual list of words from the Abenaki language from a variety of sources, including Sébastien Rasles’s A Dictionary of the Abnaki Language, in North America (which translated Abenaki into French), Willamson’s History of Maine, and words he learned directly from hisPenobscot guides (especially Joe Polis) during his three excursions recounted in “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook,” and “The Allegash and the East Branch.” In this presentation, I explore his increasing intimacy with Native American understandings of the environment, epistemologies, cultures and lifeways: an eco-political phronesis outside white liberal knowledge structures, or what he calls in “Walking” a “more perfect Indian wisdom.” He celebrates this new intimacy with the natural world that Native American words offer him in his journal on March 5, 1858: “A dictionary of the Indian Languages reveals another and wholly new life to us. … It reveals to me a life within a life” (March 5, 1858). Building on such moments, this paper investigates the implications of Thoreau’s inclusion of Indigenous languages in his writings, especially his use of Abenaki words The Maine Woods, as well as instances from his journals and selections from his “Indian Notebooks.” My contention here is that Thoreau’s increasingly sensitive inclusion of Abenaki words across his three excursions recounted in The Maine Woods indicates a shift away from a Romantic tropology of Native Americans as primitive and vanquished in his thinking. Instead, Thoreau uses words as a means to engage a living Indigenous population and to discern a more vibrant and intimate relational ontology of plant and animal life previously foreclosed to him. At the same time, Thoreau’s interleaving of Indigenous languages into his writing does not happen separately from that of the Latin taxa or French words that often appear in his texts, but rather creates a dynamic, multilingual palimpsest of his ecopoetical experiences.  

Antoine Traisnel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Michigan. He holds doctorates in American Literature from Université Lille 3 (2009) and Comparative Literature from Brown University (2013). His published books, essays, and translations span the fields of American, French, and German Literature; critical and literary theory; biopolitics and ecocriticism. He is author of: Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (U Minnesota Press, 2020); Donner le change: L’impensé animal (Hermann, 2016), co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan; Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2015). He is the translator of Sheppard Lee (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2017). His recent and current research examines cultural and literary works through the lens of biocapitalism and extinction. It explores the historical, aesthetic, and philosophical footholds of the administration of life, concerns made all the more urgent in our present of escalating necropolitical and environmental crises. He co-leads the Critical Futures Project, a research collective that explores theoretical methods for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism.

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, and was a fellow at the Institut d’études avancées de Paris. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice

Cécile Roudeau vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.

Sujet : A19-Env. Humanities- Traisnel-Jonik
Heure : 18 mars 2022 02:00 PM Paris

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Vendredi 18 février, 14h-15H30, Bruno Monfort (U. Paris Nanterre/LARCA UMR8225): Tempo(e)ralité » et connaissance : dire « now » et esquiver le présent dans « A Descent into the Maelström ». ZOOM ONLY.

 

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. 

 

Cécile Roudeau vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.

Sujet : A19 18 février B. Monfort
Heure : 18 févr. 2022 02:00 PM Paris

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Friday, Jan. 28, 1pm-2pm, ZOOM, Americanists Abroad Virtual Book Launch- Xine Yao & Gordon Fraser

A19 thanks J. Michelle Coghlan, founder of C19 Americanists Abroad, to invite us to join this first Virtual Book Launch with

Xine Yao (UCL)– Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America (Duke UP, 2021)

and

 Gordon Fraser (Univ. of Manchester), Star Territory : Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America (U of Pennsylvania P, 2021).

 

Here is the link to the Dropbox folder with copies of Xine and Gordon’s introductions: 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rp8qeifg7ffe8y9/AAASfw5vXtbyPTJ7HTPqPyJ5a?dl=0

And here is the Zoom link for this event:

Topic: Americanists Abroad Virtual Book Launch (Yao/Fraser)

Time: Jan 28, 2022 12:00 PM London

 

Join Zoom Meeting

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Transcendentalist Women in Conversation: Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, and “Woman”

The seminar will ONLINE only. The zoom link is below.

Friday January 21, 2pm-4pm. ODG 340/zoom.

 A19 invites Alice de Galzain (University of Edinburgh). Her paper is entitled :

Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne U.) will be discussant.

 Abstract: This paper focuses on Sophia Ripley’s 1841 article “Woman,” which was published in the Dial two years before Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit. Man Versus Men. Woman Versus Women” appeared in the same publication. Originally written as homework for one of Fuller’s Boston Conversations (1839-1844), Ripley’s plea in favor of women’s right to education perfectly epitomizes the polyphonic nature of feminist social advances in antebellum America. Inspired by Fuller’s feminist reinterpretation of William Ellery Channing’s concept of “self-culture,” viewing education as a means to improve woman’s condition, Ripley’s text debunks the concept of “separate spheres” and urges readers to consider women as intellectual beings rather than through the prism of the idealized, unrealistic “muse”. Inscribing Ripley’s article as part of the feminist stride of the Transcendental movement, I will illustrate the similarities between Ripley’s argument, Fuller’s, and that of other women Transcendentalists, while also confronting it with what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on the subject.

Alice de Galzain is a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh. Brought up in a bilingual environment in Europe, she has studied and lived in many different countries, including France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States – which has played a defining role in her transnational approach to literary works. In 2017, she graduated with distinctions from the University of Edinburgh, where she completed a Master of Science in United States literature. Specialized in nineteenth-century U.S. literature, Alice’s research interests include Transcendentalism, transnational writing, abolitionism, and women’s studies. After writing her Master’s dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle’s epistolary friendship and their differences over the abolition of slavery, she is now focusing her research on the relationship between Emerson and Margaret Fuller. In particular, she plans to explore explore how both Emerson’s and Fuller’s Transcendentalist reimagining of the role and status of American women led to a redefinition of the American nation. 

Cécile Roudeau vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.

 

Sujet : A19- Transcendentalist Women in Conversation

Heure : 21 janv. 2022 02:00 PM Paris

 

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Friday 10 December 2021, 2pm-4pm (zoom + OdG358): Michael Jonik (University of Sussex) “A Dictionary of the Indian Languages”: Thoreau’s Ecopoetic Ethnobotany”- respondent: Antoine Traisnel (U. of Michigan)- POSTPONED- March 18th, 2022

Abstract:

At the end of his Maine Woods, Thoreau adds a brief “Appendix” containing plant and animal names (including Latin nomenclature and common English names), advice for those who would “outfit” an excursion upriver in Maine, and a “List of Indian Words.” The latter list relates primarily to place names or to geographical or topographical features of the Penobscot valley, and signals Thoreau’s diverse yet intense interests in cartography and toponymy, geology and hydrodynamics, botany and zoology, anthropology and Colonial history, and, indeed, philology and poetics. Thoreau had compiled this multilingual list of words from the Abenaki language from a variety of sources, including Sébastien Rasles’s A Dictionary of the Abnaki Language, in North America (which translated Abenaki into French), Willamson’s History of Maine, and words he learned directly from his Penobscot guides (especially Joe Polis) during his three excursions recounted in “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook,” and “The Allegash and the East Branch.” In this presentation, I explore his increasing intimacy with Native American understandings of the environment, epistemologies, cultures and lifeways: an eco-political phronesis outside white liberal knowledge structures, or what he calls in “Walking” a “more perfect Indian wisdom.” He celebrates this new intimacy with the natural world that Native American words offer him in his journal on March 5, 1858: “A dictionary of the Indian Languages reveals another and wholly new life to us. … It reveals to me a life within a life” (March 5, 1858). Building on such moments, this paper investigates the implications of Thoreau’s inclusion of Indigenous languages in his writings, especially his use of Abenaki words The Maine Woods, as well as instances from his journals and selections from his “Indian Notebooks.” My contention here is that Thoreau’s increasingly sensitive inclusion of Abenaki words across his three excursions recounted in The Maine Woods indicates a shift away from a Romantic tropology of Native Americans as primitive and vanquished in his thinking. Instead, Thoreau uses words as a means to engage a living Indigenous population and to discern a more vibrant and intimate relational ontology of plant and animal life previously foreclosed to him. At the same time, Thoreau’s interleaving of Indigenous languages into his writing does not happen separately from that of the Latin taxa or French words that often appear in his texts, but rather creates a dynamic, multilingual palimpsest of his ecopoetical experiences.  

Michael Jonik is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature (English and American Studies), Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange (School of Media, Arts and Humanities) at Sussex University. 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, and was a fellow at the Institut d’études avancées de Paris. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice

Antoine Traisnel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Michigan. He holds doctorates in American Literature from Université Lille 3 (2009) and Comparative Literature from Brown University (2013). His published books, essays, and translations span the fields of American, French, and German Literature; critical and literary theory; biopolitics and ecocriticism. He is author of: Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (U Minnesota Press, 2020); Donner le change: L’impensé animal (Hermann, 2016), co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan; Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2015). He is the translator of Sheppard Lee (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2017). His recent and current research examines cultural and literary works through the lens of biocapitalism and extinction. It explores the historical, aesthetic, and philosophical footholds of the administration of life, concerns made all the more urgent in our present of escalating necropolitical and environmental crises. He co-leads the Critical Futures Project, a research collective that explores theoretical methods for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism.

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.