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

 

Friday, March 22, 2-4 pm: Paulin Ismard nous parlera de son nouveau livre, Le Miroir d’Oedipe: Penser l’esclavage (The Mirror of Oedipus: Thinking About Slavery) (Seuil, 2023) (UPCité / Zoom)

Report // Paulin Ismard, Le Miroir d’Oedipe: Penser l’esclavage, 22 March 2024

Le séminaire A19 (LARCA UMR 8225, Université Paris Cité/ VALE EA, Sorbonne Université) est très heureux de vous convier à une séance autour du livre de Paulin Ismard, Le Miroir d’Œdipe : Penser l’esclavage (Seuil, 2023) intitulée « L’insu. Penser l’esclavage depuis la Grèce ancienne.” Elle se tiendra le 22 mars à 14h en salle 830 (bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, Université Paris Cité) et en Zoom (lien disponible ci-dessous).

Paulin Ismard est Professeur d’histoire grecque à l’université Aix-Marseille.

En espérant vous y retrouver,

Bien cordialement,

Cécile et Thomas

Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité, LARCA, UMR 8225)

Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université, VALE, UR 4085)

Sujet: A19- Paulin Ismard
Heure: 22 mars 2024 01:30 PM Paris


Wednesday, 27 March, 5:30-7pm: Michael Boyden (Radboud University), “Choleraic Communication in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Invalidism” (Sorbonne Université, English Department Library, Salle Louis Bonnerot, Esc. G, 2nd floor / Zoom)

Report // Michael Boyden, “Choleraic Communication in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Invalidism,” 27 March 2024

The bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth-century gave rise to a “new language of immunity” (Anderson), substituting for the earlier discourses of acclimatization that had been dominant up until that point. Not only did this new language of immunity articulate new modes of being in the world and forms of governmentality, it also generated new narrative models and tropes, such as that of the “healthy carrier” and similar “gothic” figures as analyzed by, among others, Priscilla Wald and Neel Ahuja. As these scholars acknowledge, however, the bacteriological revolution did not so much reject as reconfigure earlier doctrines of environmental and climatic determinism, which continued to inform understandings of disease transmission even as the focus shifted away from sanitation toward discrete pathogens or microbes. In my talk, I aim to contribute to a more historically differentiated account of such “outbreak” narratives by focusing attention on the autoethnography of American tropical health travelers at the time of the second cholera epidemic of 1832. Since this epidemic reached the American mainland before it arrived in the Spanish islands, its trajectory challenged the moralized geography according to which such communicable diseases were perceived, just as the Caribbean was developing into a health resort for northern invalids seeking a climate cure for their illnesses. These tensions run through the memoirs of American invalids residing in the region, such as Sophia Peabody and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother Edward. In my talk, I explore how these and other tropical health travelers – who might be regarded as the inverse type of the “healthy carrier” as theorized by Wald, while in some ways prefiguring current understandings of environmental illness – at once challenged and reconfirmed climate-based understandings of the world before the introduction of the germ theory of disease. My presentation, thus, is an attempt to rethink the ways in which we conventionally narrate and periodize the history of epidemic disease in terms of its causes (from demons, to miasmas, to germs).

Michael Boyden is a professor of English at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research is primarily in American literature, with a special interest in ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, and critical sustainability studies. Boyden is the author, among other things, Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics (Oxford University Press, 2022), which tracks the genesis of the modern, future-oriented understanding of climate in travel writings coming out of the American tropics in the period 1770-1860. Boyden is also the editor of a collected volume titled Climate and American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This book brings together contributions by leading scholars in the fieldfocusing specifically on the ways in which the climate has left its mark on American literary culture from the colonial period up to the present. Boyden has also published on topics including environmental illness, climate fiction, futurism, and Indigeneity.

Friday, March 1, 2-4 pm: One hour on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Emma Thiébaut (LARCA), “Beyond Genus and Genre: the (Nonsense) Politics of Animality in the Life and Works of M.E.W. Freeman,” joint seminar A19 / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society (Zoom only)

For decades of her life, the then-very popular author of regionalist fiction Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) lived with a childhood friend, Mary Wales, and quite a few cats. In this paper, I wish to paint a very peculiar family portrait of a queer and interspecies mess. While little remains of what Freeman may have said about Mary Wales, or about her possible romantic affection for other women, the twenty-first century reader can read the love she expressed for cats, most notably in an interview she gave to Helen M. Winslow for the Saint Nicholas magazine in 1900, in her letters to editor Mary Louise Booth, and in two unexpected cat stories, “An Object of Love” (1885), and “The Little Persian Princess’ (1892). These texts, I argue, reveal queer affects by weaving together interspecies love and queer coupling or queer desire, and serving for Freeman as a space of experimentation for the expression and identification of feelings and affective identities. Because little evidence of Freeman’s feelings outside of fiction remains, I will be using what Pamela VanHaitsma has called “gossip methodology”, a tool of critical imagination that she uses in order to make up for the aching void that scholars are often confronted with when researching queer and feminist archives. And of course, this interplay between fiction and non-fiction, this semi-biographical interest, inspired by such studies as those of Melissa J. Homestead, will be furthered and yet also mitigated by an attempt to replace Freeman within late nineteenth-century romantic culture, which will allow me to demonstrate how Freeman’s texts espouse romantic discourse and, at the same time, queer it.
 
 
 
 

Wed. Jan 24, 6pm (ONLINE): Fourth Edith Wharton Birthday Talk. Prof. Gary Totten (University of Nevada, Las Vegas): “Edith Wharton’s Geographical Imagination: Notesfrom the Travel Writing”

The Edith Wharton Society is thrilled to join forces with the Transatlantic Literary Women (TLW) to host the fourth Edith Wharton Birthday Talk. This year, Professor Gary Totten (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) will be the speaker.

Gary Totten is a renowned Wharton scholar, a Past President of the Edith Wharton Society and the Theodore Dreiser Society, and the current Editor-in-Chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. His work has made a true mark not only on Wharton studies but also on studies of material culture, travel writing, ethnicity and race in American literature and culture. He is the author of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), coeditor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (2015), and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007). His most recent edited book Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States (Wiley-Blackwell) is forthcoming in 2024. He is currently the volume editor for Volume 9: Travel Writings of the series The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, from Oxford UP. 

Gary’s talk, titled ‘Edith Wharton’s Geographical Imagination: Notes from the Travel Writing,’ will reflect on the synergies of natural and built environments, and the animating force of such settings for Wharton’s characters in the island biomes of the Aegean, the verdant hills and valleys of Italy and France, and the deserts and oases of Morocco. In his talk, Gary will reflect on Wharton’s travel narratives to unpack how the combination of her geographical sensibility and mobility as a traveler produces a cultural vision reflecting the privileges of her race and class while also offering insights into women’s travel experiences and compelling moments of engagement with and understanding of the natural world. 

Details and Zoom link:

https://transatlanticladies.wordpress.com/2023/11/21/january-tea-with-tlw-joint-birthday-event-with-the-edith-wharton-society-professor-gary-totten-on-edith-whartons-geographical-imagination-notes-from-the-travel-writing/

Friday, Feb. 2, 2pm (B20, Institut Catholique de Paris, 74, rue de Vaugirard, 75006 / Zoom). Julien Nègre (ENS de Lyon) : « Petites baies et Indiens morts : l’environnement de Thoreau » (joint seminar A19 / Environmental Humanities @LARCA, « humanités et questions environnementales » @ICP)

Report // Julien Nègre, “Cute Berries and Dead Indians: Thoreau’s Environment,” 2 February 2024

Julien Nègre (ENS-Lyon) will give a talk provisionally titled “Cute Berries and Dead Indians: Thoreau’s Environment.” Michael Jonik (University of Sussex) will be respondent. 

We will look at 3 excerpts in particular (attached): 

  • Wild Fruits, the “European Cranberry” section (3 pages) in which Thoreau formulates a theory of the excursion and of its epistemological, sensory and political value;
  • Two passages from Thoreau’s journal in which he visits his friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford and interacts with Native Americans: Oct, 1855 (page 5 of the PDF) and June, 1856 (pp. 16-17 of the PDF).

Wild Fruits illustrates Thoreau’s naturalist outlook in the 1850s, at the crossroads between environmental concerns and political redefinition of the occupation of space and time. This intervention will contrast a passage from Wild Fruits with Thoreau’s cartographic archives found recently and linked to his Indian notebooks. “

THOREAU-WildFruits-EuropeanCranberry

THOREAU-Journal-Oct1855

THOREAU-Journal-June1856

 

Thursday, 18 January, 4 pm – 6 pm, UP Cité, OdG 164 / Zoom. A conversation with U.S. writer Laird Hunt (co-organized with IMAGER, UPEC)

Report // Laird Hunt, 18 January 2024

The session (co-organized by Anne-Laure Tissut [LARCA/ERIAC] and Anne-Julie Debare [UPEC, IMAGER]) will focus on Hunt’s novel Neverhome (Little, Brown, 2015), about a woman-soldier who dressed up as a man to go to fight in the Civil War. Hunt’s most recent novel, Zorrie (Bloomsbury, 2021), inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s « Un Cœur Simple », will also be part of the discussion, as well as the historical vein tapped in Hunt’s more recent work, which he calls « the Dark America Quartet ». Its specific form of realism blends with poetic invention and an elaborate play on structures which links it with Hunt’s earlier, more visibly experimental work. Moving back to the early times of the colonies and the hardships imposed on women especially by a strict Puritan doctrine (In the House in the Dark of the Woods, 2019), Hunt’s work also portrays slavery (Kind One, 2012), the Civil War (Neverhome 2014), and lynching (The Evening Road 2017). All those novels are first person narratives, staging women’s voices.

Questions may include Hunt’s fictional (re-)writing of history, writing and memory, genres and voices, the literary representations of trauma, the international influences, and the part played in his writing by the practice of translation.

Two excerpts of Neverhome (download below) will also give us the opportunity for some close reading.

The seminar will be followed by a reading at Atout Livre, 203 bis avenue Daumesnil, Paris, 12th arrondissement.

01 – Neverhome – First Chapters

02 – Neverhome – Greenhouses of memory

Friday, 8 December, 2pm, Bibliothèque d’anglais, Sorbonne Université / Zoom: Stephen Rachman (Michigan State), “Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time.”

Report // Stephen Rachman, “Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time,” 8 December 2023

Sari Altschuler (Northeastern) will be respondent.

This session will take place at Sorbonne Université, Bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones (esc. G, 2è étage; entrée par le 54 rue Saint Jacques ou le 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris).

Abstract: This paper examines space and time in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe that deal with pandemic disease. Recent studies of Poe in relation to place (e.g. Philip Phillips and Kennedy and McGann) have concentrated on contextualizing Poe’s oeuvre in terms of its human geographies, how places and spaces are manifested in his works, and how those works can be, in turn, mapped and re-mapped on to fictive, historical, actual, and imaginative locations. The ongoing pandemic has sensitized us anew to the ways in which Poe used cultural geography under the spatio-temporal pressures of epidemic disease. This essay will focus on the London of Poe’s “King Pest” and how it functions as a plague-induced interzone, an epicenter of epidemic disease. Through this analysis, the essay will demonstrate how miasmatic theories of pestilence drive the human geography in this story, as Poe’s language fixates upon local concentrations of loathsome decaying organic matter believed to be producing deadly disease. The essay will conclude with an examination of what Poe’s pestilential spatial logic has to teach us about modern pandemics and the meanings that pandemics produce.

Stephen Rachman is Director of the American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University.

He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow (Rutgers University Press). He is a co-author of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press) and the co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has written numerous articles on Poe, literature and medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning Web site on Sunday school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. He is a past president of the Poe Studies Association and currently completing a study of Poe entitled The Jingle Man: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problems of Culture.

 

 

 

 

Friday, November 10th, 2pm, ODG 829 / Zoom Matthew Redmond, “Between Worlds: Revolutionary Time in American Literature.”

On November 10th, at 2pm, we are inviting Matthew Redmond for a talk entitled “Between Worlds: Revolutionary Time in American Literature.”

Pauline Pilote (UBS) will be respondent.

Matthew Redmond is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Université de Lille. He holds a PhD from Stanford University (Living Too Long: The Politics of Lifespan in American Literature). His research explores the intersection of temporality, republican politics, and literary culture in America throughout the long nineteenth century. His work has appeared in English Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Textes et Contextes, among other sources.

 

Friday, Oct. 6th, 2023, 2pm: Prof. Nicholas Bromell (UMass):  “Another Frederick Douglass: Tracing the “Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable” in Douglass’s Political Philosophy.” (OdG, Room 830/Zoom)–Respondent: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (LARCA)

Prof. Nicholas Bromell is Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nick Bromell works at the intersection of literary and cultural studies and philosophy, with a consistent interest in historical and cultural constructions of what counts as “knowledge” and “knowing.”  His first book, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago: 1992), uncovers and analyzes an antebellum struggle over the meaning of manual and mental work and the relative values of bodily “know-how” and mental “knowledge.” In Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: 2000), he explores the ways music and psychedelics were felt by many youth to be forms of knowing that constituted a counter-public sphere with which to resist “the system.” In The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (Oxford: 2013), he starts from W.E.B.  Du Bois’s well-known claim that “there are … no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than …American Negroes” and approaches Black cultural production as an indispensable resource for U.S. democracy and its self-understanding.  `

In his most recent book, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass (Duke: 2021) (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-powers-of-dignity), he tries to fully unpack what Douglass might have meant when he claimed that “from this little bit of experience, slave experience, I have elaborated quite a lengthy chapter of political philosophy applicable to the American people.”  As well, Bromell is the editor of A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (Kentucky, 2018) and co-editor of The Norton Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass’s “My Bondage and My Freedom” (Norton: 2020).  His research has appeared in numerous academic journals, including American Quarterly, American Literary History, American Literature, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Political Theory.  His essays have been published in The Boston Globe, Harper’s, Raritan, Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, and on-line at Alternet and Salon. The founding editor of The Boston Review and a former president of the New England American Studies Association, he has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard.

His paper proposes that Frederick Douglass developed a theory of the relation between aesthetics and politics that has powerful implications for our understandings of resistance, Black subjectivity, and democracy. In giving expression to these ideas, he often found the conventional political lexicon of his time inadequate and turned instead to a distinctive mode of rhetoric,   his “soul language.”  

Americanists Abroad Virtual Book Launch, Friday, Sept, 29, 1pm-2pm around New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading With and Against the Grain (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

The Americanists Abroad cluster’s third virtual book launch will be in honour of the publication of Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou and Cécile Roudeau’s New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading With and Against the Grain (Edinburgh UP, 2023), on  Friday, Sept, 29, , from 12-1 pm (BST).

To RSVP, please emai j.michelle.coghlan@manchester.ac.uk for the zoom link and a link to the introductions on Dropbox.