Friday, November 14th, 2025 – 5p
École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris
Salle Celan
In James’s fiction, sexuality and seduction are conduits to wealth and social prestige. Yet, such access is equally often blocked by a moral sense whose calculus is as exacting as the economic. The novels of the “major phase” stage these conflicts at a heightened pitch in James’s most nuanced and controlled constructions. Famous for their maddening syntax and lofty intelligence, their plots pit American possessive individualism against European cultural capital, the spoils of finance against the ruins of civilization. This architecture is upheld through a sovereign narrative voice, which, for all its skepticism, ambivalence, and queerness, is the basis of the Jamesian art of fiction. Despite—or because of— its unprecedented and unequal privilege, this is a world of zero-sum relationality. What James adds to the picture, before and differently from Freud, is a perceptible, conscious sense that sexuality, intelligence, and vitality can be appropriated and exchanged. Whether this view is ethically defensible or intellectually coherent remains unclear. By focusing on The Sacred Fount, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age, this talk will seek responses in three protomodernist novellas. James’s experiments here push the conventions of fiction in ways that anticipate the occluded vision and precarious subjectivity associated with twentieth-century fiction.
Zakir Paul is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU. He is the author of Disarming Intelligence. Proust, Valéry and Modern French Criticism (Princeton University Press, 2024), and a translator of works by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Rancière. His articles have appeared in publications such as Modernism/modernity, Raritan, Angelaki,and boundary 2.