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Elementor #2443

Journée d’études Modernist Hands

28 mars 2023

Université Paris Nanterre, bâtiment Weber, salle de séminaires

Organisatrices : Solveig DUNKEL et Charlotte ESTRADE (Nanterre, CREA)

9h – Accueil café

9h30 – Introduction : Françoise Kral, directrice du laboratoire CREA

Atelier 1 (modératrice : Solveig Dunkel)

10h – Caroline Pollentier (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – IUF), “Virginia Woolf and the Laws of Tact”

10h30 – Leslie de Bont (Nantes Université), “‘All that fuss about a hand!’ Social norms, modernist affect and Sinclairian imagism”

11h – Naomi Toth (Université Paris Nanterre – IUF), “The failure of immediacy. Hands and the phenomenology of perception in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves”

11h30 – Elise Brault (Université Polytechnique des Hauts-de-France), “In the doctors’ hands”

12h – Discussion/questions

Lunch

 

Atelier 2 (modérateur : Benoît Tadié)

14h30 – Samantha Lemeunier (ENS Ulm), « Écrire sans main : paralysies poétiques dans les œuvres tardives de William Carlos Williams »

15h – Frédérique Spill, « La main à l’ouvrage : la figure du charpentier chez Faulkner »

15h30 – Charlotte Estrade, « Poings et gants : force de frappe des écrivains et boxeurs modernistes »

16h – Discussion/questions

 
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Hugh Kenner symposium: program

Hugh Kenner: How to Write
May 5th, 2023, Nanterre

Organized by Charlotte Estrade (cestrade@parisnanterre.fr) and Chloé Thomas (chloe.thomas@univ-angers.fr)

With the support of CREA (Nanterre), LARCA (CNRS / Paris-Cité) and SEM (Société d’études modernistes).

Program

The times indicated are all CET (Nanterre time).

Nanterre, amphithéâtre, bâtiment Weber, and online: https://webtv.parisnanterre.fr/lives/live_bat_max-weber_amphi_w

Please note that all afternoon papers will be given online, but the general public is welcome at Nanterre where coffee and conversation will be had.

 

10:45 – Welcome coffee

11:00 – Sean Mark (U. catholique de Lille): “Toward the evening of a gone world”: on forgetting Hugh Kenner

11:30  Hélène Lesbros (Nanterre): “Energized units”: Hugh Kenner’s intermedial approach to Buckminster Fuller’s writings and designs

12:30 Lunch Break

14:30 Conversation: Hugh Kenner and (non) – academic writing.

15:30 Jean-Michel Rabaté (U. Penn) – On (not) meeting Kenner in Copenhagen

16:00 Barry Ahearn (Tulane) – Hugh Kenner at Johns Hopkins

16:30 coffee break

17:00 Barry Cole (U. of Alabama) – The Intersection of Marginalized Thinkers and Shunned Spaces in the Critiques of Hugh Kenner

17:30 Joseph Staten (U. Chicago) – Syntax in Santa Barbara

18:00 coffee break

18:30 Marjorie Perloff (USC) – Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era.

 

 

Abstracts and bios

 

Sean Mark – “Toward the evening of a gone world”: On Forgetting Hugh Kenner

 

Abstract: 

 

To consider the fiftieth anniversary of Kenner’s The Pound Era is to be struck by its somewhat muted nature—an occurrence greeted, if considered beside other modernist landmarks, with a whimper rather than a bang. This year’s centennial celebrations seem likely to follow suit. Though agreeing with her premise, my paper will query Marjorie Perloff’s claim that the ‘forgetting’ that has marked Kenner’s legacy is predicated, primarily, on methodological or theoretical grounds. Despite the turn away from the formalist, new critical mode with which Kenner is often associated, and the ascendancy of a new historicist, ‘cultural’ turn, the tenacity of the traces of Kenner’s contribution attests that his impact remains relevant and vital, if now largely unavowed. In some sense, the critical attention to ‘homologies, sympathies, and identities’, for which Kenner had such a rigorous and exacting eye, embodies our interdisciplinary moment and helped articulate and consolidate a modernist comparative methodology. It is difficult, too, to conceive the so-called ‘creative-critical’ turn without Kenner’s contribution, even if practitioners themselves might hesitate to do so. We might even argue that a fundamental Marxian materialism is coterminous with the underpinnings of Kenner’s approach, as shared with Pound’s tenet that a work of art bespeaks the economic conditions of its age. Rather than on metrics of ‘method’ and ‘theory’, I will argue, the onus should instead be placed on the role of the political in Kenner’s untimeliness. It is an irony worth noting that the author of a transformational profile of Pound which, by all accounts, largely depoliticises the poet should, in turn, be caught up in the politics of Pound, a guilt by association that has weighed heavily, in the last thirty years, as a keener light has been shone upon those politics. Perhaps, rather like the “invisible” translator, Kenner was to be forgotten once the work was done, once his “translation” of Pound was complete, his place in the canon secured. But does this not risk detracting from Kenner’s own idiosyncratic authoriality? And what of Kenner’s own views, a conservative politics that would lead him to the glowing endorsement of Barry Goldwater? Reflecting on the role that Kenner played in the development of my own writing, and surveying the obituaries and the appraisals of his legacy, my paper will probe this difficult decoupling of regressive politics from aesthetics, particularly in relation to contemporary discourse around so-called “cancel culture” and “identity politics”.

Bio:

Dr Sean Mark is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) in English at the Université Catholique de Lille, where he teaches American literature and translation. After graduating from University College London, he completed a PhD in comparative literature at the universities of Tübingen, Bergamo and Brown, on a fellowship from the European Commission in the Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones doctoral programme, and in 2018–19 was British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the British School at Rome. He has published in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, Modernism and Food Studies, The Ezra Pound Studies Biennial, Sillages Critiques and Modernism/modernity. His first monograph, Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Hélène Lesbros – “Energized units”: Hugh Kenner’s intermedial approach to Buckminster Fuller’s writings and designs

Abstract: 

Among the many biographies written by Hugh Kenner, his 1973 Bucky, A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller stands out as the only book dedicated to a non-exclusively literary artist. Buckminster Fuller’s (1895-1983) multimedial work is indeed generally more widely known through landmark realizations such as the Dymaxion house or the geodesic dome in Montreal, which have become iconic references of American modern architecture. However, Fuller’s practice also extensively included writings, and, most importantly, poetry.

Concerned with the gradual “technological extension” of human capacities, Fuller’s poems depict the ever-increasing integration of industrial processes to the everyday life of the common man. Conceived of as modern epic poems, the poetic works of Fuller put the emphasis on the ever-growing capacity of human beings to channelize and create energy in previously unseen proportions. Doing so, they resonate both with the angst spawned by the atomic age and with an ardent faith in the interconnexion of technological and social improvements. 

Hugh Kenner is the first in a series of commentators to have written about Fuller as a poet in his own right, and to have exposed the intertextual relations linking his poetry to other modernist writers’ such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. As he coined the term energizing units to describe Fuller’s condensed, epic verses, he opened a new path for readers wanting to explore the intermedial aspect of the architect’s work, in word or steel. My contribution will focus on Hugh Kenner’s particular relationship with Buckminster Fuller as evoked throughout the book, the importance of his biography in the study of the artist’s work and on his insistence to emphasize the role of poetics in the understanding of Fuller’s complex writings and architecture.

Bio: 

Hélène Lesbros has been a teaching fellow and a PhD student at Université Paris X – Université Paris Ouest Nanterre since 2019. She is currently writing a thesis in American Literature, under the supervision of Hélène Aji (Professor in American Literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieur in Paris). Provisional title of the thesis: “Architexts: poetic organicism in Frank Lloyd Wright, Claude Fayette Bragdon and Richard Buckminster Fuller’s works”.

Jean-Michel Rabaté – On (not) meeting Kenner in Copenhagen

Bio: 

Jean-Michel Rabaté is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.  One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org), he is one of the managing editors of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rabaté has authored or edited more than 40 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett,  Pound and Joyce.

His books include Lacan Literario (2007), 1913: The cradle of modernism  (2007, Chinese translation 2013), The Ethic of the Lie (2008), Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime  (2010). The Ghosts of Modernity has been republished in 2010. In 2013, he has edited A Handbook of Modernism Studies and a new French translation of Joyce’s Exiles, Crimes of the Future (2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, (2014), The Pathos of Distance (2016), Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the human (2016), Les Guerres de Derrida (2016).

More recent titles inmclude Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), After Derrida (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), New Beckett (2019), Understanding Derrida / Understanding Modernism (2019), Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of literature and film (2020), Beckett and Sade (2020), Rires Prodigues (2021). Forthcoming are the co-edited collection (with Angeliki Spiropoulou), Historical Modernisms: Time, History, and  Modernist Aesthetics and the book James Joyce, Hérétique et Prodigue.

Abstract: 

Jean-Michel Rabaté will talk about his one meeting with Hugh Kenner at the Joyce symposium in Copenhagen. 

Barry Ahearn  – Hugh Kenner at Johns Hopkins

Bio: 

Barry Ahearn is Professor of English Emeritus at Tulane. He was born and raised in Massachusetts. His undergraduate days were spent at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut). From there he went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. While there he studied under Laurence Holland, Angus Wilson, Frances Fergusson, Stuart Curran, Ronald Paulson, Leo Braudy, Jerome McGann and Hugh Kenner. His dissertation on Louis Zukofsky was directed by Kenner. Following graduation from Hopkins, he worked in publishing in New York City. He also served for one year as a visiting assistant professor at Manhattan College. In 1982 he took up a position as an assistant professor at Tulane. In the year following he married. His wife, Pamela, is a literary agent. They have one son. In 1986 he was promoted to associate professor; in 1998 he was promoted to full professor. His principal publications are: Zukofsky’s « A »: An Introduction (California UP, 1983), the first book-length study of Zukofsky’s poetry; Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (New Directions, 1987); William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1994); Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings (Michigan UP, 1996) and The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Michigan UP, 2003). He has completed an edition of the selected letters of Zukofsky. He is now at work on a critical study of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and Robert Frost, a study tentatively titled The Imprecise Muse.

Abstract: 

Barry Ahearn will share his memories of Kenner at Johns Hopkins. 

Barry Cole – The Intersection of Marginalized Thinkers and Shunned Spaces in the Critiques of Hugh Kenner

Abstract: 

In an age in which critics and writers are catalogued in binary terms, Hugh Kenner offers a breathtaking alternative by examining literary works from a contrapuntal perspective. In The Pound Era, Kenner does not shy away from exposing how genius and madness walk together. Nevertheless, I propose that a spatial analysis of Kenner’s critiques offer additional possibilities for inferring a deeper political analysis. Although The Pound Era is void of any singular, grand interpretation of literature, its eclectic essence hinges on an ingenious acknowledgment that writers such as Ezra Pound must be holistically considered as more than the sum of their unfortunate flirtations with fascism. As Jeet Heer states, any “notion of Kenner as a covert fascist is simply absurd.” However, this interpretation must be bounded by the need for a strong disclaimer for both Kenner and Pound, thereby paying homage to the victims of fascist atrocity.

I will therefore pair Kenner’s examinations with Shunned Space Theory, a term I coined to reflect how marginalized communities must negotiate with the larger society to promote the survival and cultural accomplishment of their residents. By definition, a shunned space consists of land and resources deemed undesirable for occupation by the larger, more powerful society and pockmarked by political exclusion, scarcity, and disproportionate violence. Kenner’s observations of Ezra Pound therefore animate at least an indirect focus on European Jews and other groups targeted by fascist atrocities. In distilled form, I will demonstrate that these marginalized communities and their enfolding spaces not only burn through Pound’s ostensible prejudice, but categorically inform Kenner’s analyses.

My outline pivots on a specific trio of perspectives: Kenner’s critiques, Pound’s writings, and (most importantly) the Jewish Community as a series of shunned spaces. I argue that Kenner’s dynamic investigation of Pound is not immunized from the cultural productivity of the Jewish population he perennially vilified. In distilled form, history itself has judged that Kenner’s critique zealously celebrated the accomplished poet but suppressed an entirely honest representation of the political monster known as Ezra Pound.

 Bio: 

Dr. Barry Cole is an Instructor of literature at The University of Alabama. He lives with his partner of thirty years in Central Alabama and advocates for the rights of marginalized communities in his work and research.

Joseph Staten – Syntax in Santa Barbara

Abstract: 

In the chapter on William Carlos Williams in The Pound Era, Kenner argues that Williams’s achievement in his 1930 “Poem” is one not of mimetic representation but of what he calls “pure syntax”: although at the level of literal sense the poem describes a cat climbing over a jamcloset, the poem’s “pattern” of “linguistic torsions,” Kenner says, “fulfills a syntactic undertaking, purely in a verbal field” (400). Foreshadowing the distinction he would later make about “meaning” versus “saying” in his comparison of Williams and Wallace Stevens in 1974’s A Homemade World, Kenner here characterizes the meaning of “Poem” as deriving from its syntax, and thus as distinguishable from the semantics of what the poem’s sentence “says”—a characterization that will have much to do with Kenner’s understanding of modernism more generally.

Although The Pound Era is published in 1971, Kenner first writes “Syntax in Rutherford” in 1968, a decade after Noam Chomsky publishes Syntactic Structures and right when two other major figures of the period are also making the concept of syntax central to their work. One, Robert Smithson, uses syntax to characterize the meaningless materiality of the artistic formations he’s most interested in (syntax may be understood as a “set of linguistic surfaces that surround the artist’s unknown motives”); the other, Michael Fried, takes the exact opposite tack, describing syntax not as opposed to meaning but as its very structure: arch-modernist Anthony Caro’s sculpture will, through its syntax, “essentialize meaningfulness as such” (162).

This paper situates Kenner in relation to Smithson and Fried through that trio’s distinct but deeply related uses of the notion of syntax, and argues that Kenner, who may or may not have ever read Smithson or Fried, nonetheless might be reconsidered as an indispensible figure for understanding the problem of meaning in art so central to the 1960s, and still profoundly at issue today.  

Bio: 

Joseph Staten is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Literalism: Meaning After Materiality,” explores modernism’s complex involvement with the notion of raw material as both an opportunity for advancing art and as a threat to art’s capacity to produce meaning. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Interface, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Mediations.

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is Florence Scott Profesor of English Emerita at USC. She has written extensively on modernist and postmodernist American poetry. Her paper will be about Kenner’s The Pound Era.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Modernismes thérapeutiques CFP

Modernismes thérapeutiques - Appel à communications

 

Modernismes thérapeutiques

 

5e Congrès de la Société française d’études modernistes

Université Grenoble Alpes

 

19-21 juin 2024

 

Organisation:

Hélène Aji, Nicholas Manning, Benoît Tadié

 

Aux dernières pages du roman The Great Gatsby (1925), alors que le héros éponyme est sur le point d’être enterré, son père tire de sa poche un vieil exemplaire d’une histoire du cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. Le défunt y a griffonné, bien des années auparavant, tout un programme d’auto-perfectionnement. En écho à l’Autobiographie de Benjamin Franklin (1791), et dans un trope présent dans les manuels de comportement depuis le XIXe siècle des deux côtés de l’Atlantique – de Self-Culture (1838) de William Ellery Channing à Self-Help (1859) de Samuel Smiles – l’adolescent destiné à devenir Jay Gatsby affirmait là sa volonté de « lire, chaque semaine, un livre ou un magazine de développement personnel ».

Or cette résolution, où résonne l’éthique victorienne et unitarienne du XIXe siècle, s’inscrit dans un cadre jusqu’ici demeuré implicite : l’essor significatif, au début du XXe siècle, d’une littérature populaire exploitant le filon du self-help et relevant du marché de masse, qui se développe parallèlement à la production moderniste. Si ces deux veines semblent a priori représenter des visions du monde foncièrement opposées, la situation n’est toutefois pas aussi simple. Dans un entretien de 1956, William Faulkner affirme ainsi : « Ne cessez pas de rêver et de viser toujours plus haut que cela ne vous paraît possible. Ne vous contentez pas d’être meilleur que vos contemporains ou que vos prédécesseurs. Tâchez d’être meilleur que vous-même ». Une telle affirmation, avec sa rhétorique d’exceptionnalisme mélioriste, figurerait aisément dans un texte de psychologie populaire ; venant de l’auteur de The Sound and the Fury (1929), elle peut surprendre. Et pourtant l’idéal faulknérien de perfectionnement de soi n’est pas une anomalie chez les auteurs modernistes.

S’il existe une mythologie toujours vivace du modernisme anglo-américain comme étant principalement dévoué à des valeurs de dynamisme, d’énergie, voire de la violence qui l’accompagne souvent – avec, dans cette veine, des avatars comme Ezra Pound ou Wyndham Lewis – une possibilité résolument différente a récemment émergé, à partir de domaines critiques aussi divers que la théorie de l’affect, l’éthique féministe, la théorie queer et la philosophie du care, à savoir : un modernisme alternatif qui valorise et explore, dans des formes esthétiques et créatrices variées, des valeurs curatives et protectrices telles que l’empathie, la guérison, l’épanouissement ou le soin.

En ce sens, la volonté d’interroger, comme se propose de le faire ce 5e congrès de la Société française d’études modernistes, les différents modes de modernismes potentiellement thérapeutiques et les thérapeutiques explicitement modernistes – au sens pluriel de ces deux termes – vise à contribuer à l’écriture d’une histoire alternative de la production moderniste de 1900 à 1960. Une telle histoire peut tâcher d’intégrer et de valoriser des figures telles que Djuna Barnes, H.D., Robert Duncan, Ralph Ellison ou Zora Neale Hurston comme fondamentalement engagées dans l’exploration des promesses et des échecs de l’art et de la littérature en tant qu’entreprise thérapeutique. Il peut également chercher à voir le travail d’auteurs modernistes canoniques – tels que Katherine Mansfield, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf ou W.B. Yeats – sous un nouveau jour, comme étant intimement (bien que souvent de manière ambivalente) liés aux potentialités d’une vision thérapeutique de l’art.

En effet, la poésie américaine offre dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle un cas tout aussi intéressant. De fait, c’est après des carrières littéraires infructueuses que des auteurs de développement personnel comme James Allen se tournent vers ces autres formes d’écriture. Bien que poètes « ratés », ils n’hésitent pas à formuler en vers leurs maximes. Certains manuels à succès donnent même lieu à leurs propres anthologies dérivées de poésie curative : du best-seller de Napoléon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937), est tiré un recueil de poèmes, Poems That Inspire You To Think and Grow Rich (2010).

Ainsi, des fondateurs du genre du développement personnel – en accord avec le modèle émersonien du poète-philosophe – non seulement écrivent de la poésie, mais intègrent leurs productions non moins que celles d’autres poètes dans leurs ouvrages. Que pouvons-nous en déduire de la porosité des genres ? Des fascicules de citations poétiques « inspirantes » aux vers dont les gourous New Age parsèment leurs exhortations, les idéologies thérapeutiques contribuent à promouvoir une vision post-romantique de la poésie comme lieu d’affirmation subjective, d’exploration personnelle et de vérités intemporelles. C’est là un point essentiel : car cette vision, en insistant sur l’utilité du genre dans le cadre d’un projet de perfectionnement de soi, dépolitise le poétique en le plaçant dans les seules limites du sujet.

Il est alors capital de s’interroger sur le répertoire poétique convoqué par le self-help. Comment des poètes comme T. S. Eliot ou W. H. Auden s’y trouvent-ils érigés en chantres de l’affirmation positive ? De quelles manières leur production est-elle exploitée, loin de toute exigence académique ? Que ces best-sellers soient tirés à des millions d’exemplaires – plus de 15 millions pour un classique comme celui de Dave Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), comptant pléthore de citations poétiques – rend d’autant plus nécessaire d’éclairer leurs usages du genre poétique qu’ils fournissent à la poésie américaine moderne son public le plus significatif en termes quantitatifs.

Ce ne sont là que quelques exemples de l’interaction complexe qui se joue entre l’art et la littérature modernistes et les pratiques et discours de diverses cultures thérapeutiques. Si la psychanalyse n’est pas exclue du champ de la réflexion – de la cure d’analyse que la poète moderniste H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) expérimente auprès de Freud à Vienne dans les années 1930, et sur laquelle elle reviendra dans Tribute to Freud (1956), jusqu’à l’influence de la Nouvelle Psychologie sur l’œuvre d’écrivains tel que Ralph Ellison ou James Joyce –, les participants sont invités à forger des approches originales de ces questions, et plus particulièrement à se pencher sur des cultures et des méthodes thérapeutiques moins souvent analysées, englobant un spectre bien plus large de contextes tant cliniques qu’extra-institutionnels.

Ce congrès s’attache donc aussi à décentrer la relation littérature-psychologie des figures binaires traditionnelles de l’Écrivain et du Thérapeute. Historiquement masculin, anglo-européen et investi de pouvoir, ce duo a souvent dominé les études sur cette interaction. Dans la lignée des expansions actuelles des canons modernistes, la question d’un thérapeutique moderniste prend également un aspect singulier lorsqu’elle concerne plus spécifiquement les femmes, les écrivains et les artistes LGBTQ+ et BIPOC, dont beaucoup restent souvent exclues des institutions et idéologies thérapeutiques. Ainsi, des écrivains modernistes afro-américains, hispaniques et latinos, queer et féministes explorent à la fois les potentialités du langage comme outil de guérison, tout en exprimant une réticence claire à l’égard de certaines idéologies thérapeutiques, qui restent fréquemment vectrices des normes d’une classe moyenne à prédominance blanche et masculine. De telles perspectives exposent donc la manière dont ces idéaux thérapeutiques sont souvent principalement accessibles et militarisés par des groupes privilégiés, plutôt que par ceux qui luttent contre les inégalités.

 

Les propositions d’articles individuels, de panels ou de tables rondes sont invitées à aborder les questions suivantes (liste non exhaustive) :

 

  • la valorisation, ou au contraire le rejet ou la satire, des visions thérapeutiques de la littérature et de l’art dans les œuvres modernistes
  • le rôle de la littérature et de l’art comme outils curatifs face aux catastrophes historiques répétées de la première modernité, de la Révolution russe à la Shoah, aux totalitarismes, à la Première et à la Seconde guerres mondiales.
  • la relation complexe, tout au long de l’ère moderniste, entre les études littéraires et la psychologie en tant que disciplines académiques émergentes, parfois en compétition quant à leur valeur culturelle
  • les liens négligés entre des textes littéraires américains et des disciplines, méthodes et protocoles psychologiques spécifiques tels que les thérapies cognitivistes et comportementales, la Gestalt, ou des discours comme le développement personnel
  • les représentations changeantes de cultures, sites et professions de la psychologie dans les textes modernistes
  • la représentation de la psychothérapie dans la fiction, le théâtre, voire la poésie modernistes
  • les expériences psychothérapeutiques abordées par des auteurs modernistes dans des textes d’autobiographie ou d’autofiction (tels que Pour l’amour de Freud de H.D)
  • les liens entre les discours thérapeutiques et la perte ou la remise en cause moderniste de valeurs ou traditions religieuses
  • les apports des cultures thérapeutiques à l’expérimentation moderniste formelle dans la création de nouveaux genres littéraires (comme le roman de sanatorium)
  • des approches inédites des interactions entre littérature et psychanalyse, au-delà des cadres théoriques plus traditionnels
  • le trope de la littérature comme art de soin ou de guérison, y compris l’émergence de pratiques cliniques telles que la bibliothérapie
  • les paradigmes de réception et le brouillage pour des lecteurs, au sein des cultures populaires et savantes, des frontières entre discours thérapeutiques et littéraires

 

Cette brève liste n’est qu’indicative et des propositions portant sur un large éventail de sujets liés aux liens entre les discours et pratiques thérapeutiques et les arts et littérature modernistes sont les bienvenues.

 

Les propositions de 300 mots maximum pour les communications individuelles, et de 1000 mots maximum pour les panels conjoints et les tables rondes, doivent être envoyées avant le 15 septembre 2023 aux adresses suivantes : helene.aji@ens.psl.eu ; benoit.tadie@parisnanterre.fr ; nicholas.manning@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

 

Une réponse quant à l’acceptation de la proposition sera donnée avant le 15 octobre au plus tard.

 

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Hugh Kenner: How To Write

Hugh Kenner: How To Write
Call for papers

Hugh Kenner: How to Write

Symposium, Université Paris Nanterre, May 5th, 2023

 

Call for papers

 

About Hugh Kenner, Marjorie Perloff wrote that, although he was “in one sense the most celebrated of American critics, [he] has been—and continues to be—marginalized by the Anglo-American academic establishment.” The statement comes from a paper written for a special issue of the William Carlos Williams Review, in 1993, in honor of Kenner and (with a separate group of essays) the concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt. That such essays on Kenner are relatively rare tends to prove Perloff right regarding Kenner’s marginalization. The Pound Era, his opus magnum, is still read, often with delight and awe, by many of us; yet the 50th anniversary of its publication in 2021 has gone unsung. Has the book, as Perloff suggested in 1993, been left out of many academic syllabi because of its “absence of ‘theory’ as well as of ‘methodology’?” But these methodological weaknesses are also what makes The Pound Era a literary, rather than a mere scholarly, endeavour and, perhaps, masterpiece. It is striking, when reading papers devoted to Kenner, how their authors, mixing personal anecdotes, biographical fragments, and radical statements, are, consciously or not, echoing his style – his own method.

 

Kenner, born in 1923 in Toronto, first studied under Marshall McLuhan, who introduced him to Pound during a visit to St Elizabeth. He earned his PhD from Yale with a dissertation on Joyce supervised by Cleanth Brooks, and taught in the US (Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins, U. of Georgia). The Pound Era came after a series of monographs which had already established Kenner as an important scholar of Modernism, starting with Pound (The Poetry of Ezra Pound, famously written in six weeks), then Lewis, Joyce, Eliot and Beckett. After 1971 came a number of essays and collections which testify to Kenner’s wide range of interests around and beyond Modernism, from Buckminster  Fuller to Chuck Jones through geodesic math, and the much debated A Sinking Island, his pessimistic account of the state of British literature.

 

2023 marks the centenary of Kenner’s birth and the twentieth anniversary of his death. With this symposium, we would like to use this opportunity not just to pay homage to Kenner as a great Modernist scholar, but also to consider the whole range of his writings, and their consistency. Among possible topics, his position in academic syllabi today, in particular in the context of the transformation and reconceptualization of the modernist canon, which he initially helped shape, under the influence of the New Modernist Studies, may be discussed. Papers considering the reading of Kenner as an event in one’s scholarly development are also welcome, from advanced as well as junior researchers. Finally, his writing style and his influence on academic writing may be put under scrutiny.

 

Abstracts (max. 300 words) with a short biographical notice should be sent to Charlotte Estrade (cestrade@parisnanterre.fr) and Chloé Thomas (chloe.thomas@univ-angers.fr) by February 28th, 2023.

 

Bibliography:

Hugh Kenner Papers. Harry Ransom Center.

 

Davie, Donald. “The Universe of Ezra Pound.” Paideuma, vol. 1, no. 2, 1972, pp. 263–69. (Review of The Pound Era).

Donovan, Stewart. “The Critic As Artist. Review Essay of Hugh Kenner’s Literary Criticism.” The Antigonish Review, vol. 100, Winter 1995, pp. 39–55.

Goodwin, Will. “‘His True Penelope’: Hugh Kenner on William Carlos Williams: A Bibliography.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 70–80.

—. Hugh Kenner: A Bibliography. Whitston Publishing Company, 2001.

Kelly, Joseph. “Hugh Kenner, Gentleman Scholar.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, pp. 145–49.

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Outsider as Exemplary Critic: Hugh Kenner.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 49–56.

Pritchard, William H. “Hugh Kenner’s Achievement.” The Hudson Review, vol. 57, no. 3, 2004, pp. 383–400, https://doi.org/10.2307/4151440.

Rosenthal, M. L. “A Toast to Hugh Kenner.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 63–69.

Slatin, John. “Re-Reading Hugh Kenner.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 57–62.

Stewart, Bruce. “Hugh Kenner (1923-2003).” Ricorso, http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/k/Kenner_H/life.htm. Accessed 25 Nov. 2022. (Includes a number of references, obituaries and responses to Kenner’s works).

Utell, Janine. “Virtue in Scraps, Mysterium in Fragments: Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner, and Ezra Pound.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 27, no. 1/2, Autumn 2003, pp. 99–104.