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Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity

Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity

Publié le par Frédérique Fleck (Source : annick duperray)

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CALLFOR PAPERS 2010

Thesecond international conference of The European Society of Jamesian Studies

22,23 October 2010

TheAmerican University of Paris, 6 rue duColonel Combe, 75007Paris.

Henry James and the Poeticsof Duplicity

“Inquitiesin such a country somehow always made pictures” (“A London Life”, Complete Tales, Vol. VII, Leon Edel ed.p. 88). Pondering over the contrast between thepicturesque serenity of an old dower-house and the scandalous custom of the expropriation of the widow itembodied , the American heroine of the story entitled “A London Life” expresses her unfavourable judgment of English institutions but is alsooverwhelmed and puzzled by the sense of a “curious duplicity (in the literalmeaning of the word)” : “She had often been struck with it before -with that perfection of machinery which can still at certain times make Englishlife go on of itself with a stately rhythm long after there is corruptionwithin it” (“A London Life”, Complete Tales, Leon Edel ed., p.105). Figures of duplicity abound in Henry James'swritings, both in form and contents, fiction and non -fiction, disrupting theestablished order, the normative vision or the canonic genre. “Successful duplicity”characterizes some of James'sachievements in the domain of short fiction — the way some nouvelles or “novels intensely compressed” managed to “masquerade” as anecdotes to beaccepted as “good” short stories,“heroically” dissimulating their “capital”. (Preface to Vol. XVI ot the NewYork Edition, Literary CriticismII, p. 1240). The art of “duplicity” is also part of the lesson of Balzac, andother supposedly canonic realist writers whose complex vision “washes ussuccessively with the warm wave of the near and the familiar' and the tonicshock of the far and the strange.(préface to vol. II, Literary Criticism, p. 1060). Duplicity also pertains to the ghostlyand the uncanny effect, the double register of representations embroidering“the stange and sinister” on “the very type of the normal and easy” (preface tovol. XVII , Literary Criticism,p. 1264).

Wepropose to examine the multiple facets of Henry James's art of duplicity inboth fiction and non-fiction, not forgetting theaesthetic borderlands where textand paratext coalesce, the clandestine figure of the author, “markingoff”, as Foucault would have it, “the edges of the text”. (« Whatis an Author ? », in Textual Strategies., J.H. Harrari ed., Cornell UP, 1979, p.147)

AnnickDuperray, Université de Provence, annick.duperray@free.fr

AdrianHarding, Université de Provence & American University of Paris, aharding@aup.fr

DennisTredy, Université de Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle) dennis.tredy@wanadoo.fr

Pleasesend proposals (300 words maximum,) to Annick.duperray@free.fr&aharding@aup.fr . Deadline 1 June 2010.

Working languages : English or French