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HENRY JAMES'S EUROPE : Cultural(re)appropriations and transtextual relations
The firstinternational conference of The European Society of Jamesian Studies
3-5 April2009
The AmericanUniversity of Paris, 31avenue Bosquet 75007 Paris.
« To haveno national stamp has hitherto been a defect and a drawback », HenryJames wrote to his friend Perry in Sept. 1867, but he also considered that tobe an American was « an excellent preparation for culture », in sofar as Americans could deal, more freely than Europeans « with forms ofcivilization not their own », could « pick and choose andassimilate and in short (aesthetically) claim their property wherever they found it ».
The first conference organized by the « European Society ofJamesian Studies » will examine the various manners in which Jamesachieved this aesthetic (re)appropriation - « the vast intellectual fusionand synthesis » he was dreaming of as a young writer. Conversely, what arethe multiple ways in which he can be considered as part of a European heritage,interconnecting the culturally distinct European identities,(re)interpreting Europe so tospeak "in the seconddegree », both ethically and aesthetically.
We mean to reevaluate the ethical quality of thewhole process, situated as it wasat the meeting-point between historical and inner culture. For young HenryJames, the American artist abroad possessed the unprecedented advantage of his« national cachet », « a moral conciousness », an« unprecedented lighntess and vigour », which generated an activerelation with the old continent – compared to the seemingly passive relation ofthe European to his own history and heritage. How did this energetic conceptionof art as an active cultural force evolve, from the earlyinterpretation of the international theme, the staging of American identity asinnocence beguiled, to the arcane poetics of redemption specific to themajor phase ? If art was indeed « making life », creatingvalues, as James himself later reasserted in his famous reply to H.G. Wells, didn't thosevalues prove to be at times, as again James enigmatically put it in his NYEpreface to « The Turn of the Screw », « positively all blanks » ?
The process of aesthetic (re)appropriation is what we morespecifically refer to by borrowing Genette's conception of transtextuality as «all that puts one text in relation,whether manifest or secret, with other texts »(Palimpsests). The survey will include all that pertains to HJ's lifetime - the genesis of his works of fiction, the question ofliterary influences, and his reinterpretations and reavalutions of European literary traditions (through his fiction and criticalessays). As transtextual relations« stop nowhere », we also mean to highlight HJ's symbolic « lifeafter death », from a receptionist and transdisciplinary perspective - the multiple andmultiform reverberations of his own work in modern and contemporary Europeanfiction, literary theory, theatrical or film adaptations.
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
Please send proposals ( 300 words maximum) to Annick.duperray@free.fr & aharding@aup.fr . ( en français ou en anglais) Deadline 15 November 2008.