CALL FOR PAPERS 2010
Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity
The Second International Conference of The European Society of
Jamesian Studies
22, 23 October 2010, The American University of Paris, 6 rue du
Colonel Combe, 75007 Paris
"Inquities in such a country somehow always made pictures" ("A London
Life", Complete Tales, vol. VII, Leon Edel ed., p. 88). Pondering
over the contrast between the picturesque serenity of an old
dower-house and the scandalous custom of the expropriation of the
widow it embodied , the American heroine of the story entitled "A
London Life" expresses her unfavourable judgment of English
institutions but is also overwhelmed and puzzled by the sense of a
"curious duplicity (in the literal meaning of the word)" : "She had
often been struck with it before - with that perfection of machinery
which can still at certain times make English life go on of itself
with a stately rhythm long after there is corruption within it" ("A
London Life", Complete Tales, Leon Edel ed., p.105). Figures of
duplicity abound in Henry James's writings, both in form and contents,
fiction and non -fiction, disrupting the established order, the
normative vision or the canonic genre. "Successful duplicity"
characterizes some of James's achievements in the domain of short
fiction - the way some nouvelles or "novels intensely compressed"
managed to "masquerade" as anecdotes to be accepted as "good" short
stories, "heroically" dissimulating their "capital". (Preface to Vol.
XVI ot the New York Edition, Literary Criticism II, p. 1240). The art
of "duplicity" is also part of the lesson of Balzac, and other
supposedly canonic realist writers whose complex vision "washes us
successively with the warm wave of the near and the familiar' and the
tonic shock of the far and the strange.(préface to vol. II, Literary
Criticism, p. 1060). Duplicity also pertains to the ghostly and the
uncanny effect, the double register of representations embroidering
"the stange and sinister" on "the very type of the normal and easy"
(preface to vol. XVII, Literary Criticism, p. 1264).
We propose to examine the multiple facets of Henry James's art of
duplicity in both fiction and non-fiction, not forgetting the
aesthetic borderlands where text and paratext coalesce, the
clandestine figure of the author, "marking off", as Foucault would
have it, "the edges of the text" (« What is an Author ? », in Textual
Strategies, J.H. Harrari ed., Cornell UP, 1979, p.147)
Annick Duperray, Université de Provence, [log in to unmask]
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Adrian Harding, Université de Provence & American University of Paris,
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Dennis Tredy, Université de Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
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Please send proposals (300 words maximum) to [log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> & [log in to unmask]
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Deadline: 1 June 2010
Working languages: English or French
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