Conference organized by Thomas Constantinesco (Paris Diderot University), Mathieu Duplay (Paris Diderot University), Cécile Roudeau (Paris Diderot University), Richard Anker (Clermont-Auvergne University) and Stéphane Vanderhaeghe (Paris 8 University), with the support of the Paris IAS, Paris Diderot University, Laboratoire de recherches sur les cultures anglophones - (LARCA - UMR 8225), Paris 8 University, Clermont-Auvergne University, Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique (CELIS), Sorbonne Paris Cité University, Institut universitaire de France, CNRS, Institut des Amériques and the Ile-de-France Region.

Presentation

Taking literature as a mode of thinking and philosophy as a way of writing, this conference will interrogate the boundaries and explore the crossings between the philosophical and the literary in American literature from the Colonial era to the present.

Program

9.30-9.45: Welcome and Opening Remarks

9.45-10.45: Keynote 1 (Salle des Gardes): “Conscience, Rights, and ‘the delirium of democracy’”
Nancy Ruttenburg (Stanford University)
Presentation: Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot)

10.45-11.00: Coffee break

11.00-12.30: Parallel Panels

Panel 1: Emerson & Philosophy (Antichambre)
Chair: Thomas Constantinesco (Université Paris Diderot)

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, Metaphor and the ‘Epistemology of Form’”
David Greenham (University of the West of England)

“The Transcendental Ordinary: Cavell from Thoreau to Emerson”
David Robinson (Oregon State University)

“The Emersonian Poet and the Conceptual Persona”
Yves Gardes (Université Paris Dauphine)

Panel 2: Contemporary Crossings 1 (Salle des Gardes)
Chair: Stéphane Vanderhaeghe (Université Paris 8)

“‘Explaining Is Where We All Get Into Trouble.’ Anti-Philosophical Philosophies In the Contemporary American Novel”
Nicholas Manning (Université Paris Sorbonne)

“Joseph McElroy’s PLUS and the Peircean Optimism of US Postmodernism’s Philosophy of Action”
Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani)

“‘Literally, Everything I Utter is a Metaphor’: Thought Unhinged in Percival Everett's Novels”
Sylvie Bauer (Université de Rennes 2)         

12.30-14.00: Lunch break

14.00-15.30: Panel 3: Thinking and Writing the Community (Salle des Gardes)
Chair: Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot)

‘A Metonymic Society? Towards a New Poetics of Community’
Thomas Claviez (University of Bern)

“A Motive to Love your Fellow Man: Hawthorne, Stowe and Sentimental Moral Philosophy”
Marianne Noble (American University, Washington D.C.)

“Thinking ‘Literally’: Community as Limit-Concept between the Literary and the Philosophical”
Viola Marchi (University of Bern)

15.30-16.00: Coffee break

16.00-17.30: Parallel Panels

Panel 4: Melville & Philosophy (Antichambre)
Chair: Agnès Derail-Imbert (École normale supérieure)

“Melville and Spinoza”
Michael Jonik (University of Sussex)

“Melville, the Belly Philosophical”
Edouard Marsoin (Université Paris Diderot)

“The Aesthetics of Usury: Melville, Derrida, and the Interesting”
Chad Luck (California State University, San Bernardino)

Panel 5: Echoes of Pragmatism: William James in Literature (Salle des Gardes)
Chair: Mathieu Duplay (Université Paris Diderot)

“‘That Is Where Philosophy Comes In’: Gertrude Stein Making The Making of Americans”
Chloé Thomas (Université Paris 8)

“Running to Philosophy: Robert Frost’s Struggle to Write Poetry”
Michael Manson (American University, Washington D.C.)

“Lyn Hejinian, William James, and the Phenomenology of the New Sentence”
Jessica Luck (California State University, San Bernardino)

18.00-19.30: Recital and Drinks

Free registration required: https://alp2017.sciencesconf.org/

Full program: https://alp2017.sciencesconf.org/