BrANCA-sponsored panels
This page is a listing of panels organised by our members. If you would like to put together a panel, please email your CfP to branca1865@gmail.com or post on our Facebook group
Joint panel sponsored by A19 – L’Atelier xixe and BrANCA (British Association of Ninteenth-Century Americanists)
Annual Conference of the French Association of American Studies (AFEA)
University of Strasburg, France, 6-9 June 2017
Technès of Happiness in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Thomas Constantinesco and Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot)
The Declaration of Independence’s claim for the inalienable right of “all men” to the “pursuit of happiness” introduced the challenge of what it could mean to enforce happiness across the nineteenth century. Could it be implemented through law or applied “by force,” “whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative” (Derrida, “Force of Law”)? A vast range of regulatory institutions, practices and discourses throughout the century attempted to come to terms with this problem, from the policing of bodies and minds with a view to minimizing the distribution of individual suffering and maximizing the happiness of the greatest number, to a variety of efforts at ensuring the conditions of collective harmony through “bribes of pleasure, threats of harm, use of force” (John Dewey, Ethics, 1908). These technologies were extraordinary and seized the literary imagination: reform movements that traversed the nineteenth century (from temperance societies to abolitionism, from women’s rights to free love movements); variegated experiments in pedagogy (Bronson Alcott, the Peabody sisters, Margaret Fuller…) or medicine (homeopathy, vegetarianism, water-cures…); new techniques of work management (Lowell manufactures…); experimental communes across the country and their attempts to enforce brotherhood or sisterhood through communality (from the Owenites to the Fourierites to the Icarians); sustained interest in home management (Catherine Beecher); urban sociology and planning (Jane Addams); alternative plans to settle the West; the designing of prisons and asylums, hospitals and sanatoriums; or the pseudo-scientific dabbling at social, racial and psychological typologies the better to “cleanse” and “civilize” the nation. Appropriating these technologies as literary material, fiction—or literature more broadly conceived—not only reflected but also contributed to manufacturing happiness, by rehearsing a national imperative or laying bare its internal faults and failings.
Focusing on the long nineteenth century, this workshop welcomes papers that connect the “idea” of happiness with the forms of its production, its practices and methods. More specifically, we are interested in papers that explore the literary art and arts of happiness: the making of happiness as an American fiction.
Possible sources include, but are not limited to:
500-word proposals and short biographical statement to be sent before 12 January 2017 to:
thomas.constantinesco@gmail.com and cecile.roudeau@gmail.com
Details about the conference can be found on the AFEA website : http://www.afea.fr/AFEA-Conference-2017.html
BrANCA Panel at BAAS Conference 2017
BrANCA invites proposals for a special panel at the British Association for American Studies Conference, 6-8 April 2017 at Canterbury Christchurch University.
Each year BrANCA hosts a special panel at BAAS showcasing progressive, interdisciplinary work on the United States in the long nineteenth century.
We invite proposals for papers for this year’s panel from all researchers working in the field. We are particularly interested in global, hemispheric and transatlantic approaches to key themes in nineteenth century literary studies, and papers that propose new ways of conceiving the field. Researchers at all stages are welcomed, and papers from postgraduates are particularly encouraged.
250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations, with a provisional title and brief CV, should be sent to Dr. Tom F. Wright, University of Sussex at tom.wright@sussex.ac.uk by Tuesday 25 October. Queries should also be directed to this address.
Annual Conference of the French Association of American Studies (AFEA)
University of Strasburg, France, 6-9 June 2017
Technès of Happiness in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Thomas Constantinesco and Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot)
The Declaration of Independence’s claim for the inalienable right of “all men” to the “pursuit of happiness” introduced the challenge of what it could mean to enforce happiness across the nineteenth century. Could it be implemented through law or applied “by force,” “whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative” (Derrida, “Force of Law”)? A vast range of regulatory institutions, practices and discourses throughout the century attempted to come to terms with this problem, from the policing of bodies and minds with a view to minimizing the distribution of individual suffering and maximizing the happiness of the greatest number, to a variety of efforts at ensuring the conditions of collective harmony through “bribes of pleasure, threats of harm, use of force” (John Dewey, Ethics, 1908). These technologies were extraordinary and seized the literary imagination: reform movements that traversed the nineteenth century (from temperance societies to abolitionism, from women’s rights to free love movements); variegated experiments in pedagogy (Bronson Alcott, the Peabody sisters, Margaret Fuller…) or medicine (homeopathy, vegetarianism, water-cures…); new techniques of work management (Lowell manufactures…); experimental communes across the country and their attempts to enforce brotherhood or sisterhood through communality (from the Owenites to the Fourierites to the Icarians); sustained interest in home management (Catherine Beecher); urban sociology and planning (Jane Addams); alternative plans to settle the West; the designing of prisons and asylums, hospitals and sanatoriums; or the pseudo-scientific dabbling at social, racial and psychological typologies the better to “cleanse” and “civilize” the nation. Appropriating these technologies as literary material, fiction—or literature more broadly conceived—not only reflected but also contributed to manufacturing happiness, by rehearsing a national imperative or laying bare its internal faults and failings.
Focusing on the long nineteenth century, this workshop welcomes papers that connect the “idea” of happiness with the forms of its production, its practices and methods. More specifically, we are interested in papers that explore the literary art and arts of happiness: the making of happiness as an American fiction.
Possible sources include, but are not limited to:
- Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (1880);
- Louisa May Alcott, Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance (1873), Work: A Story of Experience (1873);
- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1889), Equality (1898);
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845);
- Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1791)
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Human Work (1904), Herland (1915), Moving the Mountains (1911);
- William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria (1894);
- Henry James, The Bostonians (1886);
- Herman Melville, Mardi (1849);
- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee (1890);
- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871)
500-word proposals and short biographical statement to be sent before 12 January 2017 to:
thomas.constantinesco@gmail.com and cecile.roudeau@gmail.com
Details about the conference can be found on the AFEA website : http://www.afea.fr/AFEA-Conference-2017.html
BrANCA Panel at BAAS Conference 2017
BrANCA invites proposals for a special panel at the British Association for American Studies Conference, 6-8 April 2017 at Canterbury Christchurch University.
Each year BrANCA hosts a special panel at BAAS showcasing progressive, interdisciplinary work on the United States in the long nineteenth century.
We invite proposals for papers for this year’s panel from all researchers working in the field. We are particularly interested in global, hemispheric and transatlantic approaches to key themes in nineteenth century literary studies, and papers that propose new ways of conceiving the field. Researchers at all stages are welcomed, and papers from postgraduates are particularly encouraged.
250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations, with a provisional title and brief CV, should be sent to Dr. Tom F. Wright, University of Sussex at tom.wright@sussex.ac.uk by Tuesday 25 October. Queries should also be directed to this address.
