Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RPTM (Living Too Long: Republican Time in American Literature)
Période du rapport: 2023-09-01 au 2025-08-31
The goal of my project is to establish how the United States status as a modern democratic republic has conditioned its relationship to time and history, and how that relationship is expressive of the wider condition of modernity. It is my hypothesis that a particular character type in U.S. literature, which I call the extant figure, despite having thus far gone unnamed in literary criticism, has formed an essential component of the national culture since the first generation following the Revolutionary War. This character type is defined by the sense of superannuation—of having lived too long, seen too much, and stumbled into a historical era that he does not recognize. Originally a minor player in fictions of nascent republicanism, the extant figure is transformed over subsequent generations, becoming a tool for all sorts of political, social, and philosophical thought experiments. In writing a scholarly monograph, giving various talks, and participating in other communication and dissemination activities, I will track the life and afterlives of this remarkably persistent character type. At a time when the survival of democratic republics around the world seems especially precarious, this research will provide new insight into how such republics re-conceptualize and sustain themselves across time.
The principal scientific achievement of this project has been a considerable refining of my theories about the origins and development of the extant figure. Originally it was my contention that such a character type signified similarly across the entire nineteenth century, always representing a dismayed awareness of temporal acceleration symptomatic of modernity itself. Through archival research, as well as collaboration with colleagues at the University of Lille, I have come to see the widely varied significations of this character type across generations—a much greater diversity of meanings than I had originally conceived. It was my postdoctoral research that suggested the structure of the book: life and afterlife. The extant figure was developed in a specific historical context, outlived that context, and subsequently became many things to many generations of writers.
Additionally, I have developed the concept of a second book project, focused on the ways that defunct scientific theories of the eighteenth century continue to influence literary culture through their enduring impact on novelistic form. This project, provisionally titled Life Forms, is an experiment in interdisciplinarity. Noting that the modern laboratory and the modern novel are both inventions of the eighteenth century, I treat the latter as a metaphysical extension of the former, and argue that novels allowed omnivorous authors like Godwin and Shelley to test the existential implications of new discoveries in the realm of biological science. To conduct these experiments, moreover, novelists changed the formal makeup of the novel in ways still visible today. It is also my contention that the laboratory, at once private and performative, can serve as a kind of metaphor for a new approach to balancing formalist and historicist preoccupations in literary criticism.
Additionally, I have developed the concept of a second book project, focused on the ways that defunct scientific theories of the eighteenth century continue to influence literary culture through their enduring impact on novelistic form. This project, provisionally titled Life Forms, is an experiment in interdisciplinarity. Noting that the modern laboratory and the modern novel are both inventions of the eighteenth century, I treat the latter as a metaphysical extension of the former, and argue that novels allowed omnivorous authors like Godwin and Shelley to test the existential implications of new discoveries in the realm of biological science. To conduct these experiments, moreover, novelists changed the formal makeup of the novel in ways still visible today. It is also my contention that the laboratory, at once private and performative, can serve as a kind of metaphor for a new approach to balancing formalist and historicist preoccupations in literary criticism.
My main achievement has been the drafting of a scholarly monograph entitled Living Too Long: The Extant Figure in American Literature, which is currently under review at Princeton University Press. I have also produced scholarly articles that have appeared or are forthcoming in Textes et Contextes, Studies in English Literature, and the Journal of the Short Story in English. I have written public-facing articles for The Conversation and Literary Hub, presented research at the annual meetings of BrANCA, AFEA, and MLA. Additionally, I have started my own podcast, called About the Author, which, like the public-facing articles, is dedicated to communicating my results to a wider audience. I taught multiple courses at the University of Lille, on subjects ranging from the work of Edgar Allan Poe to the construction and representation of space, and I have employed a research assistant while writing my various book chapters.
To continue advancing both book projects will require additional research and continued access to the resources of a research library. Additional teaching opportunities would also prove invaluable, teaching and research naturally cross-pollinate.
To continue advancing both book projects will require additional research and continued access to the resources of a research library. Additional teaching opportunities would also prove invaluable, teaching and research naturally cross-pollinate.