Tristram WOLFF (univ. Northwestern) « Henry Thoreau’s Last Words »

Résumé

This talk expands on what it means to give language time, this time working out the mixed legacy of American romantic Henry David Thoreau as a linguistic thinker. In Thoreau’s works, various voices emerge out of experiments cohabitating with his surrounding “wilderness” ; but troublingly, for Thoreau voices of the wilderness include the Abenaki and Penobscot companions who accompanied him on his trips to the Maine woods. The talk reexamines how Thoreau’s linguistic virtuosity, and preoccupation with studying indigenous lifeways, mixed uneasily in the rhetorical practice of settler colonial "lasting," which relegated Native American life and language to the past tense.

L’ENS de Lyon et l’IHRIM ont le plaisir d’accueillir pendant un mois comme professeur invité Tristram WOLFF, Assistant Professor à Northwestern University (Evanston, États-Unis) et auteur de Against the Uprooted Word : Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2022). Il donnera trois conférences en anglais pendant son séjour.

L’entrée est libre.