Friday, October 18 — 8.30am-6.15pm
ODG, Room 830
Saturday, October 19 — 8.45am-6.30pm
HF 027 C
https://jewettparis2024.weebly.com/conference-program.html
Conference co-organizers:
Vesna Kuiken (University at Albany, SUNY) & Cécile Roudeau (LARCA, U Paris Cité
and the National Centre for Scientific Research)
Partners:
Brown University, Maine Women Writers Collection, SUNY-Albany,
LARCA CNRS-UMR 8225, UParis Cité
Everybody’s welcome !
France figures prominently in Jewett’s life and writing: she claimed French (Huguenot) descendance through her paternal grandmother; she knew French well and integrated French language, painting, and literature in her work; she was a frequent visitor to France; she was translated into French by Th. Bentzon (Mme Blanc) and was published in La Revue des Deux Mondes; she maintained contact with the Acadians, or the “Québecois”, of Maine. More particularly to the current moment, the worldwide canonization of Jewett and her enduring importance is perhaps nowhere better epitomized than in her work’s inclusion in France’s prestigious agrégation examinations: in 2021-2023 all French universities were required to teach at least one class on Jewett.
But these two—biographical and strictly academic—are not the only reasons to situate the first ever conference dedicated to Jewett’s work in France. By dislocating Jewett from Maine and New England, to which she is all too often bound, we aim to dislocate the study of American literary regionalism—as well as the concept of “the region” in general—from its narrow territorial framework and emphasize its transatlantic and global dimensions. We find this move to be strategically important on at least two levels: first, by widening Jewett’s territorial scope, we necessarily widen the span of her work’s reception, possibly encouraging the translation of her prose and poetry into other languages, as well as the recognition and translation of other American regionalist authors from Jewett’s period and circle. Secondly, by dislocating the concept of “the region”—via regionalist literature—we aim to rearticulate the relationship between the local and the global to show that no single region can any longer be understood as an isolated unit but rather must be understood as a site where the local and global inextricably meet, alerting us to the new reality of climate change and the wholesale revaluation of all values and concepts that this phenomenon elicits. Unhinging Jewett from New England and transplanting her to another locale opens the way for internationalizing her work and allowing it to mobilize the themes so urgently in front of us in the Anthropocene.
In 2024, “Sarah Orne Jewett Unbound” aims to initiate a new wave of regionalist Jewett scholarship that will both celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the groundbreaking volume New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs and respond to it by offering new critical avenues for a twenty-first century Jewett.