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La dernière séance d’A19, co-organisée avec le LARCA, a eu lieu le vendredi 1er avril à l’université Paris Diderot à partir de 14h30. Nous y avons entendu:Ross Posnock (Columbia University, professeur invité au LARCA): William James in 1908: “Letting Life” (and art) “teach the lesson”http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/400etSarah Wilson (University of Toronto): Henry Adams, Tinkering the Broken-Down Political Machinehttp://www.english.utoronto.ca/facultystaff/facultyprofiles/wilsons.htmRoss Posnock a tracé, à partir de la première partie de son dernier livre, Renunciation, une réflexion sur le renoncement -- non seulement à la carrière (de ministre du culte, pour Emerson) ou à la fortune (familiale, pour Wittgenstein), mais plus fondamentalement, au 'pourquoi" (Nietzsche), au concept, et jusqu'au langage, du moins au "nom" (William James).http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674967830Sarah Wilson's paper, which is part of an ongoing project on literature and corruption, approached the scandal-ridden politics of the Gilded Age via one of President Ulysses S. Grant’s most outspoken critics, Henry Adams. From Adams came the accusation that Grant failed to manifest the character necessitated for a proper functioning of the executive branch. Grant’s conception of the Presidency, according to Adams, is the conception of an automaton, operating within certain established parameters but more concerned with “tinkering” than with deliberation. Tracing the conflict between mechanism and character through Adams’s political essays of the 1870s, his roman à clef Democracy (1880), and a variety of other nineteenth-century print materials, Wilson shows the lingering effects of Grantism in Henry Adams’s late-career disavowal of eighteenth-century models of character. Grant, in effect, first intimates the dissolution of personhood that Adams associates with the dynamo in The Education of Henry Adams (1907/1918).&#160;&#160;&#160;