2016 marks the centenary of the death of Henry James (15 April 1843-28 February 1916), and will be a year in which James’s heritage will be celebrated, and will come under scrutiny, in a variety of settings and in different modes. This first conference of the centenary year will take place in London, James’s adopted home and the location of much of his fiction, and will be hosted by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, one of the world’s greatest libraries. Taking advantage of another centenary, it will give special attention to James’s richly complex relation to Shakespeare, as well as to other writers, especially poets. In addition to academic papers, it will also involve readings by creative writers – in poetry and prose – of works inspired by James and his example.
James was himself much given to the act of remembrance, whether reminiscing in his biographical and autobiographical writings, or echoing the words and works of other writers and artists in his fiction. Likewise, James has had a vivid afterlife in various literary and artistic forms up to the present day.
The academic organisers are Philip Horne (University College London), Gert Buelens (Ghent University) and Oliver Herford (University of Birmingham).
Please note that the below conference schedule may be subject to change.
All proceedings will take place in the British Library’s Conference Centre with exception of the Thursday night poetry event which will take place in the Library’s Terrace Restaurant.
THURSDAY 14 APRIL
18.00-18.30 Registration
18.30-20.00 Henry James and Poetry with Mark Ford, Philip Horne and Peter Robinson.
FRIDAY 15 APRIL
08.15-09.00 Registration, coffee and pastries.
09.00-10.30 Parallel Panels 1A, 1B, 1C
Panel 1A Biography and autobiography
Dee MacCormack: ‘“Saying nothing in infinite sentences”: remembering the conversational James’
Mhairi Pooler: ‘Henry James’s Humane Art: letter writing and the autobiography of friendship’
Gert Buelens: ‘The Dead Hand of Jamesian Wills’
Panel 1B Sociologies
Ivanna Cikes: ‘The Politics of Jamesian Memory’
Anna Despotopoulou: ‘Sites of Memory and the “self-made girl” in Henry James’
Chryssa Marinou: ‘Henry James’s “Renewing the Old” and “Telescoping the Past through the Present”: mnemonic strategies in The American Scene and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood’
Panel 1C Adaptation
Erwin Flaxman: ‘François Truffaut’s Henry James’
Bethany Layne: ‘“It has taken the son to make me see the father for what he was”: Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies and Jamesian Appropriation’
Tom Ue: ‘The Foreshadowed Lives of Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others’
10.30-11.00 Break for coffee
11.00-12.30Parallel Panels 2A, 2B, 2C
Panel 2A Style
Tamara Follini: ‘Deep Memory in The Wings of the Dove’
Oliver Herford: ‘The Ragbag of Memory’
Philip Horne: ‘Henry James, Winchelsea, Rye, Denis Duval’
Panel 2B James and Woolf
Mary Boyington: ‘The Haunted House in the Hebrides: To the Lighthouse as Jamesian ghost story’
Elaine Hudson: ‘Shakespeare’s Bones: Henry James, Virginia Woolf and the Literary Pilgrimage’
Miciah Hussey: ‘The Corners of My Mind: Haunting in James’s “The Jolly Corner” and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room’
Panel 2C Impossible pasts
Linda Raphael: ‘Memory and Emotion: James’s The Wings of the Dove and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth’
Phyllis van Slyck: ‘Lost and Re-found: Memory and Imagination in James’s The Wings of the Dove and Proust’s La Prisonnière’
Theodora Tsimpouki: ‘Writing out of the Ashes and James’s “The Aspern Papers”’
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.00 Parallel Panels 3A, 3B, 3C
Panel 3A Editing James: the Cambridge Edition
Kathy Lawrence: ‘Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past: Henry James, Walt Whitman, and the Retrieval of Selfhood’
Karen Scherzinger: ‘Revision as/and comedy in The Tragic Muse’
Pierre A. Walker: ‘James’s Early Revisions to The American’
Panel 3B Forgetfulness
Emily Coit: ‘James’s “Conservative Interest” and American Forgetting’
Nan Z. Da: ‘On Flakiness’
Shari Goldberg: ‘James’s Amnesiacs’
Panel 3C The Portrait of a Lady
Amândio Reis: ‘“Clearness is too expensive”: The economy of reading in The Portrait of a Lady’
Teckyoung Kwon: ‘The Ghost as Memory-traces in The Portrait of a Lady’
15.00-15.30 Break for coffee
15.30-17.00 Parallel Panels 4A, 4B, 4C
Panel 4A Place and transport
Joshua Parker: ‘The Past’s Visitations: Cultural Sites, Narrative and Sensation’
Alicia Rix: ‘“Excursions of Memory”: transport and memory in James’s travel essays’
Melanie Ross: ‘Places of Memory: James’s Hydrography’
Rebekah Scott: ‘Numerosity’
Panel 4B James and Shakespeare
Denis Flannery: ‘King Maisie’
Larry A. Gray: ‘“Quite out of her congruous company”: “Julia Bride” as Winter’s Tale’
Angus Wrenn: ‘“We should be colliers”: Henry James, Mining, and the “divine William”’
Panel 4C James and contemporary fiction
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács: ‘Jamesian Moral Ambiguity and the Discourse of the Irish Immigrant Novel in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn’
Julie Rivkin: ‘The Aspern Papers, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and the Unvisitable Past’
Martin Spies: ‘Reimagining Henry James at Lamb House: the writer and his home in contemporary novels’
17.00-18.30 Break for coffee and pastries
18.30-21.00 Keynote: Richard Holmes Henry James, Coleridge and The Coxon Fund
followed by wine reception.
SATURDAY 16 APRIL
08.30-09.00 Day registration, coffee and pastries
09.00-10.30 Parallel Panels 5A, 5B, 5C
Panel 5A Philosophies
Jonathan Freedman: ‘The Breaking of the Golden Bowl: Henry James and Kabalah’
Hazel Hutchison: ‘Émile at Bly: Negative Education in “The Turn of the Screw”’
Wibke Schniedermann: ‘Maisie’s Practical Knowledge’
Panel 5B James, postmodernity, and authorship
Elsa Court: ‘“Strong Memories”: stylistic and temperamental echoes in the autobiographies of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov’
Roberta Klimt: ‘“I Don’t Usually Leave Letters in Books”: Philip Roth and the influence of Henry James’
Mirosława Buchholtz: ‘Repeating the Lesson of the Master: Henry James, Alice Munro and the Mixed Blessing of Authorship’
Panel 5C Losses and hypotheticals
David McWhirter: ‘Memory and Melancholia: Feeling Backward with Henry James’
Eric Savoy: ‘Jamesian Hauntology: on the poetics of condensation’
Merle Williams: ‘The “mistake” of not “living all you can”: memory and lost possibility in The Awkward Age and The Ambassadors’
10.30-11.00 Break for coffee
11.00-12.30 Parallel Panels 6A, 6B, 6C
Panel 6A Tense and temporality
Miranda El-Rayess: ‘“[T]heir backward space”: Placing the Past in James’s turn-of-the-century Fiction’
Beverly Haviland: ‘Why remembering is not time travel: Memory Theory, The Sense of the Past, James’s Autobiographies’
Ruth Bernard Yeazell: ‘Remembrance of Things Present in The Ambassadors’
Panel 6B American antecedents
Zachary Seager: ‘“The Artist of the Beautiful”: James, Hawthorne, and the Work of Art’
Sonoko Saito: ‘Aminadab in “The Jolly Corner”’
Xiaohui Wang: ‘The Dove and the Raven: James’s relation to Poe’
Panel 6C Visual arts and Aestheticism
Maria Pirgerou: ‘Henry James, Vernon Lee and the Fictional Other: memory as character construction at the fin de siècle’
- J. Lustig: ‘Henry James, Edwin Austin Abbey and the legend of the Holy Grail in cultural memory’
Nastaša Marković: ‘Victorian vs. Aesthetic Portrait: The Portrait of a Lady and nineteenth-century poetic mode of portraiture’
12.30-13.30 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Keynote: Sarah Churchwell Mastering ‘The Turn of the Screw’
15.30-16.00 Break for coffee
16.00-17.30 Keynote: Adrian Poole The Romance of Certain Old Texts: James and Shakespeare
When Thursday, 14 April 2016 at 18:30 – Saturday, 16 April 2016 at 17:00 (BST) – Add to Calendar Where The British Library Conference Centre – 96 Euston Rd , Greater London NW1 2DB GB – View Map
Original link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/henry-james-and-memory-tickets-21090260537
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