Robert Lowell and the Manipulation of American Puritan Rhetoric

Nous entendrons à cette occasion Anthony Cordingley (University of Sydney/Paris 8) qui présentera une communication intitulée Robert Lowell and the Manipulation of American Puritan Rhetoric : 

In this talk I will discuss the poet Robert Lowell’s challenge to the post-war transformation of Puritan history into a mythology of American origins. I focus on the mid-century canonisation of the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and Lowell’s objection to the instrumentalizing of Edwards by Lowell’s contemporary, the influential historian Perry Miller, who recuperated Edwards while advancing an ideology of U.S. imperialism, exceptionalism and Cold War domination. Speaking to the LISCA seminar’s theme of the lie in literature, I will explore the duplicitious nature of Lowell’s poetic discourse in his 1962 “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts”. The poet betrays his own sympathy to Edwards all the while satirizing his speaker’s participation in the cult of Edwards. By showing how the poet brings Edwards into discourse with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists, Sir Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal, I argue that Lowell affirms a cosmopolitan genealogy for the post-war US lyric in opposition to Miller’s myth of national origins, the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness”. Finally, Lowell’s ironic framing of his lyric “I” is considered not as a poetics confession but an attempt to fashion a poetics moral renewal.

Paramètres de connexion à distance (Zoom) :
https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/j/93260450384?pwd=UDY0d3R3bGlKNm5MbURocGRRTFY5Zz09
ID de réunion : 932 6045 0384
Code secret : 958771