Introduction: the crowd problem 1. Setting the stage: crowds and modern French society 2. Disciplinary struggles: the crowd in early French sociology 3. Weimar developments: toward a distinctively sociological theory of crowds 4. Liberal attitudes: crowd semantics in the USA 5. From crowd to mass: problematizing classless society 6. Reactions to totalitarianism: new fusions of sociological and psychological thinking 7. The culmination and dissolution of crowd semantics 8. Postmodern conditions: the rise of the post-political masses Epilogue: the politics of crowds.

The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology

Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In "Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction" Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

1. Introduction: frontier instances 2. In Jonathan Edwards's room of the idea 3. Emerson's moving pictures 4. William James's feeling of if 5. Henry James's more than rational distortion 6. Wallace Stevens's radiant and productive atmosphere 7. Gertrude Stein, James's Melancthon/a Bibliography Index.

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A Natural History of Pragmatism

When W.M. Conant (out-patient surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital) addressed the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1894 he spoke for many of his contemporaries when he declared that the two aims of exercise were the hygienic and the educative. The former was concerned primarily with muscular, circulatory and digestive functions. The latter emphasized the nervous system, brain and by extension ‘the mind’; how the organism grew; and how ‘character’ was formed. Growing interest in such matters was fostered by a recognition of the need to improve the nation's health and was facilitated by developments in the biological sciences. Expansionist tendencies and a perceived need for strong, virile and resolute leaders also became factors. Whereas systemized forms of gymnastics might be valuable, sports such as rowing, baseball and football were deemed to be more so. For those physicians, physiologists, and others who emphasized hygienic and educative (sometimes referred to as educational) goals, the n...

Physiologists, physicians, and physical educators: Nineteenth century biology and exercise, hygienic and educative

L’elaboration de portraits feminins reflete la fascination de Hawthorne pour cette creature complexe, un attrait nourri par l’omnipresence des femmes dans son entourage. L’influence de ces dernieres est indeniable, et semble etre a l’origine du feminisme ambigu de l’ecrivain, partage entre, d’un cote, l’heritage puritain des Manning et Hawthorne, et, de l’autre, les convictions feministes emergentes de sa belle-famille, les Peabody. Les portraits de femmes de la fiction hawthornienne se caracterisent donc par un binarisme essentialisme-differentialisme qui emane de la vision etroite des protagonistes masculins, et que l’auteur tente de depasser. Les concepts deleuziens du « mineur » et du « devenir-femme » nous seront d’une grande utilite pour comprendre comment la femme essentialisee des Puritains, ce que nous pouvons aussi appeler la femme-image, au sens lacanien du terme, est en realite une femme minoree car amputee de son esprit et de son role social. Hawthorne temoigne ainsi d’un feminisme equivoque, une voix qu’il a du mal, par moments, a assumer et affirmer completement.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01388777/document

L’émergence d’un discours féministe dans la fiction courte de Nathaniel Hawthorne (1832-1844) : l’écriture du devenir-femme

"Thinking in Henry James" identifies what is genuinely strange and radical about James's concept of consciousness first, the idea that it may not always be situated within this or that person but rather exists outside or "between," in some transpersonal place; and second, the idea that consciousness may have power over things and people outside the person who thinks. Examining these and other counterintuitive representations of consciousness, Cameron asks, "How do we make sense of these conceptions of thinking?""

Thinking in Henry James

"Lyric Time" offers a detailed critical reading of a particularly difficult poet, an analysis of the dominance of temporal structures and concerns in the body of her poetry, and finally, an important original contribution to a theory of the lyric. Poised between analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetic texts and theoretical inquiry, "Lyric Time" suggests that the temporal problems of Dickinson's poems are frequently exaggerations of the features that distinguish the lyric as a genre. "It is precisely the distance some of Dickinson's poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, that allows us to see, magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics," writes Sharon Cameron. "Lyric Time" is written for the literary audience at large-- Dickinsonians, romanticists, theorists, anyone interested in American poetry, or in poetry at all, and especially anyone who admires a risky book that succeeds.

Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre

Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism-writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. "To consent to being anonymous," Weil wrote, "is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?" Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility-from a "truth" that has no social foundation. "Impersonality" investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

Impersonality: Seven Essays

The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne

At his death in 1862, Henry Thoreau left the major part of his writings unpublished, including 47 manuscript volumes of the Journal he kept for 24 years. Although the Journal has been acknowledged to be central to Thoreau's canon, criticism of it has been peripheral until now. In this carefully considered book Sharon Cameron argues that ten years before his death Thoreau came to see the Journal as an autonomous composition-in competition with Walden-and that it was a viable work in its own right. Examining the crossed and contradictory imperative of Thoreau's discourse, Cameron opens up the Journal to public scrutiny--moving from questions of linguistic strategies and issues of the Journal's presumptive audience, to the matter of how the academy might deal with the material. She concludes that although the Journal is Thoreau's private work it is also his primary work and as such it should take precedence over the books Thoreau published in his lifetime.

Sharon Cameron

Papers

Thinking in Henry James

Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre

Impersonality: Seven Essays

The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne

Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal