Séminaire PACT / « Keywords » – Conférence de Sara Thornton (Paris Cité): « Coal : fossil energy as a structure of feeling » (salle 002 Serpente)

Dans le cadre du séminaire « Keywords » organisé par Jagna Oltarzewska (Axe PACT), Sara Thornton (Université Paris Cité) donnera une conférence le mardi 26 novembre à 17:30h à la Maison de la Recherche rue Serpente (salle 002). 

Sa communication portera sur le mot-clé : « Coal » et aura pour titre :

« Coal : fossil energy as a structure of feeling »

The present seminar asks us to consider the heuristic force of our chosen keyword within a chosen field and to reflect on its broader social, cultural and political resonances. Reading Victorian and more broadly nineteenth-century literature brings one into contact with the material world, matter of all sorts and particularly with woven fabric, paper, wood, iron and coal. Coal was the primary substance which created the energy for driving pistons and allowed the delocalization of manufacture, moving it away from communities based around water and water-driven mills to any location where a workforce could be mustered. Coal dictated a certain type of productivity which fueled industry and the expansion of Empire as well as the desire for revolution and travel. Coal and its dust inhabit the pages of the Victorian novel (and indeed particles of soot have been found in the very paper used to make serial fiction). Soot informs our vision of London or the British industrial north from Blake’s 1794 chimney sweep to the grime of the Dickensian novel to Conan Doyle’s turn-of-the-century blackened streets. It was also the subject of illustrated industrial series aimed at those who wished to set up in the business of mining coal and iron ore.

This paper will take as its cue the inaugural paper given by Catherine Bernard, which explored the tensions between ‘common’, ‘commons’ and ‘community’ and allowed us to see the emergence of a freer interpretation of what might be seen as ‘common’ to all, that is, unbound by the restrictions of community. We will ask what form of the ‘common’, coal allowed, what alternative points and places of sharing were opened up by it and what new forms of self were able to thrive during its reign. We will explore how coal, although partly a destroyer of the water-based ‘flowing commons’ (Andreas Malm, 2016) and of the rural communities which formed around water, was also the bringer of an alternative episteme and imaginary.  Williams does not mention coal in his Keywords, nor steam, although many of his entries – ‘Industry’, ‘Manufacture’, ‘Exploitation’ among others – gesture at unhealthy practices of extractivism and a need to temper the unbridled productivity allowed by fossil fuel (1983). Paradoxically, then (for this is not an apology for coal energy – after all we are still breathing the particles of soot produced when Dickens was alive), fossil fuel perhaps offered the possibility of new mental spaces, the chance to be part of a moving ‘multitude’ with ‘singularities within the common’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004), as well as ‘multiple transmissions’ (Williams, 1974) and modes of projection beyond the community, the village and the nation state.

Sara Thornton is Professor of English at Université Paris Cité and a member of the Anglophone studies research laboratory, LARCA. She has written on the way the literary text absorbs and showcases socio-economic and environmental concerns suggesting new forms of urban subjectivity (Advertising, Subjectivity and the nineteenth-century novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls, Palgrave, 2009) and Dickens and the Virtual City:  Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space with Estelle Murail, Palgrave, 2017). She has also published on animal subjectivity (Comforting Creatures : Changing Visions of Animal Otherness in the Victorian Period, with Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Cahiers victoriens, 2018) and more recently on George Eliot (‘Eliot’s Mitwelt: Productive Environments in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch‘, 2021), on decolonial receptions of Enid Blyton (‘Blyton’s ghosts: Childhood receptions in India and Britain’, Routledge, 2022 with Tanvi Chowdhary), and climate crisis and decoloniality in Dickens (19, 2025). Her present research considers coal energy and its effect on the representation of Victorian bodies and on the texture of nineteenth-century writing. She gave a paper “Becoming Mineral: Bodies and Extractivism from Dickens to Conrad” at the conference « Energy, Empire and Extractivism in the Age of Conrad » (2024).