RAPPEL: Nous vous rappelons que le prochain séminaire conjoint de « Modernités 16-18 » (Sorbonne Université) et « PEARL » (Programme d’Etudes sur l’Angleterre de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Sorbonne Nouvelle) aura lieu ce jeudi 9 octobre à 17 h00 (attention à l’horaire) en salle D 421 (Maison Recherche de Sorbonne Université, 28 rue Serpente). Nous y entendrons :
Paddy Bullard (University of Reading) pour une intervention sur « Austen’s Handicraft ».
Jane Austen’s Handiwork
The six novels that Jane Austen completed before her death in 1817 are all social comedies with, as she acknowledged, rather narrow provincial settings. It follows that the occupations of her characters are also limited: to the cultivation of polite accomplishments, such as drawing and musical performance, or to the practice of domestic arts, such as needlework. Where Austen describes people of either sex displaying manual dexterity or practical ingenuity, however, her reflections connect with advanced Enlightenment thinking on those subjects. The novels show a deepening correspondence with contemporary theories about what we would now call extended cognition, and about the function of the cognitive unconscious. This lecture explores the significance of these contexts to her techniques for representing the different cognitive styles of her characters. It also explores their relevance to the Enlightenment ideology of ‘useful knowledge’, the culture of mechanical ingenuity and practical innovation that was transforming proto-industrial Europe – and to which Jane Austen was surprisingly attentive and sympathetic.
Paddy Bullard is Professor of English Literature and current co-Head of Department, Department of English Literature, University of Reading. He specialises in English writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has published books on Edmund Burke (Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, CUP 2011), Jonathan Swift (Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (CUP, 2013), co-edited with James McLaverty), and on satire: he is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (OUP 2019) as well as the author of the recently published Satire, Instruction, and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain, CUP 2025: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/satire-instruction-and-useful-knowledge-in-eighteenthcentury-britain/2C5AB18715CC415072D5E34363818C5E
Nous espérons vous retrouver prochainement.
Line Cottegnies et pour Alexis Tadié (Sorbonne Université), Arianne Fennetaux et Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne Nouvelle).
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RAPPEL DU PROGRAMME DU SEMINAIRE:
Thème de l’année: « Littérature, Savoirs, Savoir-faire ».
Le programme du 1er semestre se poursuivra avec:
– Jeudi 20 novembre, 17 h 00 – 18 h 30, Bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones, Sorbonne Université: Karen Britland (University of Wisconsin – Madison), ‘Reading between the lines: techniques of secret writing and Lady Anne Halkett’s narrative of her life’
– Mercredi 3 décembre, 17 h 00 – 18 h 30, salle D 421, Maison de la recherche, Sorbonne Université: Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University): : « Errant Signs: Knowing and Not-Knowing in Shakespeare and Jonson »
Veuillez aussi noter le lancement du projet sur « Les femmes et la pratique expérimentale aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles », dans le cadre de SPHINX / Programme « Matrimoines, patrimoines minorés ». Journée de lancement: le 7 novembre 2025, de 14 h à 18 h.
Le programme du 2e semestre sera précisé ultérieurement, mais les dates retenues sont, pour mémoire:
(-22 janvier, de 17h30 à 19h, séminaire conjoint Modernités 16-18 / PEARL / PEMS: Helena Taylor (University of Exeter) – Practising Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century French Salon: séance organisée par l’USN et Sorbonne Université, salle 830, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, place Paul Ricoeur, 75013)
– jeudi 12 février
– mercredi 1er avril, (attention, date modifiée)
– jeudi 28 mai
