Thomas Constantinesco receives the 2023 Book Award from the Institut des Amériques
Thomas Constantinesco, professor of American Literature, received the 2023 Book Award from the Institut des Amériques (IdA) for his book "Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States."
"Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States", published in February 2022 by Oxford University Press, received the 2023 Book Award from the Institut des Amériques (IdA). This book examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century US.
Each year, this award recognises the best original monograph in American studies that has been published in the past year or is about to be. Applications were evaluated by the 2023 Book Award jury, chaired by Hélène Aji, professor of American literature at the École normale supérieure of Paris (Ulm) and the vice-president of the Institut des Amériques. Supported by the Centre nationale de recherche scientifique (CNRS), the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and the Campus Condorcet, the Institut des Amériques (IdA) fosters research in France in social sciences on American societies.
The award ceremony was held on June 14th, 2023 during the 2023 Conference of the Institut des Amériques, in Lyon.
Thomas Constantinesco is Professor of American Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University, France. He also taught at Yale, Oxford, and Université Paris Cité. Between 2014 and 2019, he was a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France and, in 2019-2021, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Oxford. He is the author of "Ralph Waldo Emerson: L'Amérique à l'essai" (Éditions Rue d'Ulm, 2012). He has published essays on nineteenth-century American literature in such venues as The New England Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, American Periodicals, and Textual Practice. With Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, he co-edited "Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature" (Routledge, 2015).
About the book
"Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States", Oxford University Press.
"Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States" examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century US. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain across the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James, as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia.
Through examining the work of nineteenth-century writers, Constantinesco argues that pain, while undeniably destructive, also generates language and identities, and demonstrates how literature participates in theorizing the problems of mind and body that undergird the deep chasms of selfhood, sociality, gender, and race of a formative period in American history. Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States considers first Emerson's philosophy of compensation, which promises to convert pain into gain. It also explores the limitations of this model, showing how Jacobs contests the division of body and mind that underwrites it and how Dickinson challenges its alleged universalism by foregrounding the unshareability of pain as a paradoxical measure of togetherness. It then investigates the concurrent economies of affects in which pain was implicated during and after the Civil War and argues, through the example of James and Phelps, for queer sociality as a response to the heteronormative violence of sentimentalism. The last chapter on Alice James extends the critique of sentimental sympathy while returning to the book's premise that pain is generative and the site of thought. By linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States eventually claims close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature.