Biographie
Michael Jonik est un chercheur internationalement reconnu pour ses travaux sur des auteurs (pour les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, essentiellement : Edwards, Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson et James.Michael Jonik enseigne la littérature américaine et la théorie critique contemporaine à l’Université du Sussex. Il était auparavant chercheur postdoctoral à la Cornell University Society for the Humanities.
Domaines de recherche et d’enseignement
- Littérature et philosophie américaines des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles ;
- philosophie et théorie critique contemporaines en France et en Allemagne ;
- philosophie politique ;
- histoire des sciences ;
- lumières transatlantiques ;
- histoire du roman ;
- théories de l’esprit, de la conscience et de la perception ;
- matérialité et forme ;
- risque et probabilité.
Collaboration avec l’IHRIM
Michael Jonik est l’un des universitaires européens les plus actifs et les plus féconds dans le domaine de la littérature des États-Unis. Il a publié de très nombreuses études consacrées à un large spectre d’auteurs américains, dans les revues et chez les éditeurs les plus prestigieux (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, notamment), et il a donné des conférences invitées dans de nombreuses universités. Il est un des animateurs d’un des principaux réseaux de recherche - à l’échelle internationale - sur la littérature des États-Unis du XIXe siècle, Branca (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).Son projet de recherche actuel, préfiguré par certains de ses articles récents, porte sur Henry David Thoreau : Thoreau’s Radical Ecologies: Philosophy, Politics, Collective Agency. Il vient d’être accepté par University of Minnesota Press. Il y poursuit une recherche sur Thoreau qui l’a conduit notamment à participer aux deux colloques sur Thoreau organisés à l’ENS de Lyon (en 2009 et 2017).
Michael Jonik se situe tout naturellement dans les problématiques du laboratoire IHRIM. Cette invitation est d’autant plus pertinente pour le laboratoire que le Royaume-Uni constitue l’un des tout premiers pôles européens concernant les études sur l’Amérique des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Michael Jonik est un chercheur d’envergure internationale, extrêmement actif, dont les larges compétences et les perspectives novatrices ne pourront que stimuler les étudiants et la communauté scientifique de l’ENS de Lyon.
Séminaires
Lundi 24 avril, 15h-17h - Salle D8’001Biohistory and American Indigenous Languages in Henry David Thoreau’s "Indian Notebooks" At the end of his Maine Woods, Henry David Thoreau adds a "List of Indian Words" which relates primarily to place names or to botanical, geographical or topographical features of the Penobscot valley. In this talk, I will investigate his increasing intimacy with Native American understandings of the environment, epistemologies, cultures and language, which I argue offers him an eco-poetical and biohistorical mode of thinking outside of received European scientific knowledge structures. He celebrates this new intimacy with the natural world that Native American words offer him in his journal on March 5, 1858: "A dictionary of the Indian Languages reveals another and wholly new life to us." I will explore Thoreau’s intimacy with Indigenous American biohistories in terms of his extensive writings on North American Indigenous languages and ethnobotany, which are part of his 12-volume unpublished, undigitized, and largely unresearched "Indian Notebooks." These notebooks contain over 2000 pages of materials related to Native America, and are thus not only a major research resource on Indigenous American cultures, but also hold the potential to fundamentally shift how we understand Thoreau as both canonical American author, and as an ecological thinker in profound dialogue with Native American philosophies of the natural world. In particular, I will investigate his ethnobotanical study of Abenaki/Penobscot word-concepts for animals and plants.
Mercredi 26 avril, 10h-12h - Salle D2’110
Life, Form and Power in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Experience"
"Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again old heart it seems to say,--there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Many readers of Emerson’s "Experience," have taken this uplifting peroration to offer an optimistic counterpoint to the skepticism that emerges across the essay, the skepticism instilled from not being able to mourn the death of his son Waldo, for not being able experience life directly but only by indirect blows, if not from the "discrepance" between the world he thinks and the word he sees. Yet the hopeful tone of the passage aside, what would it mean for genius to be transformed into practical power? What indeed does this practical power entail? More generally, what does power mean for Emerson? It is perhaps remarkable given the recurrent invocations of power across the essay, and indeed across Emerson’s oeuvre, that few commentators have explored the persistent role of power in his thinking. I will explore this here in relation to notions of "life" and "form" also at work in the essay, and in other key texts by Emerson such as "Power," "Fate" and "Powers of the Mind," in relation to idealist concepts of power in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, and in relation to recent work on Emerson by Cavell, Cameron, Arsic and Urbas.
Ouvrages et publications majeurs
- Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 268pp.
The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, editor (under contract with Cambridge
Anarchists, Scientists, Lovers and Con-men: Risk and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (in preparation).
- Selected Articles/Book Chapters
’"infinite subdued vexation": Desire, Inaction and Philosophy in Melville’s Pierre," in preparation for Revue française d’études américaines, projected publication June 2021.
"James and Turgenev," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Andrew Kahn (in press, Oxford UP 2022).
