RPTM · Living Too Long: Republican Time in American Literature
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-09-01 → 2025-08-31
- EU contribution
- €195,915
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Living Too Long: Republican Time in American Literature
The goal of my project is to establish how the United States status as a modern democratic republic has conditioned its relationship to time and history, and how that relationship is expressive of the wider condition of modernity. It is my hypothesis that a particular character type in U.S. literature, which I call the extant figure, despite having thus far gone unnamed in literary criticism, has formed an essential component of the national culture since the first generation following the Revolutionary War. This character type is defined by the sense of superannuation—of having lived too long, seen too much, and stumbled into a historical era that he does not recognize. Originally a minor player in fictions of nascent republicanism, the extant figure is transformed over subsequent generations, becoming a tool for all sorts of political, social, and philosophical thought experiments. In writing a scholarly monograph, giving various talks, and participating in other communication and dissemination activities, I will track the life and afterlives of this remarkably persistent character type. At a time when the survival of democratic republics around the world seems especially precarious, this research will provide new insight into how such republics re-conceptualize and sustain themselves across time.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
How do you nurture democracy in a republic? Today, as republics around the world are straining under the pressures of authoritarianism, this question becomes almost overwhelmingly urgent. In helping to draw the blueprints for United States republicanism, Thomas Jefferson gave his answer in temporal terms: the U.S. would remain democratic as long as each generation was given power to repair the Constitution to suit their era, but also the obligation of handing on that document, with the entire republic, in a peaceful and timely manner to the next generation. This pattern of generational succession, which Jefferson believed would prevent any one generation from permanently stamping their likeness on the country, became essential to nineteenth-century Americans socio-political outlook: to be a truly democratic republic, they believed, required living in this new temporal order, which has yet to be identified by scholarship and which I am calling republican time. The goal of my research project, executed under the co-supervision of Hlne Quanquin and Hlne Cottet (University of Lille, France), is to investigate the relationship between republican time and the workings of democracy in nineteenth-century America. I will accomplish this goal through a program of close reading of American literature, informed by theories of political science, history, race, and gender and sexuality.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE DE LILLE · LilleCoordinatorFrance
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101067300
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51a52eed5&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5215da162&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union