4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference: Dis/embodiment
Paris, France
July 1-4, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS
Keynote Speakers
Richard Kopley, Penn State-Dubois: “Tales of a Poe Biographer”
Joel Pfister, Wesleyan University: “Why Read Hawthorne Now?”
We are pleased to invite paper and session proposals for the 4th International Poe and Hawthorne
Conference on the theme Dis/embodiment. This academic event, to be held in Paris, France (July1-4, 2025), is organized by the Poe Studies Association (PSA) and the Nathaniel Hawthorne
Society (NHS) in partnership with Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Université Paris Cité, Sorbonne
Université, Université Bretagne-Sud, and the French National Center for Scientific Research(CNRS). Previous co-sponsored international conferences of the PSA and NHS have been held in
Oxford, England (2006), Florence, Italy (2012), and Kyoto, Japan (2018).
In her classic study The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1981),
Sharon Cameron uncovered the brutality of the allegorical enterprise in its “deflection from thephysical or corporeal realm” (79). Allegorical reading, because it has characters “rather embody
an idea than inhabit a body” (Carton 1982), largely misses the materiality of flesh, the pleasure ordispleasure of senses, and the complex entanglements of letter, body and world that is the wellknown province of nineteenth-century US literature. Recovering the messiness of bodies and theirmateriality has been an important injunction of nineteenth-century Americanist criticism in the last
decades, asking us to move beyond the ontological rift between matter and spirit, and to embrace
the oxymoronic resistance to the mind/body divide—in other words, to move beyond allegory, andeven hermeneutics tout court, and devise ways of reading that destabilize our interpretativegrounds. The topic of this conference, “dis/embodiment,” is an attempt to respond to thisinvitation, because the writings of Poe and Hawthorne, perhaps more than others, unsettle oursenses and blur the limit between life and death, the corporeal and the non-corporeal, the body andthe ghost, the human and the non-/post-human. In that sense, the slash in our title is less a markerof disjunction than an invitation to find new modes of articulation between bodies and what they
are not, or not quite, or not anymore.
Bodies matter, as we know, and Poe and Hawthorne’s texts register their materiality at a time whenbodies had anything but an equal share in the body politic of the United States. For those who weredenied political participation in the life of the nation because they were deemed to suffer from an
excess of embodiment, for those who were seen as encumbered by a body that was too muchmarked, oversexualized, deformed, diseased, disabled, only the prospect of disembodimentparadoxically figured the promise of (necro)citizenship (Castronovo 2001). But bodies are not only
sites of subjugation; they are also sites of resistance to their discursive production byinstitutionalized forms of knowledge and control (medicine, religion, the law). As such, they
become a locus of self-invention and identity affirmation. Dis/embodiment is therefore conducive
to forms of re-embodiments, or alternative versions of what it means to inhabit one’s/a body. The
slash, here again, points to forms of liminality and thresholding in texts which indeed favor theambiguous chiaroscuro of imagination over the light that chisels the contours of bodies as things,
which prefer the arabesque design over the injunction of a straight line that creates categories. In
Hawthorne and in Poe, bodies often turn grotesque, monstrous, on the verge of dissolution, ordisincorporation, into ghosts, specters, zombies, or untimely cyborgs—yet always grounded in themateriality of the letter, or the book. For, if bodies are discursive spaces, if “all bodies are signs[,].
. . all signs are (signifying) bodies” (Nancy 2000). Dis/embodiment then also invites us toreconsider Poe and Hawthorne’s texts themselves, as well as their translations and later adaptations
or afterlives, as unruly bodies, sentient pages that generate ambivalent readerly affects and, attimes, “tawdry physical affrightments.”
We invite proposals for individual papers as well as full panels, roundtables, and more creative
formats, on Poe, Hawthorne, or Poe and Hawthorne as they relate to the theme of dis/embodiment.
While we welcome new readings of canonical oeuvres, we are also interested in proposals turningto texts that have received less critical attention. We also invite proposals that place the questionof bodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne in conversation with other writers and literary, aesthetic,philosophical, political, and cultural traditions. We are particularly interested in proposals that seek
to explore their relation to French contexts, including how French writers, critics, philosophers,artists, and filmmakers have drawn on their writings, or translated them into French. From
Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to Marie Bonaparte, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to ClaudeRichard, Henri Justin, and Paulin Ismard, Poe has often been on the mind of French readers. We
hope that this conference will offer the opportunity to revisit the French side of Poe, as well as torecover “the French face” of Hawthorne, from his “Second Empire critics” (Anesko and Brooks)
to more recent engagements. We also welcome proposals that seek to position the question ofbodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne beyond a transatlantic setting and within larger historical andgeographical networks and traditions.
Individual paper proposals should be no more than 250 words and include speaker affiliation anda 100-word biographical statement. Panel or round-table proposals, which may be up to 1,500
words, should include a panel rationale, organizer and speaker names, affiliations and biographicalstatements, as well as paper titles and abstracts.
Please submit your proposals to dis.embodiment2025@gmail.com by 15 September 2024.
Confirmations of accepted proposals will be sent out by mid-November 2024.
All participants must be members of either the Poe Studies Association or the Nathaniel
Hawthorne Society prior to the conference.