Contenu du sommaire : Sciences & savoir dans la littérature américaine au XIXe siècle.

With the ambition of providing the United States with a national literature moving away from the "Gothic chimeras" of his English contemporaries, C.B. Brown (1771-1810) called upon science, and notably the emerging psychiatric lore, to ensure the verisimilitude of his novels. At a time when Pinel, Tuke and Rush were, according to M. Foucault, "silencing madness" by classifying mental illnesses, Brown let lunatic characters express anguish and fears dangerously akin to those of the typically enlightened and mentally healthy narrators who report them, thus casting a doubt on the very scientific premises he had appeared to rely upon and obliquely questioning the confident optimism of his age.

In Eureka, Poe hits on some of the fundamental features of our present view of the universe. In this essay, I investigate the way in which he appropriates the scientific knowledge of his day to elaborate a vision of the cosmos pulsating from and back into "God" or, to our limited reason, "Nothingness." Poe evinces a mixture of expertise, disingenuousness, discernment and rhetoric, but my overall contention is that he was guided by a deep, imaginative sense of man 's paradoxical position as an explorer of his own universe.

Against the common view of Poe as a romantic occultist, this paper attempts to describe the significance of scientific rationality as a source and model for his short fiction. Through the analysis of "Hans Pfaall", his famous early hoax, we bring to light the problematic of narrative credibility and self-evidentiality, which as J. Irwin has shown, is central to Poe's skeptical imagination. This problematic, which we also relate to the status of written information in the context of Jacksonian democracy, is further evidenced by Poe's deep interest in the invention of photography — a formidable scientific and poetic tool against skepticism.

This paper explores the textual and narrative strategies devised by Hawthorne to subvert the assumption underlying the conception of the past as an object to be reconstructed by historical knowledge. In a museum historically arranged, the succession of events through time can be duplicated as a succession of objects. Hawthorne 's tale represents the museum as a convenient fallacy, and offers the collection as the more adequate paradigm for the way in which we actually come into contact with the past, through memory and imagination combined. Moreover, the collection provides a pattern after which Hawthorne 's own career as a writer can be conceived.

This paper focuses on the highly ambivalent relation that Ishmael-as the narrator of the hunt -maintains with knowledge. This relation seems to be structured around two specific functions : knowledge as an implement of power and as a means of protection or resistance. It will eventually be seen how Ishmael's school-teacher's strategy proves powerless in front of his own Ahabian facet and the fascination for the white whale it entails.

In the first half of the 19th century, the rapid development of science in its modern form reinforced the belief that the existence of God could be proved. "Natural theology, " as it was then called, was the theoretical framework in which Emily Dickinson was taught science at Amherst College. This article traces the influence of Dickinson's scientific schooling on her poetic use of the concept of "circumference. " By calling into question the dogmatic character of both religion and science through a subversive use of this mathematical notion, Dickinson opposes all forms of centrality and exposes her own, more open conception of the world, which relies on negation and the fluidity of signs. "Circumference" can be viewed as a structuring image of Dickinson's mental universe and it gives shape to her unfinished body of poems.