PSC-CUNY Research Awards (Traditional A)

Control No: TRADA-42-397 Name : Richardson, Joan

Rank: Professor Address :

Tenured: Yes

College: GRADUATE SCHOOL Telephone : Panel: English & Creative Writing Email: Discipline : English

Human Subject Use No

Animal Subject Use No

Supplementary Materials No

List of Supplementary Material None

Department ENGLISH

Title of Proposed Project:

Wallace Stevens and Jean Wahl: "The Intensest Rendezvous"

Brief Abstract was secretive about sources. His figure of "the hermit in a poet's metaphors"

signaled his desire that readers journey to seek out and find answers to the questions posed by

his intricately plotted lines. I have been studying Stevens for about forty years, and just recently

found a path to one of his richest sources. Stevens's relationship with Jean Wahl in connection

with Les Entretiens de Pontigny conference at Mount Holyoke College in 1943 has been remarked

by many, including Stanley Cavell. What has not been given attention, however, is the depth of

the poet's indebtedness to Wahl. Readers have wondered, for example, where Stevens came to

his knowledge of Heidegger, whom he had not read. I realize now that it would have been through

Stevens's relationship with Wahl, which began before the Pontigny occasion and continued until

the poet's death.

Relevant Publications * In contract and in progress: PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN CULTURE, a book-length study

& Scholarship reflecting my ongoing research as described in my applications for earlier funding under the title of

THE FRENCH CONNECTION AND PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS, to be published by Cambridge

University Press in 2012 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Thinking in Cavell: The Transcendentalist Strain," chapter solicited for inclusion in STANLEY

CAVELL: LITERATURE AND CRITICISM, ed. James Loxley and Andrew Taylor, forthcoming late

2011, Manchester University Press (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding as described in

applications for THE FRENCH CONNECTION AND PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS).

* "Immigrant : Stanley Cavell and Unapproachable America," Solicited essay (5000

words), forthcoming Summer 2011, RARITAN: A QUARTERLY REVIEW.

* "Stanley Cavell's Thoreau and Me," Invited speaker, American Literature Association Meeting,

Boston, MA, May 2011.

* "Wallace Stevens and Science," Upcoming-Scheduled, Philoctetes Center for the Study of

Imagination, New York, NY, Invited Lecture, April 2011 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding, as

above).

* "The Uses of Pragmatism" Symposium, Invited Speaker, University of Illinois at Urbana,

September 2010 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding, as above).

* "Emerson and Ecopoetics," Invited speaker, Quips and Cranks Panel, School of Visual Arts,

New York City, September 2010.

* "Pragmatism: 'She widens the field of search for God'," Keynote Lecture,

Conference, Hamburg, Germany, June 2010 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding, as above).

* "William James in DEADWOOD," Solicited Essay, THE HOPKINS REVIEW, Summer 2010

(Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "The Transcendentalist Strain: Stanley Cavell Talks with BOOKFORUM," Lead piece, an interview with Cavell solicited by BOOKFORUM, published in the April/May 2010 issue, Vol. 17,

No. 1. (The published interview represents less one-tenth of the transcription of 80 double-spaced typed pages; I shall attend to publishing the full interview when time permits. The questions/ contexts I composed in preparation for the interview result from PSC-CUNY funding. The content here is entirely different from that comprising the chapter sub-titled "The Transcendentalist Strain" forthcoming in the Manchester University Press volume, STANLEY CAVELL: LITERATURE AND

CRITICISM.

* Bienecke Library Fellowship Award, April 2010, for research connected to William James's reading of Jonathan Edwards (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "William James, , and Charles Darwin," Invited Lecture, March, 2010, Bard

College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Henry James and Wallace Stevens," Solicited Essay, THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL,

Spring 2010 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Wallace Stevens's New York as 'New Atlantis'," Invited Participant, Wallace Stevens in New York Conference, Gallatin School, New York University, March 2010 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Richard Rorty," Invited

Participant, Roundtable, Modern Language Association Meeting, Philadelphia, December 2009

(Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Jean Wahl, Henri Bergson, and William James," Invited Talk, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, November 5-8, 2009 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Crash Course: Cultural History and The Great Depression," Review Essay, BOOKFORUM, Vol.

16, Issue 3 (September/October/November 2009).

* "Imagination, Science, and the Use of Words," The Imagination Seminar, a Faculty Seminar sponsored by The Macaulay Honors College of CUNY, Invited Speaker and Session Leader,

November 9, 2009 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Stanley Cavell and Ralph Waldo Emerson," Invited Lecture, American Literature Association

Meeting, Boston, MA, May 2009.

* "'Entwined Unities': Literature and Science," Invited with Steven Meyer for a Colloquium,

Columbia University, New York, NY, April 2009 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Thirteen Ways and More of Looking at Pragmatism," Invited Participant, Pragmatism

Roundtable, Modern Language Association Meeting, San Francisco, December 2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "'Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?': Stevens, Whitehead, William James, Bergson and Deleuze," Invited Speaker, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Meeting, Charlotte,

NC, November 13-19, 2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "The Evolution of Emerson's NATURE in William James and Wallace Stevens," Invited Lecture, All Souls Unitarian Church, New York, NY, October 2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "'A Great Beating of Wings': Bruno Latour, William James, and Angels," Society for Literature,

Science and the Arts Biannual European Meeting, Berlin, June 2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "The Varieties of American Experience: William James and Philosophical Pluralism": Keynote

Lecture, The European Association of American Studies Bi-Annual Meeting, Oslo, Norway, May

2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "'Return of the Repressed': Stanley Cavell and Ralph Waldo Emerson," Invited Lecture, Stanley

Cavell and Literary Criticism Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2008.

* "Writing the World," Literature and the Environment, Panel Discussion sponsored by The Center for the Humanities, CUNY, Invited Moderator and Speaker, together with Bill McKibben, Susan

Howe and Daniel Hillel, April 2008 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding).

* "Invisible Visibility: Richard Powers & The Sound of Words," Society for Literature,Science and the Arts," Invited Speaker,Portland, Maine, November 2007.

* "William James's French Connection," Invited Lecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,

November 2007 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding)

* "Motion Research: Angus Fletcher describes the scientific revolution's effect on language,"

BOOKFORUM, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September/October/November 2007)

* "A Brief Natural History of Pragmatism," Invited Lecture, Columbia University, February 2007

(Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding)

* "'The Mind Feels When It Thinks': Jonathan Edwards's Aesthetics," Invited Speaker, Modern

Language Association Meeting, Philadelphia, Pa., December 2006 (Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding)

* "William James's Feeling OF IF," Invited Lecture, American Philosophical Association and

William James Society, Joint Meeting, Washington, D.C., December 2006 (Resulted from PSC-

CUNY funding)

* A NATURAL HISTORY OF PRAGMATISM: THE FACT OF FEELING FROM JONATHAN

EDWARDS TO GERTRUDE STEIN(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

(Resulted from PSC-CUNY funding)

* "Wallace Stevens: A Likeness," THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WALLACE STEVENS, ed.,

John Serio (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

* "Recombinant ANW: Helmholtz, William James, and Whitehead," CONFIGURATIONS: A

JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE, and TECHNOLOGY (Fall/Winter 2006). (Resulted from

PSC-CUNY funding)

* "Terms of Address: Emerson's lectures shed light on his essays," BOOKFORUM, Vol. 12, No. 5

(February/March 2006).

* "Music is Thinking, Then, Sound: An Aesthetic Exercise," 'NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRDS'

SONG BE THE SAME': NEW ESSAYS ON EARLY MODERN AND MODERN POETRY, ed.,

Jennifer Lewin (New Haven: Beinecke Library, University Press of New England, 2002).

*"The Fact of Feeling: American Aesthetics," REAL: YEARBOOK OF RESEARCH IN ENGLISH

AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, Volume 15: PRAGMATISM AND LITERARY STUDIES, ed.,

Winfried Fluck (Tubingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999).

*WALLACE STEVENS: COLLECTED POETRY AND PROSE, ed., with Frank Kermode (New

York: Library of America, 1997).

*"Emerson's Sound Effects," RARITAN: A QUARTERLY REVIEW, Volume XVI, Number 3 (Winter

1997), 83-101.

*"Learning Stevens's Language: The Will & The Weather," TEACHING WALLACE STEVENS:

PRACTICAL ESSAYS, Tennessee Studies in Literature, Volume 35. eds. John N. Serio and B.J.

Leggett (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).

*"Wallace Stevens: New York 1914," WAYS OF KNOWING, ed., John Brockman (New York:

Prentice Hall, 1992).

*WALLACE STEVENS: THE LATER YEARS, 1923-1955 (New York: Beech Tree Books/ William

Morrow & Co., 1988).

*WALLACE STEVENS: THE EARLY YEARS, 1879-1923 (New York: Beech Tree Books/ William

Morrow & Co., 1986).

Education

Institution Degree Year(s) Discipline

Queens College CUNY B.A. 1969 Comparative Lit. &

Graduate School CUNY Ph.D. 1977 Comparative Literature

Other Current & Past Funding (last 5 years)

Period Title Amount Funding Source

The French Connection & Pragmatist July 2009-June 2010 $3,000.00 PSC-CUNY Research Foundation Aesthetics, Phase 3 (continued)

The French Connection & Pragmatist July 2008-June 2009 $2,500.00 PSC-CUNY Research Foundation Aesthetics, Phase 3 (beginning) The French Connection & Pragmatist July 2007-June 2008 $3,200.00 PSC-CUNY Research Foundation Aesthetics Phase 2

The French Connection & Pragmatist July 2006-June 2007 $2,500.00 PSC-CUNY Research Foundation Aesthetics: Phase 1

Renewal- Pragmatism & American Literature: July 2005-June 2006 $1,700.00 PSC-CUNY Research Foundation An Intellectual History + The Place of Pleasure

Attachments

Description File Name File Size Date Attached

Project PSC-CUNY.1.11._TRADA-42-397. 1/26/2011 4:32:33 44032 Description doc PM

Budgets

Description Requested Amount

0 Summer Salary (Principal Investigator) 0 Fringe Benefit Expense 0

0 0 Research Staff Fringe Benefit Expense 0 MTA Payroll Tax

0 0 Clerical Staff Fringe Benefit Expense 0 MTA Payroll Tax

0 General Office Supplies/Xeroxing 0 0

0 Research Supplies 0 0

0 Domestic Travel 0 0

0 Independent Contractors 0 0

0 Payment to Subjects 0 0

0 Laboratory Fees 0 0

0 Equipment 0 0

0 Manuscript Preparation/ Publication Costs 0 0

Foreign Travel 3470.80 1) NY-Newark Airport, r/t: $4.50 (Subway) + $36 (N.

J. Transit & Airtrain= $40.50 + 2) New York (Newark)-

Paris r/t, cheapest July/August Fare (Travelocity) =

$1410 + 3) -Caen Railroad r/t, July/August

Fare= $110 + 4) Navette (Bus) from Caen Station to

IMEC library r/t= $9.50 (3.50 Euros each way valuing

Euro @ current rate of $1.35) + 5) 32 days residence at dormitory of IMEC library with full pension @ 44

Euros a day = $1900.80 Grand Total = $3470.80

Please note: While I am certainly not a "Junior" faculty member, as I have indicated in years past 3470.80 when I have been funded, I am a single mother 0 supporting a son in NYC; he has now graduated college but has been unable to find more than part- time work. Without funding I am unable to manage the expense of the proposed research trip without incurring additional debt--something I (like our government) cannot afford at present. (I did not have funding and did travel for research last summer, for example.) The Wahl archive is vast, and I don't expect to be able to read through everything in just a bit over a month, but I will at least have located and read (and/or copied, when possible) the most relevant items. Thank you for your consideration.

Total 3470.80 PSC-CUNY Research Award Application TRADA-42-397 Joan Richardson English Panel Project Description

Wallace Stevens and Jean Wahl: “The Intensest Rendezvous”

Engaging the work of Wallace Stevens has shaped the trajectory of my career. I could not have anticipated when I completed the second volume of my critical biography of the poet in 1988, Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955 (Beech Tree Books: William Morrow & Co.; the first volume, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923 had been published in 1986) that I would still today be passionately involved with what Stevens called his “fluent mundo.” I recognize in retrospect why this is the case: in short, the experience of reading, thinking, imagining, feeling through his words continues to educate me, teach me— again, to borrow a phrase from him— “how to live, what to do.” One of those from whom Stevens, in turn, learned was Jean Wahl (1888-1974), a French philosopher who lived in the from 1942-45, having escaped from internment as a Jew at the Drancy camp (northeast of Paris). In the U.S., he and Gustave Cohen (a scholar of medieval French history, also in exile), with the help of the , founded a “university in exile,” the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes at the New School in New York (1941-46); Wahl also held a position at Mount Holyoke College, where he set up a series of conferences known as Les Entretiens de Pontigny, modeled on meetings concerning poetry and politics run from 1910 to 1939 at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in . While Stevens’s relationship with Wahl in connection with Les Entretiens de Pontigny—the second meeting, to which Stevens was invited, was in August, 1943—has been remarked and discussed by many readers and critics, including Stanley Cavell, what has not yet been given attention is the depth of the poet’s indebtedness to the exiled philosopher. I had not myself realized Wahl’s significance for Stevens even while working on my last book, A Natural History of Pragmatism; The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2007), though in pursuing research for a subsequent volume (in contract with Cambridge as well), following through on the important connection between William James and Henri Bergson, I found myself on the path to Jean Wahl, experiencing a line from Stevens coming to life, “something always seen but never seen before.”

1 In my discussion of Stevens’s abiding concern with the nature of philosophical thinking in A Natural History of Pragmatism, I described him as having a “cosmic consciousness.” In one of his late poems, “The Planet on the Table,” his imaginings of having circled the sun more than seventy times makes him reflect—using the persona “Ariel,” in/with which he signed letters as a young man to the woman who would become his wife: “Ariel was glad he had written his poems. They were of a remembered time/Or of something seen that he liked.//…/His self and the sun were one/And his poems, although makings of his self,/Were no less makings of the sun.//It was not important that they survive./What mattered was that they should bear/Some lineament or character,//Some affluence, if only half-perceived,/In the poverty of their words,/Of the planet of which they were part.” From the time of his youth when his father wrote him letters in which he would paraphrase observations from Charles Sanders Peirce (whose articles of the late 1870s prefiguring “pragmatism” were published in Popular Science Monthly, a magazine to which Garrett Stevens subscribed) and remind him always “to look not at facts but through them,” Wallace Stevens was predisposed to attend no less carefully than Lucretius—a poet whose work continued to matter for him throughout his life—to “the nature of things.” By the time he had come into his own maturity as a poet, Stevens’s attention to the nature of things extended from the microcosmic quantum realities described by Niels Bohr and Max Planck to the macrocosmic “perceptual field” described by Alfred North Whitehead, a spatio- temporal continuum, where, as Stevens quoted in his 1951 Moody Lecture at the University of Chicago, “everything is everywhere at all times, for every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.” And poised at some indeterminate point within this immeasurable plenum, human beings, “a small part of the pantomime,” as Stevens put it, somehow registered in their own matter and memory, “inklings of [our] bond to all that dust.” It is to querying and describing the nature of this experience that Jean Wahl devoted himself, beginning, as a protégé of Henri Bergson (1859-1941)—whose Matiere et Memoire (1902; 5th edition, 1908) was formative for him—with his 1920 doctoral thesis, “Les pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amerique,” centrally preoccupied with William James and . It is when Stevens began his acquaintanceship and correspondence with Jean Wahl—a good time before Wahl’s invitation to Stevens for the 1943 Entretiens de Pontigny—that the poet found himself focusing once more on the significance of Santayana

2 and James, most particularly on the latter and “the will to believe.” Jean Wahl followed the lead of Emile Boutroux, who introduced James to France, wrote the preface to the French translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience, and authored the first book dedicated to James after his death. Using the 1920 Letters of William James edited by his son and, in addition, material still uncollected today (James’s correspondence with the Polish philosopher Wincenty Lutoslavski, for example), Wahl published a biographical study of William James in 1932 as part of a triptych that included Alfred North Whitehead and as well. Wahl, moreover—known by many as “the French Hegel”—devised the interpretations of Hegel long attributed (from the 1930s on) to Alexandre Kojeve; these have been found more recently to belong, in fact, to Wahl’s teaching during the 1920s. He was also the only one qualified to examine Jean Paul Sartre for his “aggregation” in 1929 on Edmund Husserl. To add to this richness, Wahl’s class notes reveal him to have been introducing his students to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) already in the late twenties. Readers of Stevens have long wondered where the poet came to his knowledge of Heidegger, whom he had not read; I realize now that it would have been through conversation and correspondence with Wahl, which, having begun even before the Entretiens de Pontigny occasion, continued until the poet’s death. Wahl’s immersion in the work of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, I realize, too, would equally have informed Stevens, not to speak of Wahl’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the phenomenologists and existentialists, a knowledge which Stevens drew on directly for “A Collect of Philosophy,” his 1951 Chicago lecture. Wahl’s library is housed at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris while his archive—35 boxes containing manuscripts, files with work plans and notes, correspondence (including letters exchanged with contemporary —is housed at the IMEC (l’Institut Memoires de l’edition contemporaine) library at l’abbaye d’Ardenne (near Caen); these materials are not available on-line (and there are not yet plans for this availability). There are also some papers at the Archives nationales in Paris. It is to research in these materials that I am applying for a PSC-CUNY Research Award (Tradtion A) for 2011-12. There are reasonably priced full-pension dormitory rooms available at the IMEC library, where I will spend the greater part of my time; in Paris, I expect to stay in the apartment of friends. (My fluency in French is excellent.) I am grateful to the members of the Review Panel for considering my application and hope that my project is deemed worthy of support.

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