“To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect and a drawback,” Henry James wrote to his friend Perry in Sept. 1867, but he also considered that to be an American was “an excellent preparation for culture”, in so far as Americans could deal, more freely than Europeans “with forms of civilization not their own”, could “pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically) claim their property wherever they found it”.

The first conference organized by the European Society of Jamesian Studies will examine the various manners in which James achieved this aesthetic (re)appropriation – “the vast intellectual fusion and synthesis” he was dreaming of as a young writer. Conversely, what are the multiple ways in which he can be considered as part of a European heritage, interconnecting the culturally distinct European identities, (re)interpreting Europe, so to speak, “in the second degree”, both ethically and aesthetically?

We mean to reevaluate the ethical quality of the whole process, situated as it was at the meeting-point between historical and inner culture. For young Henry James, the American artist abroad possessed the unprecedented advantage of his “national cachet”, “a moral consciousness”, an “unprecedented lightness and vigour”, which generated an active relation with the old continent – compared to the seemingly passive relation of the European to his own history and heritage. How did this energetic conception of art as an active cultural force evolve, from the early interpretation of the international theme, the staging of American identity as innocence beguiled, to the arcane poetics of redemption specific to the major phase? If art was indeed “making life”, or creating values, as James himself later reasserted in his famous reply to H.G. Wells, didn’t those values prove to be at times, as again James enigmatically put it in his NYE preface to “The Turn of the Screw”, “positively all blanks”?

The process of aesthetic (re)appropriation is what we more specifically refer to by borrowing Genette’s conception of transtextuality as “all that puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts” (Palimpsests). The survey will include all that pertains to Henry James’s lifetime - the genesis of his works of fiction, the question of literary influences, and his reinterpretations and re- evaluations of European literary traditions (through his fiction and critical essays). As transtextual relations “stop nowhere”, we also mean to highlight Henry James’s symbolic “life after death”, from a receptionist and transdisciplinary perspective – the multiple and multiform reverberations of his own work in modern and contemporary European fiction, literary theory, theatrical or film adaptations.