6月8日-11日にメリーランド大学カレッジパーク校で開催される、Society for Early Americanistsという学会で発表をしてきます。
私が参加するパネルは以下のとおりです：
FRIDAY, 9 JUNE
Panel F: Contested Republics I
Panel Chair: Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University, SUNY
1. Samuel Seabury: Canonized and Noncanonical (James Greene, Indiana State University)
2. Asylum America: Exclusion of Others in Crèvecoeur and Brockden Brown (Yoshiaki Furui, University of California, Berkeley, Rikkyo University)
3. Speeches from the Dock: Irish Patriotism, Political Insurrection, and January 6th (Mark Kamrath, University of Central Florida)
サバティカル中はメルヴィルの単著原稿と並行して、アメリカにおける「アサイラム」という概念に関する研究を進めており、今回の発表はその一環です。クレヴクールの『アメリカの農夫の手紙』と、チャールズ・ブロックデン・ブラウンの『エドガー・ハントリー』を題材に取り上げます。いずれこの論は論文化したいと思っているので、よいフィードバックを得られればと期待しています。
以下が発表の要旨です：
In Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), America is idealized as “the asylum of freedom . . [and as] the refuge of distressed Europeans.” However, as if to contest this national ideal, Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1798) depicts how Clithero Edny, an Irish immigrant, is unjustifiably suspected of murder by American neighbors and is eventually evicted from community as alien, thus debunking the “America as asylum” myth. The same can be said of Crèvecœur’s narrative, in which the narrator, in the political turbulence of the Revolutionary War, finds himself persecuted by the Whigs and flees to the Indian territory in the end.
Although these narratives tell the nation’s failure to live up to its ideal, I argue that they also point to its survival in very implicit ways. Both Letters and Edgar Huntly simultaneously negate and retain the ideal by registering its presence on the margin of the national territory. In Letters, despite his earlier presentation of America as asylum, Farmer James ends up finding asylum in the Indian village. In Edgar Huntly, Clithero is ultimately sent to a mental asylum. Thus, the ideal of America as asylum is found in the outlying area that is allegedly outside, yet definitely within, America. Thinking about the ideal of America as asylum would urge a reconsideration of what constituted “America” in this period.
