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Professeure invitée à l'ENS de Lyon, Betsy Erkkilä (Northwestern University) a donné une série de conférences sur Leaves of Grass de Walt Whitman. Dans cette deuxième conférence, elle explore l'influence des insurrections populaires en France sur le langage démocratique utilisé dans Leaves of Grass et sur la structure des différentes éditions du recueil.

Professeure invitée à l'ENS de Lyon, Betsy Erkkilä (Northwestern University) a donné une série de conférences sur Leaves of Grass de Walt Whitman. Elle revient ici sur l'aspect révolutionnaire de la poésie de Whitman.

“Meritocracy” is the comic honorific that the American elite has awarded to itself in recognition of its accomplishments since the end of the Cold War. The coinage has proved to be a lasting and significant one because it does so many kinds of necessary work at once. “Meritocracy” assuages the inherent tension that exists between the terms “elite” and “popular democracy” by suggesting that the new American elite has earned its position in an entirely democratic way. Yes, we do have an elite, the word admits, as other nations do: but our elite merely consists of the most “meritorious” members of our democracy, and so any potentially troubling contradiction dissolves in a pleasurable way that both the early Puritans and their plutocratic descendents might easily recognize. The fortunes of the founders of Google and Facebook provide us with reassuring proof that the more we have, the more deserving we are.

In 1916, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore delivered a series of lectures that would eventually be collected into the book, Nationalism. Tagore was writing in the glow of his own celebrity (he had just won the Nobel Prize for literature) and from within the heart of the crisis engulfing the modern world, two years into the slow, grim war that had converted Europe into a labyrinth of trenches covered over with clouds of poison gas. For Tagore, this was the tragic but inevitable outcome of a social calculus that valued efficiency, profit and, especially, the spirit of us versus them that bonded together the inhabitants of one nation and allowed them to go out, conquer and enslave other people, most of them members of no nation at all.