WYOMING INSTITUTE FOR HUMANITIES RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, LARAMIE
Jonathan White
Professor Emeritus in Literature, University of Essex
Visiting Speaker Presentation
“Retracing in Balzac a Socio-Cultural Archaeology of Paris”
Introduction: Balzac anticipated the contemporary city of danger and actual violence
that we must now urgently seek to understand. I attempt to retrace the ‘archaeological
work’ (travail archéologique) that Balzac claimed he was doing on behalf of future
generations. In a recent influential book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas
Piketty has argued that, just as Jane Austen in Britain, Balzac had a remarkable grasp
of the economic conditions of his period. Piketty fills out something that Frederick
Engels had attested: ‘I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional
historians, economists and statisticians, together.’ However, the Comédie Humaine
promulgates no such idée maitresse of human progress as does a Marxist version of
history. Instead, it discloses a poetics; in particular of what is gangrened and polluted
about the city at the heart of French society, Paris. Already before Baudelaire, what is
most striking for Balzac is frequently what is most evil or monstrous. The sites of its
appearance are, metaphorically speaking, what he called “sewers of poetry.”
Biography: Although British by birth, White was raised in the USA and Australia. His
PhD for Cambridge was on Shakespeare, but he now publishes mainly on European
Literature, with increasing focus on the Romantic period. White’s two books on Italy
are Italy: The Enduring Culture (2001) and Italian Cultural Lineages (2007). He is the
editor of Recasting the World: Writing After Colonialism (1993). He also co-edited and
wrote Introductions for The City and the Ocean: Journeys, Memory, Imagination
(2012) and Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (2016). White
recently contributed a chapter on Manzoni for the Oxford Handbook of European
Romanticism (2016). He has held fellowships in the University of Melbourne, the
Italian Academy of Columbia University, the Humanities Research Centre of the
Australian National University and the National Sun-Yat Sen University. In a visiting
capacity he has taught for periods at Melbourne and Duke Universities and at the
National Chengchi University. White is frequently invited to contribute program
articles for the Royal Opera House, mainly on aspects of the Italian operatic repertoire.