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Thomas Constantinesco: Melville's Anaesthetics

Prof. Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne), author of Writing Pain in the Nineteenth Century United States, will discuss the role of anesthesia in Herman Melville's writings.

5/28/2025
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Haldeman Hall 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Arts, Arts and Sciences
Thomas Constantinesco, professor of American literature at Sorbonne University, Paris will deliver a public lecture on the figure of the "heroic doctor" in the writings of Herman Melville. Melville’s novels such as Typee, White-Jacket and The Confidence-Man afford insight into the distributive relations of feeling between physician and patient at the time of the invention of modern anesthesia. Prof. Constantinesco examines how anesthesia allows Melville to pose important questions about pain and its treatment as differentiated among the inflictor, the sufferer, and the witness, including their broader aesthetic and ontological import in nineteenth century Anglophone literature. Thomas Constantinesco is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson : l’Amérique à l’essai (Editions rue d'Ulm, 2012) and Writing Pain in the Ninteenth-Century United States (Oxford, 2022), as well as several essays and book chapters on the Transcendentalists, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, and William James. More recently, Constantinesco co-edited with Sari Altschuler a special issue on “Pain” in American Literature (June, 2024), that dealt with the need to reevaluate the aesthetics and politics of pain after Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd. He also translated works by Emerson, Melville, James, Washington Irving, and Mark Twain into French. No registration is required. Event is open to the public.
For more information, contact:
James Godley
james.a.godley@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://english.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=78040

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.