TALK DESCRIPTION: The 'cumulus of history' of my title refers simultaneously to two radically different temporal frameworks--that of the long-term accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere contributing to anthropogenic climate change, and that of the half-hour span of the cumulus cloud of Luke Howard’s nomenclature. As the accelerated pace of climate change now seems to collapse even the distinction between weather and climate, what insights can be gleaned from the juxtaposition of disjunctive temporal phenomena--the fugitive time of Constable’s cloud-studies and the enduring time of accumulated CO2s? Examining the role that economies of storage and accumulation have played in bringing us to this ecological crisis, the paper then asks about what lessons might be learned from methods of observation such as Constable’s--methods determined by the essentially transitory, time-bound, metamorphic and non-repeatable character of their objects. The paper also compares different accounts of the weather and seasonal change, contrasting those documented in the indigenous-rights project Conversations with the Earth with those of the climate-controlled laboratory.

ANNE-LISE FRANÇOIS works in the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel and novel of manners; gender and critical theory; literature and philosophy; and ecocriticism. Her book – Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, 2008) –was awarded the 2010 René Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. A study of the ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action found in the fiction of Mme de Lafayette and Jane Austen, and the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, Open Secrets argues that these works make an open secret of fulfilled experience, where the term “open secret” refers to non-emphatic revelation–revelation without insistence and without rhetorical underscoring. This ethos locates fulfillment not in narrative fruition but in grace understood both as an economy or slightness of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular the work of self-concealment and self-presentation. Questions of how to value unused powers and recognize inconsequential action also inform her essay on Wordsworthian natural piety and genetically engineered foods (Diacritics, Summer 2003 [published 2005]), as well as an earlier article on the gentle force of habit in Hume and Wordsworth (The Yale Journal of Criticism, April 1994). Her current book project “Provident Improvisers: Parables of Subsistence from Wordsworth to Benjamin” focuses on figures of pastoral worldliness, provisionality, and commonness (with “common” understood in the double sense of the political antithesis to enclosure and of the ordinary, vernacular, or profane).