Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James's Paris

This paper reexamines and resituates Henry James's curiously embodied spatial memory by turning not to the voluble buildings and vanished architectural limbs in The American Scene, but rather to the "aftertaste" of the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his correspondence, early travel sketches, and later novels. Reading James's attention to lost landmarks and charred landscape in light of their ongoing presence as transnational sites of memory in American magazines helps us rethink Jamesian "historic sense" in The Princess Casamassima and The Ambassadors as an intimate, synesthetic index of social space, and reveals the uncanny space of revolution in James's Paris.