Bibliofile

Dean Irvine: Working Group Talk, April 11, 3:30, Beinecke Library Room 39. Irvine is the Canadian Studies Bicentennial Visiting Professor at Yale for 2011-12. At Dalhousie University, he is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project. Irvine will talk about the relationship between the rare books and digital humanities using examples from the Beinecke Library and his current project, ModLabs.

ModLabs is a history of modernist laboratories (aesthetic, scientific, and corporate) and their relationship to the formation of digital-humanities laboratories and collaboratories. From Hugo Münsterberg’s psychology lab at Harvard in the 1890s and Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York in the early 1900s to the arts labs of the 1920s and 1930s (the Vkhutemas in Moscow, the Bauhaus at Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, the Bureau de recherches Surréalistes in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Design Laboratory in New York, the New Bauhaus and Institute of Design in Chicago, and the Mass Observation project in Britain), the modernist period witnessed the emergence of institutional formations that brought together artists, writers, film makers, architects, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, scientists, and engineers in a transatlantic cultural movement that traversed disciplinary boundaries and fostered new modes of collaboration. While not all early to mid-century modernists were inclined to found labs or practice their craft in such environments, writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein drew analogies between aesthetic and laboratory experiment. With the creation of studio-laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s (Experiments in Art and Technology in New York, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Visible Language Workshop at MIT), the late twentieth century welcomed a new generation of collaboration among artists, scientists, engineers, and industry that modeled itself on avant-garde labs of the early twentieth century. The opening of MIT’s Media Laboratory in 1985 announced its experiments with digital media being “as much like the Bauhaus as a research lab,” which at once moved toward the formation of digital-humanities and new-media laboratories of the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries and, at the same time, returned to the avant-garde labs of the modernist period. This genealogy of laboratories and the collaborations that they stage is the blueprint of ModLabs.

Dean Irvine’s Bio
Aside from being Director of the Editing Modernism in Canada project and Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, as well as current Bicentennial Canadian Studies Visiting Professor at Yale, Dean Irvine is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada (2008), and editor of The Canadian Modernists Meet (2005), Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson (2003), and Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (1998). His latest book, Variant Readings: Editing Canadian Literatures, is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press. With Sandra Djwa and Zailig Pollock, he is a General Editor of The Collected Works of P.K. Page and its online companion, The Digital Page, and he is the Director and General Editor of the Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne at the University of Ottawa Press.

Kyle Dugdale (Architecture): Uriel Birnbaum: Architecture, Modern – - Fiction

Among the most visually compelling items in the Beinecke’s collection is a slim, magnificently illustrated volume by Uriel Birnbaum, published in Leipzig and Vienna in 1924, and entitled Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern.  Its title would seem to support its classification in Yale’s catalogue under “Architecture, Modern – - Fiction,” a category within which it currently provides the sole entry; and both the style of its text and the nature of its illustrations – or more accurately, perhaps, of its illuminations – might prompt the casual reader to mistake it for a children’s book.  Other libraries have classified it as a “fairy tale”; and indeed, the story begins – and, perhaps, ends – as all good fairy tales should.  As a result, it would be easy to overlook both its deep connections to the traditions of architectural theory and its critical stance towards the arguments of architectural modernity.

Dugdale will present his preliminary investigations into the identity of this enigmatic book, beginning with an examination of traces suggested by the otherwise incongruous image on the book’s title page, exploring the possibilities for creative miscategorization, speculating on its status within the disputed tradition of books about buildings, and outlining some of the unanswered questions to be addressed by future research.

Kristin Graves (French / African American Studies): “Mapping la belle créole“

Kristin Adele Graves is a fourth year joint doctoral candidate in African American Studies and French. She holds a B.A. from Tulane University in French, English, and Art History, as well as minors in History and Italian Studies. Grave’s work engages literature alongside popular cultural production such as music, dance, and cinema. Graves is especially interested in Louisiana and Haiti, and gendered geographies of both.

Graves will be discussing dissertation research she recently completed with the support of a Beinecke Research Fellowship.  Her dissertation is on representations of “la belle créole,” or beautiful Creole woman, in French and Creole languages.  The project tracks transmutations of the “beautiful Creole”—and of Haiti, Louisiana, and the French Antilles as metaphoric beautiful Creole bodies— across time and space.

As a Glissantian point of convergence, la belle créole illustrates the many intersections of erotics, aesthetic ideals, and political ideology.  The dissertation thus aims to examine book culture, literature, performances, and popular song together through the international circulation of la belle créole as a recurrent trope from the late 17th century to our contemporary moment.

In mapping la belle créole through linguistic, temporal, and geographic dimensions, this project aims to make contributions in the realms of French, Caribbean, and American cultural studies.  For her presentation, Graves will be sharing research relevant to the first half of the dissertation, which traces the history of la belle créole through early French travel narratives, Louisianan literature, nineteenth and twentieth century Haitian nationalisms, and Josephine Baker’s spectacular embodiments of “Creole” personae in interwar France.

In October, the Yale Working Group in Book History welcomes Renata Ago, Professor of History at the La Sapienza Universita di Roma, to give a guest lecture at the Beinecke Library. Prof. Ago will speak on the the library and the antiquarian collection of Giovanni Ciampini, a Roman member of the Republic of letters who died in 1698. In her talk, she will discuss the relationships between his interests in antiquarianism and in science that emerge from the catalogue of his books as well as the role of his library in the construction of his reputation and social status. Tea and cookies to follow.

All fall 2011 events take place from 4:30-6 in Rm 38/39 of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

In the field of medieval and renaissance manuscript studies, computer technology and non-invasive technical analysis offer new promising and innovative ways to address issues relating to codices and fragments.  Beinecke Osborn fa.1, a manuscript of John Gower’s works (London, ca. 1410-20), is a case study for how a cultural artifact can yield new information in at least two significant ways, through 1) the digital enhancement of text severely damaged by damp and mildew, and 2) the identification of pigments that can reveal subtleties of manuscript production techniques, especially in the rubrication of texts and the decoration of flourished initials.

Participants in this brainstorming session will include medievalists, conservators, computer scientists, and curators, who will attempt to propose a future research agenda utilizing new technologies – a research agenda that will shed light on the production and transmission of the manuscripts of John Gower in the 15^th century.

All fall 2011 events take place from 4:30-6 in Rm 38/39 of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.