Poetry Readings

Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry Reading
Thursday, March 31, 2011 5:30 PM
Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street
An Evening of Poetry at the Gallery
Contact: artgalleryinfo@yale.edu

A reading in conjunction with the Yale University Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition, a collaboration among a team of students from Yale and the University of Maryland, College Park, features works that address, question, and complicate the paradigms that have mapped meanings onto African American bodies throughout history. The 54 works selected for the exhibition, representing the Gallery’s commitment during the past decade to growing this area of the collection, include paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and photographs.

The Beinecke Library is a co-sponsor of this event.

A reading of letters between psychoanalyst and patient

			A. A. Brill and Mabel Dodge Luhan: A Reading from their Correspondence   by Patricia Everett and Paul Lippmann Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 5:00 pm Psychoanalyst A. A. Brill maintained an active correspondence with his patient Mabel Dodge Luhan, a writer and New York salon hostess. Luhan’s analysis began in June 1916 and continued until she moved to Taos, New Mexico, in December 1917, after which analyst and writer corresponded for nearly thirty years. This reading from the Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers presents a selection of letters that reflect the highly personal, expressive, and exploratory nature of their correspondence. Luhan recounted her dreams and reported on her current mental states. Brill responded with advice, warmth, and forceful interpretations. These letters provide views into often inaccessible aspects of analytic relationships.

			Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul   An exhibition on view through June 13 Web Exhibition Psyche & Muse explores the influence of cultural, clinical, and scientific dialogues about human psychology on twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers. Tracing important themes in the lives and work of key figures and artistic communities represented in the Beinecke Library’s Modern European and American Literature collections, the exhibition documents a range of imaginative encounters involving the arts and the study of the mind. The books, manuscripts, and visual works in Psyche & Muse represent aesthetic and philosophic lineages from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era; the exhibited materials reveal ways in which the study of psychology and core concepts of psychoanalysis were both intertwined with and opposed to artistic production throughout the twentieth century. Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul features materials from the Beinecke Library’s twentieth-century collections, including the Modern European Books and Manuscripts Collection, the Yale Collection of American Literature, and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters; figures represented in the exhibition include: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Antonin Artaud, James Baldwin, Andre Breton, A. A. Brill, Herman Broch, H. D., Mable Dodge Luhan, Max Ernst, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Moss Hart, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, George Platt Lynes, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, Glenway Wescott, Richard Wright, and Gregory Zilboorg.

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All events and exhibitions are free and open to the public. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library | 121 Wall Street | New Haven | Connecticut

Discovering E. M. Forster’s Secret Lives

Wendy Moffat discusses her new biography of E. M. Forster

Using photographs, images of holograph letters, and other evidence, Wendy Moffat will explore a few puzzles she had to solve in writing her biography of the British novelist E. M. Forster. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster won the Biographers’ Club Prize, was selected as an ALA Stonewall Honor Book and a New York Times’ Top 10 for 2010. If you’re interested in biography, history of sexuality, archives, social history, or literature, this talk is for you.

Wendy Moffat is a Professor of English at Dickinson College, and she earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University. She was a visiting fellow at Beinecke in 2007.

Friday, March 25, 2011 4:00 PM
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (BRBL)
121 Wall St., New Haven, CT 06511
(Location is wheelchair accessible)

Open To General Public
Free Admission

Contact Information:
Beinecke Library
203-432-2977
beinecke.library@yale.edu

Hilton Als at Beinecke

THE JAMES WELDON JOHNSON MEMORIAL LECTURE | 2011  

A Reading & Conversation with New Yorker critic Hilton Als

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Hilton Als, a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker, is a recipient of a Guggenheim Award for Creative Writing, and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He has written for The Village Voice and The Nation, and served as Editor-at-Large at Vibe magazine. He edited the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art” (November 1994-March 1995) and recently co-curated the exhibition “Self-Consciousness” with the artist Peter Doig at the Veneklasen Werner Gallery in Berlin (2010). His book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published by FSG in 1996. Als has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Arts and Letters at the Beinecke Library was founded by Carl Van Vechten in 1941 in honor of James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), poet, novelist, lyricist, diplomat, educator, and noted civil rights leader. The Collection celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.

Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and Calhoun College

Psyche & Muse Online

Detailed information about collection materials featured in the current exhibition, Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul are now available online: Psyche & Muse online .

Books, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and objects described in the Exhibition Checklists & Object Descriptions may located by consulting the Library’s primary finding tools: Orbis, the catalog for books; Yale’s Finding Aid Database for manuscript materials; and the Beinecke Digital Library.

Psyche and Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul explores the influence of cultural, clinical, and scientific dialogues about human psychology on twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers. Tracing important themes in the lives and work of key figures and artistic communities represented in the Beinecke Library’s Modern European and American Literature collections, Psyche and Muse documents a range of imaginative encounters involving the arts and the study of the mind. On view from January 28 through June 13, 2011 at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 121 Wall Street, New Haven. Free and open to the public.

Image:  Aldo Piromalli, Psychiatry, or Death of the Soul, Amsterdam: Vrije Vogel Pers, 1977. A tiny fold-out flier, this colorful comic strip expresses Piromalli’s personal frustration, exiled in Amsterdam on pain of incarceration in a mental asylum should he return to Italy. But it also echoes the broader revolt against psychiatric norms and inhuman treatment that ignited social protest across Europe in the sixties and seventies. Here Piromalli objects to the label “schizophrenic” and singles out “brain-slicing operations.” Other frames in the strip portray electroshocks and drug therapy in equally graphic ways.