Introducing Aeon
Introducing AEON: The future is now!
Aeon is an online registration and requesting service designed specifically for special collections and research libraries.
Beginning on Monday, October 3, the Beinecke Library will discontinue use of all paper call slips in favor of Aeon online requesting. Yale faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID. Visiting researchers who have registered with us will be assigned a username and password at the desk.
We believe this new system will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service. However, as with any new technology, there may be some issues within the first few weeks that could lead to slight delays in your requests. Thank you for your patience.
For AEON info on the Beinecke home page: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brblvisi.html
For additional information on AEON: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/
For questions: Moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu
“This Is My Life”
“This Is My Life”: The Sonnet and the Emergence of Black Subjectivity
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Beinecke Library, Room 38
Part of a larger research project on the African American sonnet, this talk will explore the role of the sonnet form in the emergence of an individualized subjectivity in turn-of-the-century black writing. African American poetry in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly public. Where it did not take a stand in political debates, it at least presented the kind of exteriorized, carefully crafted persona deemed suitable in the struggle for cultural recognition. It was in the sonnet, that poets were first able to move beyond these constraints toward a fuller self-expression. Dunbar, Braithwaite, and a number of their contemporaries took advantage of the emotional depth associated with the sonnet form to articulate a literary subjectivity that was often partial and paradoxical but constituted an important step toward cultural and psychological emancipation.
Timo Müller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Augsburg, Germany, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2009. His main research areas are modernism, ecocriticism, and African American and Caribbean literature. He has published The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) as well as articles in journals including Anglia, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature. An article on James Weldon Johnson and the genteel tradition is forthcoming. His research at Beinecke is for his current book project, The African American Sonnet.
Image: Aaron Douglas illustration appearing in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, 1926.
Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O’Keeffe Letters Project
The Beiencke Library is pleased to announce the completion of several related projects designed to make the correspondence between photographer, gallerist, and arts advocate Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe more accessible to students, scholars, and general readers for research and reading.
The projects are rooted in the Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe Papers, one the Yale Collection of American Literature’s richest archival collections. This archive, a gift to Yale from Georgia O’Keeffe, supplemented by additional gifts from the Stieglitz family and other donors, has long supported important research not only into the lives and work of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, but also the work of many of their contemporaries, the development of modernist aesthetics, and many other subjects ranging from the history of photography to the culture and landscape of the American southwest.
The present projects open the Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Papers to scholars, students, and general readers in several new ways. The publication of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933, edited by Sarah Greenough, makes this compelling correspondence available outside the Beinecke Library reading room for the first time. (About: My Faraway One at Yale University Press).
Alongside the publication of My Faraway One, the Beinecke Library has completed digitization projects which make related Stieglitz and O’Keeffe archival materials available to scholars in the library and at a distance online. The projects include complete description and scanning of all the materials associated with the Stieglitz and O’Keeffe correspondence, and seamless online organization and access to both metadata and high resolution image files (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Image Guide ; Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Finding Aid with links to images of Stieglitz/O’Keeffe letters). These projects simultaneously preserve and protect the fragile archival documents and make them fully accessible in their entirety to scholars all over the world.
My Faraway One was published jointly by the Yale University Press and the Beinecke Library with the generous support of William Reese, Y’77.
Party!
Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911 – 2011
EXHIBITION CLOSING PARTY
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 5:00
More about Multitudes: http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2011/09/14/multitudes/
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University, 121 Wall Street, New Haven
Free and open to the public
Multitudes
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1855
Founded in 1911 when Yale College graduate Owen Franklin Aldis donated his distinguished library of first editions of American fiction, drama, and poetry to the Yale Library, the Collection of American Literature stands as one of the most important collections of its kind. In the century following Aldis’s gift, the Collection has continued to grow, building on core areas and expanding to include complementary materials, from individual manuscripts to expansive literary archives, from little magazines and lively ephemera to high-tech artists’ books. The highlights exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911–2011 reveal areas of bibliographic strength and new development while demonstrating the Collection’s extraordinary richness, eclecticism, and depth. From the colonial period to the present, the Collection celebrates American Literature as a living art form with a complex history. Its evolving and vibrant traditions are a subject worthy of both rigorous scholarly attention as well as leisurely pursuit for the general reader.
Image: Samuel Hollyer, lithograph from a daguerreotype of Walt Whitman by Gabriel Harrison, 1855. Title page, Leaves of Grass, first edition 1855. An example of the Yale Collection of American Literature’s great strength in printed, manuscript, and visual materials documenting American Poetry is its outstanding collection of materials relating to the life and writing of Walt Whitman. One of the most important works of American Literature, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the democratic spirit, the emotional and intellectual power of literature and art, and of the poet himself. In this work, Whitman introduced a new mode of writing and of expression. In the 150 years since it was first published, Leaves of Grass and its author have played a crucial role in shaping American literature and America’s literary imagination. The Beinecke’s Whitman holdings contain copies of all major editions of Leaves of Grass, including five copies of the extraordinarily rare first edition, published in 1855, and several copies of the 1856 second edition, featuring a quotation from a letter Whitman received from Ralph Waldo Emerson in response to the first edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career…” In addition to printed works, the Library’s Walt Whitman Collection contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, art, and other material dating from 1842-1949, and features the Whitmania of Yale benefactors Owen Aldis, Louis Mayer Rabinowitz, Adrian Van Sinderen and others. Outstanding manuscripts include Whitman’s early 1850s text “Pictures,” often called a prototype for poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass because its expansive energy predicts the experimental free verse that characterizes Whitman’s work. The Collection also includes numerous photographs of the poet. Whitman was quite conscious of his public persona and understood the powerful role that photography, still a new and developing technology, could play in helping him to reach his American audience. From the “rough” depicted in the portrait on the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, to the respectable bard appearing in the edition published five years later, to the “Good Gray Poet” that emerged in the 1860s, Whitman’s photographic image evolved over the course of his career as a writer and public figure. The Whitman Collection also includes artworks and objects such as bronze medallions and Whitman’s own eyeglasses.
For more information about the Yale Collection of American Literature, contact Louise Bernard, Curator of Prose and Drama (louise.bernard@yale.edu) or Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry (nancy.kuhl@yale.edu). Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection American Literature was organized with the assistance of Charlotte Parker, Y’2013.
Poetry at Beinecke Library 
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