Celebrating 2012

Congratulations to the many scholars conducting new research in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the Yale Collection of American Literature in 2012. Information about some of this year’s most exciting projects can be found at the following links.

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White by Emily Bernard
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/03/26/cvv-bernard/

“Gertrude Gertrude Stein Stein: What are the Questions?” by Joan Retallack
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/25/retallack/

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/11/18/cohen/

“The ‘Librarian’s Dream-Prince’: Carl Van Vechten and America’s Modernist Cultural Archives Industry,” by Kirsten MacLeod
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/11/18/macleod/

1917, Impossible Year by Wendy Moffat
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/10/moffat/

On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson By William Souder
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/12/01/souder/

Saul Steinberg: A Biography By Deirdre Bair
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/12/01/bair/

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/11/10/luhan/

Documenting Abyssinia: Imperial Ethiopia and African-American Literature byNadia Nurhussein
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/01/nurhussein/

“History and Ordinary Womanhood” by Teresa Barnes
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/07/12/new-research-barnes/

Delmore Schwartz’s ‘International Consciousness’ by Alexander Runchman
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/09/05/runchman/

“Radical Reading Practices in the Archives of H.D. and Gertrude Stein: A New Approach to Autobiography” by Zoe Mercer-Golden, Yale Class of 2013
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/06/04/mercer-golden/

My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann Edited by Irene Goldman-Price
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/05/14/wharton-bahlmann/

The American H. D., by Annette Debo
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/05/10/new-research-debo/

“Making a Cosmiconcept: The Negotiation of Authority in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Visual Art and Writing” by Zoe Mercer-Golden, Yale Class of 2013
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/05/29/mercer-golden/

A Curious Peril: H.D. and Late Modernism, by Lara Vetter
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/04/18/vetter/

“(Re)Storing Happiness: Toward an Ecopoetic Reading of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton,”  by Cynthia Hogue
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/04/09/new-research-from-the-beinecke-collections/

Thornton Wilder: A Life By Penelope Niven
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/11/01/niven-wilder/

“Lost in the Zoo: The Art of Charles Sebree” by Rachel Kempf, Yale College Class of 2013
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/05/24/kempf/

“Providing Context: Schervee & Bushong Group Portrait Photograph of Sigmund Freud and Participants in the Psychology, Pedagogy and School Hygiene Conference at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, September 1909” by Matthew Mason
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/07/13/frued-mason/

“John Hersey’s Yale Education” by Zara Kessler, Yale College Class of 2012
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/06/01/kessler/

“Quite a Story to Tell: The Laughs and Loves of Mary Welsh,” Katherine Fein, Yale College Class of 2014
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/05/25/fein/

“Placing Joseph Bruchac: Native Literary Networks and Cultural Transmission in the Contemporary Northeast” by Christine M. Delucia
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Studies-in-American-Indian-Literatures,673235.aspx

BEINECKE VISITING FELLOW TALK

BEINECKE VISITING FELLOW TALK
What Will Lettrism Turn Out to Be?
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Beinecke Library, Room 39

Published in 1954, Maurice Lemaître’s What is Lettrism? sought to define a movement that had been making headlines in Paris for nearly a decade. No arena of avant-garde experimentation seemed beyond its reach. Poetry, music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture—the Lettrists announced a new approach to all of them. And in fact the creative energy unleashed by the movement rippled across postwar Europe (and well beyond) for decades to come. Yet today Lettrism is virtually unknown. Beyond a small coterie of initiates, combatants, and connoisseurs, it is remembered at best as a “precursor” of Situationism, or perhaps an esoteric form of Concrete Poetry. Now finishing a two-month fellowship at Beinecke, Frédéric Acquaviva will reveal some of the discoveries from his first plunge into the massive archive of Maurice Lemaître, acquired by Beinecke in 2009, as he discusses his continuing struggle to define Lettrism’s legacy in the tweny-first century, a task that has kept him busy for more than fifteen years.

Frédéric Acquaviva is a French composer living in Berlin. Working with authors such as Pierre Guyotat and Jean-Luc Parant, Frédéric composes experimental music and sound installations that focus on the possibilities of the voice. He is a specialist in the history of Lettrism and sound poetry and has orchestrated and produced the symphonies of Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, and Maurice Lemaître. In the last two years, Frédéric curated a major exhibition on Gil J Wolman, I am Immortal and Alive, at Barcelona’s MACBA, the first Parisian retrospective on Lettrism, Bientôt les Lettristes (with Bernard Blistène) in the Passage de Retz, and Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s (with Kaira Cabanas) at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has written monographs on Jacques Spacagna and Bernard Heidsieck, and produced Radio/Phonies, a show on various artists and poets, including Henri Chopin, Marcel Hanoun, Pierre Albert-Birot, and Otto Muehl, for France Culture.