scholarly journals What a Performance

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 610-630
Author(s):  
Anna Mendelssohn ◽  
Sara Crangle
Keyword(s):  
John Ashbery ◽  
Vanishing Points ◽  
Susan Howe ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
British Poetry ◽  
Political Exile ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The University ◽  
A Performance

From the late seventies until her death, british-born writer and artist anna mendelssohn (1948–2009) authored fifteen poetry collections and at least two dozen short fictions and dramas, often publishing under the name Grace Lake. A consummate autodidact, Mendelssohn's passion was international vanguardism, a truth exemplified by the writers she translated: in Turkey in 1969, the poetry of political exile Nâzim Hikmet; from the late nineties, the work of Gisèle Prassinos, the surrealist child prodigy celebrated by André Breton. Mendelssohn's devotion to a modernist legacy situates her within the British Poetry Revival, a label applied to a wave of avant-garde poets that surfaced in the sixties and seventies. Given that she spent her last three decades in Cambridge, Mendelssohn can be further located on the margins of “that most underground of poetic brotherhoods, the Cambridge Poets” (Leslie 28). Mendelssohn's poems appeared in journals receptive to experimentalism, among them Parataxis, Jacket, Critical Quarterly, and Comparative Criticism. In the 1990s, Mendelssohn was anthologized in collections released by Virago, Macmillan, and Reality Street. Iain Sinclair included her in his influential Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996); in 2004, she featured in Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points (Salt Publishing, 2004) alongside John Ashbery and Susan Howe. Her most readily available text remains Implacable Art (Salt Publishing, 2000). Increasingly recognized in her later years, Mendelssohn gave poetry readings at the University of Cambridge, London's Southbank Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many other venues.

The Trial That Never Was: Russian Documentary Theatre and the Pursuit of Justice

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Time Span ◽  
First Century ◽  
Documentary Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The University ◽  
Judicial History

Twenty-first-century Russian theatre artists have increasingly taken to using material from real-life events to explore the intricacies of injustice in the civic sphere and its connection to the country's past. In a fifteen-year time span documentary forms have come to the forefront of Russia's theatrical avant-garde. In this article Molly Flynn offers a close reading of one of the most politically charged productions to have emerged from Moscow's booming documentary theatre – One Hour Eighteen: the Trial that Wasn't but Should Have Been (2010). The play uses verbatim texts from the prison and medical staff directly involved in the final days before the murder of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitskii in 2009. Setting the piece in a theatrical courtroom, the creators of One Hour Eighteen place their work in the context of Russia's judicial history in the previous century, during which the resemblance of trials to theatre has often been uncomfortably close. Molly Flynn is a doctoral candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the history and significance of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia.

‘Stirling's worth’: architectural quality and the Florey building, Oxford

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 291-299
Author(s):  
Igea Troiani
Keyword(s):  
Early Phase ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The University

In 1976, Gavin Stamp published the legendary review, ‘“Stirling's Worth”: the History Faculty Building’. Written from the perspective of a user of the building, it offers a critical assessment of the quality of what is recognised by architectural connoisseurs as one of James Stirling's masterpieces of avant-garde architecture; designed in the architect's early phase, 1950–74. Apart from the History Faculty building at the University of Cambridge, 1964–67, early period works also include Stirling and Gowan's iconic Engineering building at the University of Leicester, 1959–63, and the lesser known Florey building at The Queen's College in Oxford, 1966–71 [1].

Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism & the Building of the Archive for New Poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunsong Kim
Keyword(s):  
San Diego ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Collection Development ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Archival Practice ◽  
Small Press ◽  
The University

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP’s stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, “experimental” poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP’s collection development priority. I interrogate two main points in this article: 1) How does whiteness—though visible and open—remain unquestioned as an archival practice? and 2) How are white archives financed and managed? Utilizing the ANP’s financial proposals, internal administrative correspondences, and its manuscript appraisals and collections, I argue that the ANP’s collection development priority is racialized, and this prioritization is institutionally processed by literary scholarship that linked innovation to whiteness. Until very recently, US Experimental and “avant-garde” poetry has been indexed to whiteness. The indexing of whiteness to experimentation, or the “new” can be witnessed in the ANP’s collection development priorities, appraisals, and acquisitions. I argue that the structure of the manuscripts acquired by the ANP reflect literary scholarship that theorized new poetry as being written solely by white poets and conclude by examining the absences in the Archive for New Poetry.

INTERVIEW WITH PETINA GAPPAH

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Faith Mkwesha
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Language ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Third ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Book Award ◽  
The University ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
University Of Zimbabwe

This interview was conducted on 16 May 2009 at Le Quartier Francais in Franschhoek, Cape Town, South Africa. Petina Gappah is the third generation of Zimbabwean writers writing from the diaspora. She was born in 1971 in Zambia, and grew up in Zimbabwe during the transitional moment from colonial Rhodesia to independence. She has law degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Graz. She writes in English and also draws on Shona, her first language. She has published a short story collection An Elegy for Easterly (2009), first novel The Book of Memory (2015), and another collection of short stories, Rotten Row (2016).  Gappah’s collection of short stories An Elegy for Easterly (2009) was awarded The Guardian First Book Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the richest prize for the short story form. Gappah was working on her novel The Book of Memory at the time of this interview.

2005 Verriest Medal awarded to Professor John D. Mollon

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. ii-ii
Keyword(s):  
Color Vision ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Visual Neuroscience ◽  
Evolutionary Origins ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Color Vision Tests ◽  
Spectral Coding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

The International Colour Vision Society awarded the 2005 Verriest Medal to John D. Mollon, Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, UK. This award is bestowed by the Society to honor long-term contributions to the field of color vision. If the field of color vision were itself a rainbow, then Professor Mollon's contributions cover nearly its full spectrum, including the isolation and elucidation of basic chromatic coding mechanisms and the constraints that they impose on human (and more generally primate) visual performance, the genetic basis of spectral coding mechanisms, the ecological influences on and evolutionary origins of chromatic discrimination. He has been instrumental in the design of several new color vision tests and has extensively exploited abnormal models, both congenital and acquired, to further our understanding of normal mechanisms. He is especially appreciated for his keen and profound sense of the history of science, in particular with respect to the field of color vision. He has been a member of the society for over 25 years and is currently serving on its board of directors. He organized the 2001 ICVS meeting in Cambridge, celebrating the bicentennial of Thomas Young's lecture on color vision.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document