Some highlights from Elizabeth Bishop's personal library at Vassar College. Books from Bishop's library are also in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
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I look forward to discussing Sylvia Plath's poetry and her reading of Virginia Woolf with Dr. Emily James's English 218: Literature by Women: Shakespeare's Sisters class at the University of St. Thomas, MN on March 8.
Woolf Studies Annual 22 contains reviews by Sarah Cornish, Jonathan Goldman, Carolyn Allen, Jean Mills, Lauren Elkin, Matthew Vechinski, John Young, Janine Utell, Gretchen Gerzina, Jane de Gay, Elisa Kay Sparks, Karen Zumhagen-Yekple, and Amanda Golden. The issue is available at a discounted price for a limited time. See here for further details.
I look forward to discussing Sylvia Plath's poetry with Lieutenant Colonel Naomi Mercer's class at the United States Military Academy, West Point on March 3.
This section of Foundations of Research Writing investigates representations of New York City in poetry, prose, and fiction from the early twentieth century to the present. We will consider everyday life at street level, navigating news and transport, beginning with Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," in which the speaker learns of the death of the jazz musician Billie Holliday. O'Hara published this poem in Lunch Poems (1964), a collection of verse he composed while working at the Museum of Modern Art. We will have the opportunity to visit MoMA, seeing the paintings that inspired O'Hara and other writers. Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, we will return to Edith Wharton's Old New York (1924) and E. B. White's Here is New York (1949). We will then explore the literary, artistic, and musical experimentation of the Harlem Renaissance and the ways it has inspired twenty-first century poets. Later in the term, we will join Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Round Table and Dawn Powell in Greenwich Village. We will also encounter the lasting impression of transportation, reading such poems as William Carlos Williams's "The Great Figure" and Barbara Guest's "20," anticipating more recent narratives like Patti Smith's M Train (2015). Our course concludes with the Beat poetry scene and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955). Students in this class will complete essays, blog postings, digital projects, and presentations, becoming more innovative thinkers able to articulate complex critical ideas. This course examines global dimensions of literature and culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Reading British, American, and Anglophone writers, we will consider such topics as changes in technology, cities, transportation, media, education, the visual arts, war, and the British Empire. Our course texts will include James Joyce’s The Dead (1914), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1934), and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1938) as well as the poetry, prose, and short stories of Sarojini Naidu, Una Marson, Claude McKay, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. By completing essays, digital projects, and blog postings, the students in this course will develop a more detailed understanding of the complexity of language, geography, and history.
On December 1, I will be presenting on "Everyday Plath" for Dorothea Lasky's graduate seminar, "Beyond the Confessional: A Poetics for the Everyday," at Columbia University.
Some images from my presentation of Sylvia Plath's poetry and manuscripts for Emily James's English 367: Make it New: 20th Century British Literature and Other Arts class at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Our discussion also commemorated Plath's 83rd birthday and the 53rd anniversary of her composition of the poem "Ariel." “No gate, no lock,
no bolt”: The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminist History exhibition at the Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in Manhattan contains several items related to Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. The Plath items include typescripts of her poems "To Eva Descending a Stair: A Villanelle," "Verbal Calisthenics," "Go Get the Goodly Squab," and "Doomsday" and a letter to Ramona Maher of Texas Christian University thanking her for favorably reviewing Plath's poem "Carnival Nocturne." All of these items were sent or prepared while Plath was living in Lawrence House at Smith College in 1954. Plath mentioned near the close of her letter to Maher that she is a "devotee of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence." Plath had read Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse two years earlier in her twentieth century literature course at Smith. The Woolf items on display include a poem by Vita Sackville-West and the logbook from the Godrevy Lighthouse in Cornwall, which includes the names of Virginia, Thoby, Adrian, and Leslie Stephen from their visit in 1894.
The exhibit closes on Saturday October 24, 2015. |