Friday, August 10, 2007

A Different Sade: Food for Thought

In June the British Academy organised a public discussion evening on the Marquis de Sade. The Academy has now posted online a report of the event and the text of five discussion papers presented during the evening. Marian Hobson writes:

"Sade’s wish for recognition as an homme de lettres, proved by his essay Idée sur les romans (1800) was discussed by Katherine Astbury (Warwick) and Thomas Wynne (Exeter). Sade’s estimation of his contemporaries, Astbury showed, corresponds to ours rather than to his own epoch’s: an emphasis on women novelists (Mesdames Graffigny and Riccoboni), an awareness of the difficulty of writing novels during a period of political instability, and his discussion of the relation of the Gothic novel to revolutionary anxieties and trauma."

"For Wynne, repetition and theatricality are threads linking his major explorations of debauchery and cruelty with his desperately unsuccessful but much more conventional theatre, and his continual efforts to get his plays performed. The idea of a rehearsal, with its adjusted order and allowed self-contemplation can explain a pattern in Sade’s actual behaviour: the repetition of attempts to be performed does away with the need to act out the role of reformed writer during the dangers of the Revolution.

"Caroline Warman (Oxford) pointed out that the unlikely and practically contemporaneous couple of Jane Austen and Sade shared effects of style – which Warman illustrated. Both move beyond a common irony on the topic of female education, and allow theatricality to work in their novels as a social structure concerned with disguise, with corruptability and with the ‘acting out’ of fantasies - performed on others: for Sade, in manoeuvres, in social interaction for Austen.

Bob Gillan (University of Manchester) on the contrary discussed not the fantastic but the religious-political elements in Sade, underlining similarities between Sade’s ideas and those of the major figure of the anti-Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre. Will McMorran (Queen Mary, University of London) showed that the implied reader in a Sade novel cannot easily be aligned with the usual figure allowed in a reader response theory such as Wolfgang Iser’s; the teaching of Sade in “the academy” is pornography in the class-room, and needs to be thought through, so that we do not treat the sex and the cruelty as if they weren’t there."

Read the papers, and subsequent discussion here:

www.britac.ac.uk/news/release.asp?NewsID=262

Thursday, August 09, 2007

New Google Tip

Google Translate is one of the most useful new features from Google - as it adds greatly to the flexibility of the translation tools offered by Google, by enabling the searcher to look for search results in one language and automaticalling translating them into another. The retrieved web-pages are presented on a single page alongside translated results. Unfortunately the improvement in technical capability hasn't been matched by an improvement in the quality of the translation.
This search is still in a trial Beta version . Go to:

http://google.com/translate_t

and click on the search results tab.

In Print....

BEAT: Photographs of the Beat Era by Christopher Felver - Published by Last Gasp: "there has never before been a book filled with this many photographs of equal Beat Era personalities -- the most comprehensive photography collection of the people, players, and friends of the Beat era in American literature. Includes photos of: Kathy Acker, David Amram, Karel Appel, Al Aronowitz, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Richard Brautigan, James Broughton, Joan Brown, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Ernesto Cardenal, Carolyn Cassady, Don Cherry, Francisco Clemente, Andrei Codrescu, Gregory Corso, The Dalai Lama, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Durrell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Karen Finley, The Fugs, and many more."

R. Crumb's heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country compiled by the well-known and controversial illustrator Robert Crumb. Biographies of musicians together with a full-color original illustration by the cartoonist. A characteristically idiosyncratic tribute by an underground icon to the musical innovators who helped inspire him, it is packaged with a 21 track CD.

Both available from the Great City Lights Bookstore:

www.citylights.com

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Open Library

"A Library bigger than any building" is the title of Giles Turnbull's article on The Open Library
for the BBC's online Magazine:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6924022.stm

The Open Library can be found at:
www.openlibrary.org