Editing Archival Materials: Robin Blaser’s Astonishment Tapes
Fri, Dec 5, 2014
4:00 PM
English Department Lounge (Room 4409)
How do we bring something of the cultural past to a clear light without falsifying its complicated historical context? Join literary scholar Miriam Nichols as she discusses the work behind her publication of Robin Blaser’s Astonishment Tapes, an 800+ page transcript of 20 audiotapes. Cutting conversational static and repetitions to emphasize narrative threads and create a document of publishable length is not always the goal. But should scholars abandon the book form and post the whole thing online? Following her talk, Nichols will be joined by Ammiel Alcalay and Lost & Found editors Iemanja Brown, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, Claudia Moreno Parsons, Josh Schneiderman, Talia Shalev, and Kyle Waugh in a round-table discussion on problems in contemporary textual scholarship.
Cosponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative; the MFA in Art Criticism & Writing at School for Visual Arts thePhD Program in English.
Participants
Ammiel Alcalay
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, critic, scholar, and activist who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include Islanders (City Lights), and neither wit nor gold: from then (Ugly Duckling). His After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota), was the subject of a 20th anniversary conference at Georgetown in 2012. He has translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović, both from City Lights. A new book of essays, a little history, and a 10th anniversary reprint of from the warring factions came out in 2013 from re:public / UpSet. He is the initiator and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry, for which he has just received an American Book Award.
Miriam Nichols
Miriam Nichols is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley where she teaches literary theory, modernism, and American literature. Her publications include editions of Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest: Collected Poems and The Fire: Collected Essays (both University of California Press, 2006) and Radical Affections: Essays on the Practice of Outside (Alabama UP, 2010). More recently, she has prepared an edition of Robin Blaser’s The Astonishment Tapes, a series of autobiographical audiotapes recorded in 1974 (forthcoming from Alabama UP) and she is currently working on a literary biography of Robin Blaser.
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