Ransom Center Magazine

Ezra Pound

Thinking outside the (tux) box: A novel solution to preserving the quirky diaries of the Guy Davenport collection

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Last year, Ransom Center archivist Richard Workman brought to my attention some journals that he was cataloging as part of the Guy Davenport Papers. Guy Davenport (1927–2005) was an American author, literary critic, and artist. Throughout his adulthood, he regularly kept journals of his day-to-day life and activities (including his feelings about his marriage gone bad, [Read more…] about Thinking outside the (tux) box: A novel solution to preserving the quirky diaries of the Guy Davenport collection

Dear Guy: Letters in the Guy Davenport collection

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Here’s the plot of a story a writer told me he had joked about writing with Guy Davenport: For about two days in the 1970s, Queen Elizabeth, the Dalai Lama, and Thomas Merton were within twelve miles of one another in central Kentucky, about a mile from Lincoln’s birthplace. Merton lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Dalai Lama was visiting him, and Queen Elizabeth was staying on a nearby farm [Read more…] about Dear Guy: Letters in the Guy Davenport collection

Fellows Find: The Christine Brooke-Rose archive

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Stephanie Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the English and Creative Writing Department at Aberystwyth University. At the Ransom Center, she analyzed the Christine Brooke-Rose papers for her dissertation, which is a single-author study on the writer, looking at the neglect of her work as a British author by the industry. Jones’s research was supported by a 2014–2015 Dissertation Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center, jointly funded by the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.

 

The subject of neglected British experimental authors has emerged as a poignant topic of critical discussion over the last few years. Writers of the 1960s and 1970s who had been influenced by the Second World War, as well as the highly reflexive, avant-garde literature produced bysuch modernist heavyweights as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, are beginning to be reassessed as having something useful to offer to the current critical climate. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: The Christine Brooke-Rose archive

Lost in the Archives: Video highlights fellow’s research methods

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Kamran Javadizadeh, an assistant professor in the English Department at Villanova University, visited the Ransom Center this fall to conduct research for his current book project, “Bedlam & Parnassus: The Institutionalization of Midcentury American Poetry.”

The idea for Javadizadeh’s book began when he discovered that Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop could both see the U.S. Capitol from their very different positions in 1950—one was a patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital and the other the poet laureate. He argues that the combination of these two poets creates an understanding of what poetry meant culturally and societally in post-war America. While at the Ransom Center, Javadizadeh studied the Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound collections.

Javadizadeh’s work was jointly funded by the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship and the Dorot Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies, as part of the Ransom Center’s fellowship program.

The Ransom Center is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its fellowship program in 2014–2015.