Speculative Knowledge and the Situated Dispositifs of Zora Neale Hurston and Stella Adler’s Digital Film Collections

The Magnificent Lunatic:The Life and Work of Sarah Bernhardt Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Rene Berger's Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin Click for larger view View full resolution Sarah Bernhardt as Mrs. Clarkson in L' Étrangère, 1887. Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin In 1878, Sarah Bernhardt's every activity was news. The Exposition Universelle brought tourists to Paris to see the big attraction, Monsieur Eiffel's iron tower. But Sarah upstaged what many were calling an architectural monstrosity. She was smitten with the hot-air balloons in the Tuileries Gardens, which for a price would take customers up 500 meters to gaze at the city. On a cold, cloudless day. Sarah ascended in a balloon and convinced the aeronaut to release the tether. Soon they were sailing over the fairgrounds, floating above the Eiffel Tower's lattice monument and beyond the Louvre's indistinct pallor. The breeze strengthened; Sarah's gossamer white scarves flew from her shoulders, a semaphore to the crowds below. Her fans pointed skyward. "Our Sarah. Our Miss Bernhardt," they shouted. She was caught, her day of anonymity ruined. She hid in the shelter of the basket and drank several flutes of champagne as the balloon drifted beyond the city. When she returned home that evening, reporters were waiting in the foyer of her house. Also waiting for her was a summons to appear before the administrator of the Comédie Française. Theater troupe members needed permission to leave Paris. Moreover, her antics were becoming a disgrace; her excursion was in all of the papers. Sarah blamed the winds for carrying her beyond the city's borders—and she did not appreciate being told what she could and could not do. She threatened what she could and could not do. She threatened to resign. Her box-office value was already too high to jeopardize, so the administrator backed down. By 1878, Sarah was the leading star of French theater, but it had not been easy. Her overnight success had been a decade in the making. Early in her [End Page 98] career, Bernhardt seemed the least likely to succeed as an actress. When she was finally cast in bit parts, nothing in her performances convinced teachers or directors otherwise. Click for larger view View full resolution Gismonda miniposter by Alphonse Mucha, 1894. Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin She was too skinny. One columnist announced that she was so thin she had no need for an umbrella; she could walk between raindrops. Another critic said she should watch out for ravenous dogs; they might mistake her for a bone. And the public's favorite: "You know she's such a liar; she may even be fat." Instead of hiding her thinness under gathered gowns and flounces, she wore costumes that accentuated her wasp waist and slender limbs. Her hair was also all wrong, uncontrollably kinky, earning her the moniker "the blonde Negress." Others said, "That isn't hair; that's a mop." She wore her mane proudly, sometimes teasing it out in a halo around her face. She had frequent and acute stage fright but accepted it as a part of her desire to deliver a great performance. When one young, inexperienced actress bragged that she didn't know the meaning of stage fright, Sarah responded, "Wait until you get to be a good actress, my girl, and then you'll know." Sarah Bernhardt's greatest talent was to recognize her limitations and refuse to let them wreck her work. She knew that she was not pretty but used uniqueness to her advantage. And if she wasn't an actual beauty, she could cast a spell with her catlike, sapphire-blue eyes and passionately expressive mouth. The early facts of Sarah Bernhardt's life are elusive. Few early documents exist, and her memoir, My Double Life, is unreliable. Biographers have tried to sort through conflicting stories—many told by Sarah and later by her son and friends—but with limited success. The date of her birth is unknown, but biographers have settled on October...

Anthony Burgess, primarily known for his literary career, was also a prolific composer. Composition and music was his first love and passion. At the present time, there is no study specifically on the choral music of Anthony Burgess and there have been only a few performances of his music. The primary goal of this paper is to consider the choral compositions of Anthony Burgess. In a comparison of the works list produced by Anthony Burgess in This Man and Music, a works list complied by Paul Phillips and the inventory of holdings in the Burgess collection at the Ransom Center, there are twenty-three known choral compositions. Of these twenty-three pieces, the scores of eleven pieces are held in the collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. This paper will present an overview of Burgess’s extant choral music housed at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin along with individual analytical studies of the four complete choral pieces held at the Ransom Center.

Fast Learner:The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Luc Herman and John M. Krafft "Scripts're in the top drawer." But they were all purple, Dittoed—worn, torn, stained with coffee. Nothing else in the drawer. "Hey. . . . Where's the original? What did you make these copies from?" (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 77–78) In the spring of 2001, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced its "acquisition of the corrected typescript to Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V. [1963]," along with eight letters written by Pynchon to Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale between 1960 and 1964 (Stephen Smith). Until now, critics have not had much apart from Pynchon's novels and stories to work on or with: the occasional letter; Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, his 1984 collection of the short stories he published between 1959 and 1964; some juvenilia (contributions to a high school newspaper, reprinted in the Pynchonbibliography by Clifford Mead); and a little nonfiction, including a New York Times Magazine article on the Watts riots. This lack of materials put Pynchon scholars at a disadvantage when it came to genetic criticism, in which texts are studied with a focus on their development. How did Pynchon's novels come to be what they are? We had almost no way of knowing until now, but the HRC typescript radically changes this situation with regard to V. We were aided in the early stages of our research into the Ransom Center's acquisition by the late Stephen Tomaske, a librarian at California State University at Los Angeles who had been doing biographical research on Pynchon for some twenty years. Since we thought (perhaps erroneously) that Pynchon himself would not like to collaborate on this project, we approached Corlies ("Cork") Smith, Pynchon's editor for V. at the publishing house J. B. Lippincott. Smith was extremely forthcoming. We interviewed him by telephone and face to face, and he even provided us with nearly all his editorial correspondence with Pynchon about V.1 [End Page 1] Those letters proved invaluable, since they provide the key to the connection between the Ransom Center's typescript and the published novel. The correspondence we have between Cork Smith and Pynchon starts in March 1960 with a "'Hello There!'" note from Smith and ends abruptly in June 1962 in the midst of a discussion about the place of a specific chapter in the eventual text. Thanks to the good offices of Pynchon's recently acquired agent, the famous Candida Donadio, Lippincott had bought his story "Low-lands" for inclusion in issue 16 of its New World Writing series, which came out in 1960. Donadio knew that Pynchon was writing a novel, and she managed to sell this unfinished novel to Lippincott as well. The date on the contract (as we learned from Tzofit Butler, the manager of theInformation Center Archives at HarperCollins, which currently holds the rights to V.) is January 29, 1960. Cork Smith told us in this connection that Lippincott also "faked up a delivery date. We put it like a year and a half later or something." Sure enough, on August 2, 1961, Smith wrote to Pynchon that Lippincott had accepted the novel. Smith recalls that, since the decision had to be cleared with his boss, he must have received the novel perhaps three or four weeks before the beginning of August, which means Pynchon delivered almost exactly on the fake date added at the time of the contract. The novel reached Lippincott in a box via Pynchon's agent. Smith is adamant that this box contained a clean typewritten original. Therefore, that document is not what can now be consulted in Austin. The typescript acquired by the HRC is a copy rather than an original. To be more precise, the typescript features two kinds of copies, one black, the other various shades of blue. Sarah Funke, an employee of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, through whom the HRC bought the typescript, identified the blue pages as carbon copies. But the crispness of the type, evidence of scraping, and exactness of corrections on the...

Perspectives on DLI‐2 – Growing the Field

Apollo, 24 Preludes and Aeternum (2013) The Royal Ballet, March The Oracle (2013), Meryl Tankard (dir.), London: Queen Elizabeth Hall, May The Perfect American, Phelem McDermott (dir.), Philip Glass (2013) English National Opera, June LOLPERA, Angela Lopez (dir.), Ellen Warkentine and Andrew Pedroza (2012) Los Angeles: Hollywood Fringe Festival, 24 June LACE:HERE:NOW, Nottingham, September 2012–February 2013 ‘I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America’ (2012–2013) Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 11 September–6 January ‘Visions of The Future’ (2012) the tenth biennial Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1–3 November

This essay takes as its starting point the problem posed by the increasing number of literary archives of the papers of “postcolonial writers” that have been acquired by American and European academic institutions. After registering the ethical problems posed by this trend, I argue that the existence of such archives represents an opportunity for postcolonial studies to interrogate its own archival politics in relation to constructions of literary value. Using the Amos Tutuola Collection (located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) as a case study, I demonstrate that while this archive’s form makes certain claims for its value, a study of the author’s letters, manuscripts, and documents contained therein suggests that alternative values are latent within it. I discuss how these values differ from those typically sought by postcolonial critics, and conclude by considering how a hypothetical digitized Tutuola collection might allow for the realization of new values. Inquiry into forms of value — and not simply the identification of existing ‘literary’ ones — is, I suggest, an important aspect of the continued relevance of writers’ collections to postcolonial studies.

This untitled essay is a transcription by Edith Lees (Mrs Havelock Ellis) of a draft of an anonymous letter from John Addington Symonds to Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebing subsequently included it in his 1889 edition of Psychopathia Sexualis as one of his case studies. Ellis received this ‘essay’ after Symonds’ death, and it was transcribed and titled in Lees’ hand ‘Copy by Mrs Havelock Ellis of a paper by J.A. Symonds’. It is held in the Ellis collection at The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

In 2018, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin rehoused over 300 illustrated movie storyboards from the popular and frequently used David O Selznick Collection. Preservation technicians tracked this project from its inception to the survey and design conception, and through to its execution. By creating a new housing model and refining it over the course of a year, the Preservation Unit was able to consider how housing affects an object, which led to new systems and structures to facilitate process management and workflow, and how an object is impacted by its housing.

Cet article fait une utilisation des archives de Robert De Niro, récemment acquises par le Harry Ransom Center, pour fournir une analyse théorique et historique de la contribution singulière de l’acteur au film Raging Bull (Martin Scorcese, 1980). En utilisant les notes considérables de De Niro, cet article désire montrer que le travail de cheminement du comédien s’est étendu de la pré à la postproduction, ce qui est particulièrement bien démontré par la contribution significative mais non mentionnée au générique, de l’acteur au scénario. La performance de De Niro brouille les frontières des classes de l’auteur, de la « star » et du travail de collaboration et permet de faire un portrait plus nuancé du travail de réalisation d’un film. Cet article dresse le catalogue du processus, durant près de six ans, entrepris par le comédien pour jouer le rôle du boxeur Jacke LaMotta : De la phase d’écriture du scénario à sa victoire aux Oscars, en passant par l’entrainement d’un an à la boxe et par la prise de soixante livres. Enfin, en se fondant sur des données concrètes qui sont restées jusqu’à maintenant inaccessibles, en raison de la modestie et du désir du comédien de conserver sa vie privée, cet article apporte une nouvelle perspective pour considérer la contribution importante de De Niro à l’histoire américaine du jeu d’acteur.

Samuel Beckett in Austin and Beyond Alan W. Friedman and Charles Rossman, Guest Editors We dedicate this issue to Tony Hilfer. Samuel Beckett never made it to Austin—getting no further west than Manhattan on his only visit to the United States (as Alan W. Friedman discusses in his essay, "Samuel Beckett Meets Buster Keaton: Godeau, Film, and New York")—though we invited him to participate in (or at least to write a new work for) "Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett," a conference held in his honor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.1 But a vast quantity of his manuscripts and many of his critics have made the journey. This special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language is entitled Samuel Beckett in Austin and Beyond for four main reasons: most of its contributions were initially presented at the annual James Joyce Bloomsday conference that was held in Austin in June 2007; its contributors and editors are mainly faculty or graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin; many of the essays feature research based on the extraordinary Beckett holdings in UT's Harry Ransom Center (see No Symbols Where None Intended and Fathoms from Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/ beckett/); and it not only offers something of a retrospective on Joyce and Beckett but also, in the end, anticipates future Beckett studies. The first three essays included here concern both Joyce and Beckett, and thus provide a direct link to the 2007 Joyce conference. Picking up recent critical threads that situate the two writers in their Irish contexts and in Ireland's performative tradition, Emily Bloom's "The Protestant Thing to Do" asks what, in dramatic terms, Anglo-Irish Protestants do in Joyce's Dubliners and Beckett's All That Fall. Bloom determines that in Joyce's stories Protestants judge and discomfort the Catholics around them, while in Beckett's radio play they assume the role of stage Irishmen, a counter-intuitive and "desperate performance." Dirk Van Hulle argues that the complex notion of "hesitancy"—a version of the classical rhetorical trope aposiopesis—is a verbal tool or leitmotif for Joyce (referring, for example, to the Phoenix Park forgery letters, stuttering, and gossip) and a way of being and writing for Beckett (as Harry Ransom Center manuscripts reveal). This difference in usage sheds light on the two writers' contrasting relationships to the natural and artistic processes of "decomposition" and "subsequent recombination," with Joyce emphasizing the latter and Beckett the former. And Rodney Sharkey, in his quirkily autobiographical piece, addresses what he considers "an uncannily predictive quality" [End Page iv] or "archetypal foreshadowing" bordering on magic in Joyce's writings concerning, among others, both Beckett and himself, as well as events and attitudes in contemporary Ireland (including "racism, sexuality and crime"). Sharkey also finds Joyce and Beckett firmly linked by their shared view of the inextricability of the creative and the excremental. The next four essays tackle vexed questions concerning specific Beckett texts. Alan W. Friedman's "Samuel Beckett Meets Buster Keaton: Godeau, Film, and New York" argues that both Balzac's play, Mercadet Le Falseur, and the 1949 film version, The Lovable Cheat, which stars Buster Keaton, "bear a striking resemblance" to Waiting for Godot. And, while not venturing into Sharkey's realm of the magical, Friedman explores the co-incidences of both Keaton's subsequently working with Beckett on Film during the playwright's only visit to the U.S. and the Balzac play and movie as possible sources for the title, and some of the substance, of Beckett's first play. James Jesson, in "'White World. Not a Sound': Beckett's Radioactive Text in Embers," argues that Beckett's radio plays are at least as textual—both a kind of fiction and "objects containing writing"—as they are theatrical. They are also as much depictions of creative acts as their products, acts that are central to individual identity and integrity. Justin Tremel's "'Thought of everything? . . . Forgotten nothing?': (Re-)Editing Beckett's Eh Joe" addresses the troubling instability not within but of Beckett's dramatic texts. Beginning with the technically demanding Play, Beckett...

Early American Sheet Music is a digital sheet-music collection curated and published by The Library of Congress. This beautiful resource provides open access to a specific classification number, M1.A1, by providing high-quality images and an easy-to-use visual browsing interface. It showcases early print sheet music and copied manuscripts from the United States and the colonies through 1820. However, the manner in which this digital collection has been curated highlights the changing roles and responsibilities of the library from custodian to custodian and publisher. While digital collections are enabling researchers across the world to see the resource, the curation tailors the online collection, thus invoking limitations on researchers. Further questions centre on issues of copyright. While the collection is free to use for personal research and education purposes, what persists is a constant confusion when it comes to downloading and performing early music found in digital collections. Performing such collections may be unique to music, but it is a serious issue that requires clarification. Using the new Early American Sheet Music resource as a centre for discussion, this article interrogates the current issues of digital music collections.

This paper considers the possibilities of searching and visualising collection materials at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC). In doing so, it argues that digital archival engagement is not a replacement for in-person reading room experiences, but rather enables an altogether different type of engagement with such materials. Following an analysis of the accuracy of searches in the HRC’s digital collections, the article identifies areas for improvement in increasing digital access to the HRC’s collections. Further, they reveal the misrepresentation or underrepresentation of historically oppressed groups (particularly in archives), including women, Black Americans and non-English speakers. The article concludes with recommendations for the more accurate and ethical representation of these groups in online archives.

Exploring Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects. By Karen Calhoun. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014. 352 p. $95 softcover (ISBN 978-1-55570-985-3). The back cover of Calhouns book Exploring Libraries: Foundations, Practice, and Prospects declares it landmark text on digital libraries for students of LIS, educators and practicing information professionals throughout the It also states that it provides an authoritative and in-depth treatment of the digital library arena, from the fields emergence to current topics and future prospects. Calhoun is a prolific and well-respected author and lecturer on the subject of digital libraries, and is definitely someone worthy of earning such accolades. The book consists of two main themes. The first is a broad, international overview of the past twenty-plus years of digital libraries, while the second concerns the roles digital libraries play in relationship to their online communities. Chapter 1, Emergence and Definitions of Libraries, covers the first decade of this brave new world. The World Wide Web had been born, costs associated with computing had become much more affordable, and the National Science Foundation assembled a series of workshops on how to make digital libraries a reality. Projects such as the eLib Programme in the UK and the Library Initiatives (DLI-1 and DLI-2) in the US, plus Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, gave a taste of what was to come. Calhoun also uses this chapter to establish the definition of digital libraries upon which she bases the rest of the book. In her eyes, digital libraries are both a multidisciplinary field of research and practice, and the systems and services that support the advancement of knowledge and culture; contain managed of digital content; and often utilize architecture from the computer and information science/ library field (e.g., repository, resource identifiers, user interface). In chapter 2, Outcomes of Libraries' First Decade, Calhoun identifies several key results from this initial period. These include a new field of research and practice, the transformation of scholarly communication processes, open access, digitization and digital preservation, metadata and its standards, and actual working digital libraries and the they serve. Each outcome is discussed in detail, and introduces such topics as D-Lib Magazine, PageRank (Googles forerunner), the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), JSTOR (short for Journal Storage), Dublin Core, the Library of Congress' American Memory, and the British Library Online Newspaper Archive. Chapter 3, Key Themes and Challenges in Libraries, introduces the concept map that Calhoun created based on the major themes from the digital library literature of the decade 2002-12. The map consists of a collection of keywords plotted in a continuum of themes and topics arranged from collections to communities (x-axis) and from technology to social and economic aspects (y-axis). The remainder of the book is based on both this map and the four challenges that she has identified to building and for digital libraries: interoperability (providing uniform access for users to diverse information from various systems), community engagement, intellectual property rights, and sustainability. Chapter 4, Digital Library Collections: Repositories, begins with a look at traditional library and collection development in light of the web. It provides a close examination of digital repositories, including content usage and discovery (e.g., Google Scholar), the application of repository software (e.g., DSpace, Fedora), and web services such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), and concludes with examples of next-generation repositories such as Drupal and Scholar's Workbench. Chapter 5, Hybrid Libraries, wraps up the book's first theme by examining the interaction between library users and hybrid libraries (collections of non-digital, digitized, and born-digital materials). …

Staff from UT Libraries, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Tarlton Law Library have been collaborating in discussion group activities during the last year to develop knowledge and skills in anticipation of life after MARC, investigating the brave new world of linked data in libraries with a focus on the Library of Congress Bibliographic Framework (BIBFRAME) initiative. Our group efforts to better understand BIBFRAME and linked data for libraries include in-depth discussions of current literature, webcasts, and presentations; strategic application of Zepheira’s Practical Practitioner training; and hands-on experimentation transforming local metadata in various formats for various resource types to BIBFRAME. Our analysis of the resulting transformations has helped us gain insight on mapping complexities, data loss, false transformations, potential new metadata displays, and the limitations of the tools involved. The experimentation process overall has afforded us the opportunity to ask targeted questions about what is needed to move towards linked data and to gain a better view of the frontier of Technical Services staff skillsets. In this panel presentation, we’ll share details about our approaches to maximizing the group learning experience, and lessons learned from grappling with new concepts, data models, terminology, and tools. Representatives from our experimentation teams will report on the initial experience of transforming MARC and non-MARC data sets to BIBFRAME, and what we see as emerging questions and next steps.

Any discussion of ethnographic film in the classroom must begin by defining what constitutes ethnographic film. For the purposes of this paper, the definition given by Karl Heider in Ethnographic Film (University of Texas, 1976) is useful: "ethnographic film is film which reflects ethnographic understanding." If a film is informed by this understanding; it enables the viewer to see the activities in a cultural context, not simply, as isolated or exotic behaviors. The ethnographic content can be provided directly in the film through narration, titling, or interviews; or written ethnographies can be used to provide the information needed to place the film's events and activities in a relevant cultural context.