Brown University Library News

April 14 – May 16, 2008
Lownes Room, John Hay Library
20 Prospect Street
Providence, Rhode Island 02912

The exhibit runs from April 14 to May 16, 2008 and is open to the public during normal library opening hours: Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
From antiquity to modern times, from the confinement of enclosed spaces to open-ended journeys of displacement, as part of an individual or collective experience, Melancholy has been a source of inspiration and contemplation for philosophers, aesthetes, writers, artists, and scientists.

This exhibition presents works from the collections of the John Hay Library and Rockefeller Library and is designed to accompany the Conference “The Demon of Melancholy: Geneaologies, Modernities” which will take place at Brown University on April 24th and 25th, 2008.

For more information please contact Hay@brown.edu or visit http://www.brown.edu/Departments/French/melancholy.html

Curated by Ana Catarina Teixeira and Patricia Figueroa in collaboration with Prof. Nelson Vieira
April 15 – June 5, 2008
John Hay Library
20 Prospect Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02912

Sponsored by the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies.
To both Brazilian and international critics, Machado de Assis is a name that stands alone in 19th century Latin American fiction. Born on the 21st of June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro to a father of African ancestry and a Portuguese mother, Machado de Assis, as an autodidact, rose above humble beginnings and a meager education to achieve the highest status of his country’s literary establishment.
During his prolific career, Machado explored nearly every genre–poetry, theater, journalism, literary criticism, and translation–but it was as a novelist and a short story writer that Machado forged a narrative voice that would forever impact the literary topography of his nation. At a time when European models dominated, Machado rejected pure imitation and explored new ways to represent Brazilian society.
In 1908, at the age of 69, Machado de Assis died in his native city, leaving behind a legacy of short stories and novels, which mordantly criticized Brazil’s insensitive upper middle class and elites with the use of subtle irony and well-crafted ambiguity.
The masterful manner in which Machado created his memorable characters not only allows his readers, then and now, to better comprehend the realities of Brazilian society, but above all, the complexities of the human condition. This unprecedented contribution not only placed Brazilian literature on the literary map, but also paved the way for the “new novel” in 20th century Portuguese and Spanish America.
This year, Brown Univertsity Library joins the literary community to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Machado’s death with a display of early criticism of Machado’s works, donated by Professor William Leonard Grossman. The materials selected highlight not only the vast array of responses by his contemporaries, but also reveal insights into the timeless and universal nature of his prose in an attempt to help the audience gain a glimpse of Machado, the man and the writer, as a source of inspiration for an exponentially growing corpus of literary criticism.
The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies is proud to co-sponsor this exhibit on Machado de Assis since his writing is an integral part of the undergraduate and graduate curriculum.
Image source: cover from “Machado de Assis” by Augusto Corrêa Pinto. Rio de Janeiro: Irmãos Pongetti, 1958. John Hay Library.

April 17, 2008
Location: Rockefeller Library, Second Floor Computer Cluster
Time: 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Please join us for a networked performance by John Cayley, Visiting Professor of Literary Arts. Mr. Cayley’s performance will be accompanied by a reception. Come hear the Rockefeller Library “sing” as part of the kick-off for “Transforming the Student’s Experience as Scholar,” a symposium cosponsored by the Brown University Library and the Council on Library and Information Resources.
For more information on Mr. Cayley’s piece visit: http://programmatology.shadoof.net/?imposition
For more information visit: http://blogs.brown.edu/project/libnews/archives/2008/04/transforming_th.html