Hélène Cixous: Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas (1988/1994)

“They didn’t know each other, but they knew the same suffering.

A Russian Jewish poet who died in exile in Siberia; a South African political leader who survived his banishment to prison: The two men, Osip Mandelstam and Nelson Mandela, so far apart in time and space, are brought together in this story, their shared destinies unraveled in light of the Jewish and African diasporas.

In Manna, Hélène Cixous, a writer associated with the notion of écriture féminine and a major figure in Continental feminist practice during the 1970s and early 1980s, continues her disruption of the orthodoxies of politics and social order through the liberating use of poetic language. In this act of willful writing, by turns lyrical and intense, she links her two distant subjects through the common first syllables of their names, the dates of their respective exiles, and the women, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Winnie-Zami Mandela, who disclose and restore their partners’ lives through language.

For Cixous, politics is approached most openly and freely through poetry; no social change occurs without linguistic change. In Manna her poetic language mediates the historical, political, and personal narratives of Mandelstam and Mandela (two cores lodged in the heart of the world) to produce a new sense of individual tragedy and cultural possibility. An act of emancipation, exhilarating in the way it subverts the master texts of social and political power, this strange and beautiful book releases its subjects-and its readers-from the limited language of constraint and exile.”

First published as Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas, Les Editions des Femmes. Paris, 1988.

Translated and with an Introduction by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816621144, 9780816621149
294 pages
via leninbert

Review: Clare Cavanagh (Slavic Review, 1997).

Publisher

PDF

Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987)

McLuhan corresponded with a vast number of people, including Duke Ellington, Woody Allen, Jacques Maritain, Rollo May, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Bob Newhart, Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter.

Heavily annotated, the letters are arranged in three sections, each with a period introduction: 1931-1936 takes McLuhan through the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University. 1936-1946 covers one year’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin; two years at Saint Louis University; one year, with his bride, at Cambridge for work on his Ph.D.; four more years at Saint Louis; and two years as Assumption College, Windsor, Ontario. These letters include a large correspondence with Wyndham Lewis. The last section begins in 1946, when McLuhan went to the University of Toronto. Two years later he began a long correspondence with Ezra Pound. Covering the period of McLuhan’s fame, it ends in September 1979 with a letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, written shortly before McLuhan had a stroke that rendered him speechless.

These letters have been selected from a large collection, now in the Public Archives of Canada, and offer a valuable commentary on McLuhan’s work and, in some instances, the most lucid and detailed explanation of his ideas available.

Selected and edited by Matie Molinam, Corrine McLuhan, and William Toye
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1987
ISBN 0195405943
562 pages

Review (R.D. Berg, Canadian Journal of Communication, 1988)
Review (Frank Kermode, London Review of Books, 1988)

PDF (189 MB, no OCR, any help in reducing the size is welcome!)

Walter Gropius (ed.): The Theater of the Bauhaus (1925–) [DE, EN]

“The Bauhaus movement was one of this century’s most daring experiments in arts education, and its influence on architecture, design, and the visual arts is well known. Many of its most important ideas are revealed in Bauhaus writings about theatrical performance and performance spaces. Originally published in Germany in 1925 — at the height of the Bauhaus movement’s influence– The Theater of the Bauhaus collects writings from some of the movement’s most important figures and describes a theater stripped of history, moralism, scenery, and, for that matter, narrative itself. The Bauhaus group believed traditional theater to be little more than a vehicle for propaganda, with its “peep show stage” separating spectators from performers. They rejected as well the theater of ridicule and satire practiced by the Dadaists and Expressionists. In place of both traditional drama and the avant-garde that lampooned it, Oskar Schlemmer and his Bauhaus associates created an abstract theater of movement, color, light, form, and sound-language would be added later, once the stage had been purged of its “literary encumbrance.” They believed that humanity’s essential nature–freed from history, tradition, class, and nationality–would find expression in theatrical works that incorporated pantomime, masks, dance, and acrobatics.”

Contents: Walter Gropius: Introduction; Oskar Schlemmer: Man and Art Figure; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Theater, Circus, Variety; Farkas Molnar: U-Theater; Oskar Schlemmer: Theater (Bühne); Translator’s Note.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 4 of Bauhausbücher series
84 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

English edition
Translated by Arthur S. Wensinger
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1961
ISBN 0819560200
110 pages

Die Bühne im Bauhaus (German, 72 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, added on 2014-8-17, updated on 2022-4-13)
Die Bühne im Bauhaus (German, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
The Theater of the Bauhaus (English, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger, 1961, 6 MB, updated on 2016-10-15)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series.