Day: October 13, 2011

Guide to French and Francophone Literature

Posted on by Claude Potts

Illustrations de Cy est la danse macabre des

This critically revised and updated  library subject guide provides a starting point for research on French and Francophone literature in the UC Berkeley Library. For additional resources in all formats including e-books, please explore related LCSH subject headings in OskiCat or browse the shelves near the relevant call numbers supplies in this bibliography.

The guide is rather lengthy (21 pages) but is sub-divided as follows: General Guides and Literary Histories, French Language Dictionaries, Manuals and Guides to Literary Theory and Criticism, Poetry, Theater, Francophone Literature Resources, and Guides by Literary Period: Middle Ages, the Renaissance, 17th century, 18th Century, 19th century, 20th-21st century. Bookmarks on the left (viewable in most web browsers) allow one to skip through the PDF rather easily in locating a specific section.

While links to some electronic resources are provided, the French Studies subject grouping in the Library’s Electronic Resources Finder contains the most current digital resources available and should be consulted when using this guide to what are, for the most part, printed books.

 

 

Adeus, Saramago

Posted on by Claude Potts

José Saramago (1922-2010)

Portuguese writer José Saramago died today at the age of 87. He gained international acclaim for novels such as  Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness), Intermitências da morte (Death at Intervals), and Memorial do convento (Baltasar and Blimunda).  In 1998, he was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Though he wrote his first novel at 23, it wasn’t until he was in his 50s that we was able to dedicate himself full-time to fiction. His prose is described as “combining surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism.” The UC Berkeley Library has more than 92 works by Saramago in the original and in various translations as well as dozens of critical and biographical works all discoverable through OskiCat. A more complete obituary is available on the New York Times site and an announcement in both Spanish and Portuguese on the José Saramago Foundation web site where he blogged up until a few months before his death on world events, philosophy, writing – much of which was published last year as a book titled O Caderno (The Notebook). Diário de Noticías, the Lisbon newspaper where Saramago worked as a journalist early in his career, has also compiled a full tribute titled “Morrer é? simplesmente natural” (To die is? simply natural).

Summer Sites

Posted on by Claude Potts

Playa de Chipiona by José Jiménez Aranda (c.1899 Museo del Prado)

The summer affords time for a round-up of web sites recently encountered and of potential interest to those who work in the Romance languages:

Biblioteca Medici Laurenciana – more than 1655 manuscripts of the 3900 in the Florentine library’s Plutei collection have been digitized and are available here.
http://teca.bmlonline.it

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval  Manuscripts – launched in 2009, this project of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center aims to provide a single finding aid for digitized medieval manuscripts available on the web. See also Digital Scriptorium.
http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique – a refereed academic journal, publishing three times a year and serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities.
http://www.digitalstudies.org

La Enciclopedia del Museo del Prado – freely available digital conversion of the 4-volume print tool published in 2006 by Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado and Tf editores.
http://www.museodelprado.es/enciclopedia/enciclopedia-on-line

Études Photographiques – published by the Société française de photographie with the CNL, CNRS and l’université de Ryerson, this open-access journal is one of many titles available through the Revues.org portal which provides access to more than 254 OA publications. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org

Manioc, nouvelle bibliothèque numérique partenaire – this digital library of primary sources from the Caribbean, the Amazon, and the Guyana Plateau also provides full text to the open-access journal Études caribéennes.
http://www.manioc.org

PLEAIADI – the “Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali” aims at building a national Italian platform that offers centralized access to the scholarly literature archived in Italian open-access repositories.
http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi

The Renaissance in Print: 16th Century French Books in the Douglas Gordon Collection – comprises over 600 digitized volumes of French books from the sixteenth century on religion, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, travel and architecture all held by the University of Virginia.
http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/rmds/portfolio/gordon

Salon du Livre podcasts – downloadable MP3s from the Paris book fair held every year in March. Includes talks with Jean-Claude Carrière, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fatou Diome, Georges Balandier, Jean-Luc Nancy, Véronique Ovaldé , Antonio Lobo Antunes, Enrique Vila-Matas, and more.
http://www.salondulivreparis.com/?IdNode=1065&Lang=FR

Traces – An open-access bibliographical database on Catalan language and literature. The TRACES project was created in 1987 by the Grup d’Estudis de Literatura Catalana Contemporània (GELCC) from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
http://traces.uab.cat

Vocabulários Ortográficos da  Língua Portuguesa – two new and complementary, if not competing, orthographical dictionaries were published earlier this year. The searchable online versions are freely available:
Vocabulário ortográfico da língua portuguesa (Academia Brasileira de Letras – 5.ª ed. 2009)
Vocabulário ortográfico da língua portuguesa (Porto Editora – 1.ª ed. 2009)

La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne – sponsored by L’association Siècle DeleuzienV and Le Groupe Esthétique, Représentations, Savoirs  (une équipe de recherche de l’Université de Paris 8), hosts hundreds of hours of MP3s mostly from the 1980s.
http://www.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze

*An extremely high-res. version of José Jiménez Aranda’s Playa de Chipiona at the top of this post is available on the Museo del Prado’s web site.

Celebrating Mexico

Posted on by Claude Potts

Photo: Emiliano Zapata

EXHIBIT: Celebrating Mexico: The Grito de Dolores and the Mexican Revolution

September 2nd – January 14th
The Bancroft Rotunda Gallery
10am – 4pm, Monday through Friday

The Bancroft Library’s exhibition for Fall 2010 commemorates the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. Beginning with the “Grito de Dolores,” the battle cry issued by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810 and culminating with the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the exhibit looks at the complex history that involved Mexicans across social sectors, geographic regions, professions, and even continents. The rich collection of The Bancroft Library provides an opportunity to look at these two transforming periods in Mexican history through a selection of visual and textual documents that cast light on the diverse players involved.

A parallel exhibit opens on Sept. 20 at Stanford University’s Cecil H. Green Library. Together, the two events mark the first collaborative exhibition by the two Bay Area universities that each boasts superlative Mexican history collections.

UC Berkeley’s Press Release

Stanford Library’s Celebrating Mexico exhibit & web site

Paris Review interview archives

Posted on by Claude Potts


The Paris Review has placed its complete archive of author interviews, previously almost impossible to find in electronic form, available online for free. The storied interview series began in 1953 with “E. M. Forster, The Art of Fiction No. 1” and continues through “Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206.”

The collection can be browsed by name or by decade.

Though most interviews are with Anglophone writers, a sizeable amount are with canonical 20th century figures from the Romance languages such as Italo Calvino, François Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, Georges Simenon, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Manuel Puig, Marguerite Yourcenar, Yves Bonnefoy, Camilo José Cela, Primo Levi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, José Saramago, Umberto Eco, Jorge Semprún, Luisa Valenzuela, and more.

blogged on The Resource Shelf on 10/24/10

 

AIDA (Articoli italiani di periodici accademici )

Posted on by Claude Potts

Through December 5, 2010, the Library will have access to a trial version of this Italian article index or database. Please note that UC-eLinks have not been enabled for the trial and you will only be able to view citations. Comments and suggestions should be sent to Claude Potts at cpotts[at]library.berkeley.edu. Click here for the complete list of titles indexed in AIDA. Here’s the publisher’s description:

The Bibliography Articoli italiani di periodici accademici (AIDA) contains more than 219,800 articles in the humanities from 1,388 Italian periodicals. Publications from the entire spectrum of the humanities, including peripheral disciplines, are covered. The collaboration of Italian librarians ensures that the journals evaluated provide a representative selection of the current literature in the humanities and all related fields. AIDA is not simply an extract from the IBZ. The titles of articles are sorted and compiled by an Italian-speaking editor. AIDA is therefore an ideal supplement to the IBZ.

Each entry includes information on author, title, subject (in German, English, Italian), journal title, subtitle (year of publication, volume, issue, page number), ISSN, publisher, box number of union catalogue and the Italian catalogue of journals, ZDB-ID, holdings of Italian libraries.

Please note: you may be prompted for a user password and login but if you just click “ok” it will let you into AIDA.

Buscando Book Reviews

Posted on by Claude Potts

Tracking down book reviews for European publications in the Romance languages can be challenging. With the exception of the IBR Online, most tools listed in the Library’s Electronic Resources Finder category for “Book and Film Review Databases” index primarily US and UK imprints. Article databases like Cairn, Francis, Historical Abstracts, International Medieval Bibliography, Iter, MLA, and Periodicals Index Online can be helpful but when even those fail to turn up relevant hits, you may want to consult some of the print and web-based sources recently added to the research tools pages for French, Italian Studies, or Iberian Studies.

Despite a major serials cancellation project last year, the Library will continue its subscriptions to print sources like Delibros, Insula, O meus livros, and Qué leer from Spain and Portugal. We continue to receive Revista de libros from Madrid in both print and digital form. From Italy, we’ve also retained our subscription to La rivista dei libri and L’indice dei libri del mese which profile some of the most important new titles being published in Italy. And from France, subscriptions to Critique published by Éditions de Minuit, Lire, Livres de France, and La Quinzaine littéraire have all been kept and provide critical reviews of Francophone publications. Current issues for all of these can be found in the Heyns Reading Room on the second floor of the Doe Library.

A few freely accessible online sources to make note of include: Acta fabula: revue des parutions en theorie littéraire, CriticaLiteraria.com, H-France Review,  La Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea (SISSCO), Mercurio panorama de libros, and www.lindiceonline.com.