Michel Foucault Audio Archive

  

The Media Resources Center at the University of California, Berkeley has made available the most comprehensive collection to date of online audio recordings of lectures and courses by the renowned French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. The English language collection features two lecture series delivered at UC Berkeley in the 1980’s on Truth and Subjectivity and Parrhesia. The French language collection offers five complete semester length courses, covering such quintessentially Foucauldian concepts as Parrhesia, governmentality, neoliberalism, security, biopolitics, and sovereignty. The collection includes recordings spanning two decades of thought and instruction, including Foucault’s final 1984 course at the Collège de France.

All recordings can be accessed from the Michel Foucault Audio Archive, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/foucault/mfaa.html

This collection was generously donated to the Media Resources Center by Paul Rabinow, Professor of Social Cultural Anthropology and digitized and edited by Gisèle Binder, Operations Supervisor, Media Resources Center.

Gary Handman Director
Media Resources Center
Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley


BN’s Teatro del Siglo de Oro portal

Teatro del Siglo de Oro

The Biblioteca Nacional de España (BN) now hosts a web portal that aims to be become a fundamental reference source for the study of Teatro del Siglo de Oro with special attention on the authoritative control of textual sources. At the time of its launch last spring, there were 137 fully digitized manuscripts (autógrafos, copias manuscritas, partes, sueltas, relaciones, and desglosadas) by authors like Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Moina, and Vélez de Guevara. The intent is to make accessible the more than 2,000 original manuscripts in the national library’s collection. The portal also includes a useful bibliography, list of recent studies, and a handy list of links to other e-resources such as TESO – the searchable database of more than 800 Siglo de Oro plays available through the UC Berkeley Library.


Nace Hispana

Hispana is the newest online portal for digital collections across Spain. To date, it brings together in one place more than 1,367,187 digital objects from more than 127 of Spain’s archives, museums, and libraries, both private and public. The Ministerio de Cultura de España explains that “Hispana, que ya es el cuarto agregador mundial de recursos digitales, abre las puertas a un cambio en la cultura de nuestro país.” Much of the content in Hispana feeds directly into Europeana – the digital library for all of Europe launched last year.


Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau

Hosted by the Société Octave Mirbeau and maintained by an international group of Mirbeau experts including Yannick Lemarié  et Pierre Michel,  the online Dictionnaire Octave Mirbeau contains more than one thousand entries. Some are brief, from one to fifteen lines, but most are quite substantial. The entries are grouped into five sections: amis et connaissances de Mirbeau (famille, écrivains, peintres, sculpteurs, compositeurs, gens de théâtre, etc.) ; les lieux (villes où Mirbeau a vécu ou voyagé et pays dont il a parlé ou bien où son oeuvre a été reçue et traduite) ; oeuvres (publiées de son vivant et depuis sa mort) ; thèmes et interprétations ; et personnel des oeuvres de fiction (êtres humains et animaux).

The UC Berkeley Library has more than 117 works by or about Octave Mirbeau, iconoclastic French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright in its printed collection, including Cahiers Octave Mirbeau.

 


Adeus, Saramago

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

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.


Paris Review interview archives


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

 


Catalan language & literature

Traces

, or the Base de dadas de llengua i literatura catalanes, is a freely accessible bibliographical database that collocates much of what has been published on Catalan language and literature. The TRACES project was created in 1987 by the Grup d’Estudis de Literatura Catalana Contemporania (GELCC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). With a searchable interface in Catalan, Spanish, or Catalan, it includes to date more than 74,000 records for monographs, literary and cultural journals, news sources, dissertations, and more. For full-text access to many of the articles cited, one might try RACO – an open access repository of mostly Catalan (and some Spanish) full-text scholarly journals.

 

 


Bibliotheque Bleue Texts Digitized

La plaisante et triomphante histoire des hauts et cheualeureux faicts d'armes, du tres-puissant & tres-magnanime, & tres-victorieux Prince Meliadus (Troyes, 1612).

Thirty-two texts of popular French literature from the Bancroft Library’s collection of Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes have recently been digitized and added to ARTFL’s Bibliothèque Bleue Online. Hosted by the University of Chicago, the openly accessible database of now 284 separate livrets (booklets) comprises a single searchable corpus for a representative portion of the vast publishing enterprise which was started by printer-bookseller Nicolas Oudot in the early 17th century in Troyes and quickly spread across Western Europe and flourished through the middle of the 19th century. While the length of the texts are usually quite brief and the content varies considerably, they were always aimed at popular consumption. ARTFL’s database, powered by PhiloLogic, includes both the searchable text as well as the digital facsimiles of the often badly worn and cheaply produced chapbooks, which were typically covered in bleue (blue) sugar paper wrappers.

The Bibliothèque Bleue represents a long and storied tradition in popular French print culture. Spanning more than 250 years and involving the publication of mass-produced, inexpensive books that were sold for pennies by colporteurs (peddlers), it comprised texts ranging from the practical (recipes, almanacs, and how-to books) to the pious (hagiographies, prayer books, and other religious instruction) and to the entertaining (fiction, chivalresque romances, songbooks, burlesque), and provides a unique insight into the popular culture of France. The most significant collection (some 2570 volumes) of Bibliothèque Bleue material resides at the Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, whose initial digitization efforts form the basis of the Bibliothèque Bleue Online.

The bulk of the Bancroft’s 92 Bibliothèque Bleue texts were acquired by rare books curator Tony Bliss in the mid-1990s. See The Berkeleyan article from 8/27/97 titled “The Old, The Rare, and the Trashy.” The catalog records for each physical artifact (often bound in the same volume) can be located in OskiCat by searching the title phrase “Bibliothèque bleue (Troyes, France)” or by going directly to the collection entry record which collocates all 45 volumes. Texts chosen for inclusion, a project of the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL), do not duplicate those already contained in ARTFL’s Bibliothèque Bleue Online.

This modest digitization project of approximately 2500 pages of once commonplace yet now scarce historical material involved more people than one might imagine, and plans are underway to add a few more Bancroft texts as well as make the UC Berkeley texts available on the California Digital Library’s Calisphere for even broader use and discovery. This collaborative project would not have been possible without the assistance and support of Tony Bliss, Chuck Eckman, Mary Elings, David Kessler, Steve Mendoza, Charles Stewart, Robert Byler, Randy Brandt, Susan Snyder, Lorna Kirwan, Lynne Grigsby, Sarah Sussman, and the entire team at ARTFL.

Mareschal expert, traitant du naturel, & des marques des beaux & bons chevaux, de leurs maladies & remedes d'icelles. (Troyes, 1781)
Beaugrand, Nicolas [1731]. Mareschal expert,
traitant du naturel, & des marques des beaux
& bons chevaux, de leurs maladies & remedes d’icelles.
Par feu N. Baugrand Augmente d’une seconde partie,
contenant plusieurs recepées tres aprouvées du Sieur de l’Espinet
,
sic (La Veuve de J. Oudot & J. Oudot, Troyes)

See also:

 

Andriès, Lise. La Bibliothèque bleue: littérature de colportage. Paris: R. Laffont, 2003.
Main Stacks PQ1125 .A537 2003

 

La Bible Bleue: Anthologie d’une Littérature “populaire.” / Geneviëve Bollëme; appendice et index ëtablis par Nora Scott. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.
Main Stacks PQ801 .B37

La Bibliothèque bleue et les littératures de colportage. Actes du colloque organisé par la Bibliothèque Municipale à vocation régionale de Troyes en collaboration avec l’École nationale des Chartes, Troyes, 12-13 Novembre 1999 / Réunis par Thierry Delcourt et Elisabeth Parinet. Paris: École des chartes, 2000.
Main Stacks PQ1276.P62 B435 2000

Catalogue descriptif de la Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (almanachs exclus) / Alfred Morin. Genève: Droz, 1974.
Bancroft Reference Z4.A1 H58 v.7

Martin, Henri-Jean, “The Bibliothèque Bleue: Literature for the Masses in the Ancien Régime,” Publishing History 3 (1978): 70-102.

Sussman, Sarah, “The Bibliothèque Bleue Online: CIFNAL’s First Collaborative Project,” Focus on Global Resources, 28: 3 (Spring 2009).
http://www.crl.edu/focus/article/5508