Peter Read, Professor of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts in the Department of Modern Languages, will be giving a guest lecture entitled ‘Dans la fabrique du poète: manuscrits et épreuves de Guillaume Apollinaire’ [‘In the Poet’s Workshop: Manuscripts and Proofs of Guillaume Apollinaire’] at the University of Turin on 5 April 2017.
The illustrated lecture will explore the constantly expanding collection of personal notes, jottings and manuscript drafts established by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Peter will show how Apollinaire used this archive as a reservoir of ideas, verses, turns-of-phrase and vocabulary which he could include in new compositions, mingling writings from past and present to create new spaces of chronological and spatial simultaneity.
The lecture will also address the material reality of the poet’s archive, in which texts are drafted on headed notepaper from banks, cafés, newspapers and magazines, on the backs of international news-agency bulletins, on torn sheets of used wrapping paper, in cheap exercise books and in diaries printed in English, French and Russian. These everyday materials participate in Apollinaire’s development of a modernist aesthetic that channels the cosmopolitan diversity of life in Paris and expresses a global consciousness, attuned to transcontinental travel and new communication technologies.
For more details about the University of Turin, please see: https://en.unito.it