News and Events

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Professor Marisa Libbon Reviews Two Books About Jane Austen and English Fashion in the European Review of Books

Bard Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon published her review of two books about Jane Austen’s clothes, “Needle and Pen: Dressing is writing or, the clothes in the writer’s closet”, in the latest issue of the European Review of Books. The two books she reviews, the monograph Jane Austen’s Wardrobe by Hilary Davidson and the novella The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, both explore how bespoke clothing can be a mirror of the people it was made for. Beyond just reviewing these works, Libbon presents selections of Austen’s fashion to explore how Austen “shaped her novels and her wardrobe simultaneously.”

Writing about the 1990s (a period when four of Austen’s novels were adapted to film and TV) as the “Age of Austen”, Libbon explains how important Regency-era fashion has been to our understanding of the period and how it has sometimes eclipsed the actual author. Austen’s wardrobe, Libbon argues, is where we can find information we’ve overlooked about Austen’s life. Putting this information beside DeWitt’s novella, she concludes that fashion and the written word both help us remember the past: “the words we use, like the clothes we wear, give us shape.”

Post Date: 09-16-2024

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Bard Professor Peter Filkins Receives $50,000 NEH Public Scholars Award in Support of His Book Project Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann

Peter Filkins, Bard College visiting professor of literature and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund the writing of his upcoming book, Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann, which is a biography of Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). Filkins previously received a 2022–23 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, as well as a travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport, in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he researched his book project, translating letters and manuscripts while working directly within Bachmann’s archive.

Poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann remains an iconic figure in postwar German literature. With the blessing of her heirs to write her biography, Filkins has completed much of the necessary research for his book—including translating excerpts from personal correspondence, manuscripts, acceptance speeches, essays, poems, stories, librettos, novels, and critical commentary from scholars—as well as studying historical documents, reviews, and memoirs from family members. During his NEH grant period, Filkins will focus on writing this biography. This book will expand the understanding of an important writer outside of her native language and culture, and place biography in the service of literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, and the humanities.

“It’s very pleasing to have such support for the extended period of writing necessary to complete this book. It also goes a long way to bringing more attention to Bachmann's work and introducing it to a larger American audience,” said Filkins.

Ingeborg Bachmann remains Austria’s most celebrated writer of the postwar era, as well as a pioneer of second-wave feminism. Her unblinking examination of fascism’s poisonous, yet subtle effect on language and gender relations informs her poems, essays, stories, and novels. Though she died tragically in a fire at age 47, she remained an important influence on writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, and Thomas Bernhard. The critical reception of her work has also been enhanced through its translation into English, with Filkins having translated her complete poems, Darkness Spoken.

Filkins’s NEH Public Scholars Award is one of 25 in that category, and part of $37.5 million in NEH grants for 240 humanities projects across the country, announced in the third and last round of NEH funding for fiscal year 2024. The grants will support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs. These peer-reviewed grants were awarded in addition to $65 million in annual operating support provided to the national network of state and jurisdictional humanities councils.

“From exhibitions, books, and documentaries about our past, to research centers to help us meet the challenges of the future, these 240 new humanities projects contribute to our greater understanding of the human endeavor and add to our nation’s wealth of educational and cultural resources,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “We look forward to the exciting range of products, discoveries, tools, and programs these grants will generate at institutions and in communities across the United States.”

Post Date: 09-03-2024

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Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose Writes a Retrospective on the Literature of the 2000s for the Washington Post

Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard and author of 12 novels, contributed an essay on the literature of the 2000s to the Washington Post’s ongoing series celebrating the 75th anniversary of the National Book Awards. Prose, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, frames the 2000s as a decade when authors reflected the anxiety of current events in their work. Although writers are not reporters, she writes, “even if they don’t address the current moment in their work, they live inside that time.”

Prose’s list begins with writing about those current events, juxtaposing the 9/11 Commision Report at the beginning of the decade with Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin near the end of it. She also overviews nonfiction, poetry, and short stories, with special focus on the poetry of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Donald Justice, and Kevin Young. Writing about her time serving as a judge for the award in 2007, she notes that the books honored that year—including Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork—“intensely reflected the preoccupations of that time but also raised questions that remain essential—and unanswered—to this day.”

Post Date: 09-03-2024

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Peter Filkins’s Translation of Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

“This is the first time the complete text of The Book Against Death has appeared in English, compliments of a superlative translation by Peter Filkins,” writes Sam Sacks for the Wall Street Journal. The Book Against Death, translated by Visiting Professor of Literature Peter Filkins from German, is a collection of notes, fragments, and aphorisms that Elias Canetti wrote across half a century. It was the preparation for what Canetti called a “life work,” a book in which he would put “everything” and which he never finished—the manuscript accumulating his musings until his own death at age 89. A Jewish writer who cast himself as “Death’s Enemy,” Canetti lived through the Holocaust and wrote: “No other feeling approaches the intensity and unshakable nature of this one. I accept no death. Thus all who have died remain genuinely alive to me, not because they have claims upon me, not because I fear them, not because I feel that something of them is still alive, but rather because they never should have died. All of the deaths that have occurred thus far are a multi-thousand-pronged form of judicial murder that I cannot deem legal.” This is the philosophical position Canetti maintains throughout his text.

Further Reading:
“Elias Canetti’s war against death” in the New Statesman

Post Date: 07-23-2024

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Francine Prose’s New Memoir 1974 Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times

1974, a new memoir by Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. The memoir reflects on the shift of America’s identity during that historical year and the events that defined it, such as the Vietnam war, drugs, women’s liberation, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. It also examines Prose’s own relationship with Anthony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. “Throughout 1974, Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time. Many lesser writers have tried this and failed,” writes Meredith Maran for the Los Angeles Times. “Of the many books I’ve read (and written) on the topic—I lived in parallel to Prose’s 1960s–1970s life—none has matched Prose’s use of the personal to deepen the political and vice versa.” Maran continues, “In this, her first memoir, Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening—without demonizing or idealizing—the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down.”

Post Date: 06-25-2024

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Visiting Professor of Literature Peter Filkins Receives Multiple Awards in Support of His Work

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature at Bard College and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has received three awards in support of his individual professional projects. A 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, awarded Filkins with €1,500 in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he translated letters and manuscripts for his upcoming book, A Biography of Ingeborg Bachmann (1923-1973), while working directly within her archive. He will conduct further research and translation from March 26 to June 23, 2024 in the same archive with an additional €4,500 travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport. Finally, a Jentel Artist Residency 2024 will enable Filkins to work on a book-length poem about Claude Monet’s Water Lilies during a three-week residency from August 15 to September 7, 2024.

Post Date: 06-17-2024