Muses and Museums

The book The Exhibit in the Text (Edited by Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti) examines the intense relationship between literature, collecting and museology from the Enlightenment through to the twentieth-century crisis of representation and memory, via the end of the nineteenth century, a time when Europe was pervaded by an enthusiasm for exhibiting and classifying. The essays in this collection explore the huge impact of the ‘exhibition and museum fever’ on literary texts; the authors examine how museums, collections and the concepts of display and taxonomy are both textualized in, and appropriated by, narrative and poetry.

Screening:
Nowhere Home. Space and Place in British Modernism
Directed by Giulia Ciniselli, written by Caroline Patey

A poetic journey from London to St. Ives, from Vita Sackville West’s grand house at Knole to the river Rye, along the coast and on the Downs, where Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell chose to write and paint, and then across the Channel into France and down south to Provence: the film explores some crucial spaces – houses, gardens, landscapes – and the memories of an artistic generation in search of a place and yet ever ready to yield to a deep sense of restlessness and homelessness.

Programme

Introduction: Prof. Dr. Thomas Rommel
Book Presentation, The Exhibit in the Text, ed. by Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti

Screening: Nowhere Home. Space and Place in British Modernism, Directed by Giulia Ciniselli, written by Caroline Patey (OV/2008, 47 minutes)