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Harry Ransom Center

David Douglas Duncan at the Harry Ransom Center

Duncan with the Sheikh of Huzayel

Duncan with the Sheikh of Huzayel in 1946. Photo by Welles Stabler (via Harry Ransom Center)

In 1996, former Life Magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan donated his archive to the Harry Ransom Center, the premier humanities research center located at The University of Texas at Austin. viz. is proud to be partnering with the Ransom Center this year, and we're extra excited about the Ransom Center's web exhibitions, which include fabulous shots from Duncan's time in the Middle East.

Book-Burning is a Wall in the War of Ideas

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Image Credit: Brandeis.edu

"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas" portrays the book as a concrete opposition against the Nazi campaign to suppress free expression. This poster represents the base of a literary monument hardening into brick, creating a wall against the forces of anti-intellectualism and hatred. On one level, the text and image disagree as to whether books constitute a weapon or a barrier. On another, the vulcanized page promotes the binary of "us" versus "them," which is required to motivate citizens to armed resistance. The essentialism of this binary, unfortunately, needs to be called into question. Courses in modernist poetry prove that not all fascists were anti-literary, just as twentieth-century American history (or even the recent nightly news) shows that "we" also take our turn at book-burning. Far from denying the clear differences between Axis and Allies during World War II, we might consider how the poster's instrumental definition of books gestures toward a paradoxical complicity subtending the opposed acts of creation and destruction. Such an inquiry inverts the more conventional topic of how certain forms of preservation might actually threaten the existence of art and literature. Speculation into the creative capacity of book-burning has surprisingly rich antecedents in Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century poem, The Dunciad, and in Jorge Luis Borges's reflections on that poem in his mid-twentieth century essay, entitled "The Wall and the Books."

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/banned/

Harry Ransom Center Bookshop Door Exhibit is Open

Frank Shay Bookshop Door
Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center
Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

For those of you that missed it, this week’s The New York Times Book Reviewhad a write-up on the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibition, The Door: The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door. The exhibit, which opens this week, invites visitors to contemplate Frank Shay’s bookshop door, an entrance signed by 242 members of the Village’s 1920s literary scene. Some of the signatories, such as John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, are giants of American literature, while others are lost to time. At the opening of this fascinating exhibition, it’s worth pausing for a moment and considering what this door had meant to passersby.

Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection

 

Image Credit:  Winifred Casson, Accident, (ca. 1935)

via the Harry Ransom Center

The university's own Harry Ransom Center has been getting a lot of press lately. Although much of the attention involves the opening of the David Foster Wallace archive, many are talking about the center's new exhibit.

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