Background
Caws, Mary Ann was born on September 10, 1933 in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States. Daughter of Harmon Chadbourn and Margaret Devereux (Lippitt) Rorison.
(Not since the publication of Paul Auster's The Random Hou...)
Not since the publication of Paul Auster's The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1984) has there been a significant and widely read anthology of modern French poetry in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary verse of scourge Michel Houellebecq. Many of the English translations (on facing pages) are justly celebrated, composed by eminent figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery; many others are new and have been commissioned for this book. Distinguished scholar and editor Mary Ann Caws has chosen work by more than 100 poets. Her deliberately extensive, international selection includes work by Francophone poets, by writers better known for accomplishments in other genres (novelists, songwriters, performance artists), and by many more female poets than have typically been represented in past anthologies of modern French poetry. The editor has opted for a chronological organization that highlights six crucial "pressure points" in modern French poetry. Accompanying the selections are a general introduction, informative essays on each period, and short biographical notes--all prepared by the editor.
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( To the Boathouse is the memoir of a southern girl and h...)
To the Boathouse is the memoir of a southern girl and her maturing sense of self as she grows to become one of the most prolific and accomplished writers and critics of our day. Mary Ann Caws recounts the tangled relationships of her family, and her own ties to her sister, parents, and the grandmother—a painter—who served as her role model for a life of passionate engagement. The southern landscape plays a central role in her early life in North Carolina, where she makes her debut and begins to struggle with accepted social values of the time and region. Caws sketches her educational experiences at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale—where she weds a professor of philosophy. She recounts the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding. Caws relates her passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their field house in Provence. The author returns to visit the tangled vines of the southern landscape and her hometown and dwells on the steadying influence in her life of a singular place: the boathouse in New York's Central Park where for most of her adulthood she has retreated for peace and solace and where, finally, she and her children row out on the water to toast their lives, their city, and their sense of home. "The southern family, the lush landscape, the memories of food (including recipes!), the complicated social obligations, complex relationships, and various houses where the family gathers are all the ingredients for a very compelling childhood memory." —Ladette Randolph, author of "This is not the Tropics" Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of City University of New York. She has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, N.E.H., and Getty Foundation fellowships and is the author of many works of scholarship, including Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Work of Dora Maar, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf.
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(The "Overlook Illustrated Lives" series offers visual lit...)
The "Overlook Illustrated Lives" series offers visual literary biographies, informatively written by leading experts, accompanied by over a hundred photographs and illustrations, some unpublished and rarely seen, that bring to life the author's world. In this volume, Mary Ann Caws captures the details of Marcel Proust's life, from his daily routines to the elite social circle that fascinated his youth, and has hand chosen photos and illustrations to enable readers to share the celebrated author's sight - and how others saw him. The more than 100 illustrations, some previously unpublished, range far and wide: Proust's favorite paintings by Vermeer, Manet, Monet, Moreau, Rembrandt, Whistler and others; portraits of the people he was close to; sources for his fictional characterizations of Sarah Bernhardt, Charles Haas, Robert de Montesquiou, Rejane, Emile Zola, Alfred Dreyfuss, and others; and copious illustrations of the Ballets Russes Proust attended with such enthusiasm, scores of the music he loved, some of his manuscripts, his own sketches, and the places dear to him and central to the great novel that was his life's work. Coinciding with the publication of the first all-new English translation of Proust's great work in more than seventy years, this volume celebrates the combination of solitary genius and passionate investigator of social custom that has made the author an object of fascination to generations of readers.
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( For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry...)
For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original. In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.
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("Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell de...)
"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.
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( Mary Ann Caws presents in detail an important feature o...)
Mary Ann Caws presents in detail an important feature of modern literary narrative--the setting apart of passages that stand out from the flow of the prose, larger-than-life scenes that seem to hold the essence of the work. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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( This book explores the life and art of seven extraordin...)
This book explores the life and art of seven extraordinary women of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who had a tremendous if not yet fully acknowledged impact on the modernist movement and its reception. Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, Dorothy Bussy, Dora Carrington, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emily Carr and Claude Cahun were powerful forces in their various fields. Each lived an unusual life, the eccentricity of which was in large part responsible for its creative intensity. Drawing on much unpublished material, the stories recounted here, often involving very famous men-- including Utrillo, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wagner, Hugo, Rilke, and Gide-- show a singular courage and determination. Whether as writers, translators, painters, or photographers, these innovators stood out among their contemporaries as remarkable contributors to modernism.
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( A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence...)
A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence―including over thirty delicious recipes. More than thirty years ago, Mary Ann Caws, then a young professor, moved to Provence to translate the poetry of Provençal poet René Char. What sounded like a simple romantic sojourn turned into a journey of self-discovery on the joys of living simply: good company, good food, and great wine, preferably from your neighbor’s vineyard. There was little else in the way of material goods. Her little cottage, her cabanon, had no running water, no heat, no electricity, and was missing a wall and almost half the roof. The rest of the place seemed held together only by weeds and brambles. Mary Ann and her family were never happier. The beauty of the olive trees, cherry orchards, marketplace and vineyards dictated the rhythm of their new lives. The process of preparing food and the sharing of it with friends and neighbors came to embody the essence of their existence on a hillside near the Mount Ventoux. Now, in this delightful and lyric meditation on Provence and its food, Mary Ann invites you to sit down at her table and share in some of her favorite recipes, the recipes of her neighbors, and her delicious memories of life in France. 12 color, 12 b&w illustrations
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( Caws discusses the artist's paintings, drawings, and co...)
Caws discusses the artist's paintings, drawings, and collages in relation to the wide variety of American and European literature, philosophy, and art which influenced Motherwell.
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( The Description for this book, The Inner Theatre of Rec...)
The Description for this book, The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry: Cendrars, Tzara, Peret, Artaud, Bonnefoy, will be forthcoming.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691062129/?tag=2022091-20
( Acclaimed scholar Mary Ann Caws examines the details of...)
Acclaimed scholar Mary Ann Caws examines the details of Woolf's career and haunted private life. Many of the accompanying illustrations showing Woolf and intimates from the famed Bloomsbury Circle-which included economist John Maynard Keynes and biographer Lytton Strachey-are published here for the very first time, along with other rare photos and portraits, providing rare insights into the mind of this enigmatic and influential writer.
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(Three Bloomsbury women: a great writer, a talented painte...)
Three Bloomsbury women: a great writer, a talented painter, and an unsuccessful, reclusive artist. mary Ann Caws's deeply personal book takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. By juxtaposing their lives, struggles and works, Caws weaves a rich and moving story about the pain women suffer in being artists, and in finding--or creating--their sense of self.
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( The Description for this book, The Eye in the Text: Ess...)
The Description for this book, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, will be forthcoming.
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(Maria McDonald Jolas, a member of a distinguished Kentuck...)
Maria McDonald Jolas, a member of a distinguished Kentucky family and cofounder with Eugene Jolas of the international literary journal transition, has been called a survivor of the heroic generation and, somewhat to her discomfort, "the leading lady of Paris literati of the Thirties." Her memoir and other writings, edited and introduced by Mary Ann Caws, reveal the truth in those accolades as well as the measure of her contribution to our understanding of modernism. Completing the portrait of her family's life begun in her husband's autobiography, Man from Babel, this volume sheds light on the remarkable achievements of the other half of a celebrated partnership. As one of the primary forces behind transition, Maria Jolas helped introduce the world to the twentieth-century's literary avant-garde, among them Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce. A skillful translator, Jolas is renowned for her renderings of Gaston Bachelard's philosophical texts, Nathalie Sarraute's novels and plays, and works by Joyce. In addition, Jolas founded an influential school, the Ecole Bilingue in France, and the celebra
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( "Having the freedom of our perceptual conviction," writ...)
"Having the freedom of our perceptual conviction," writes Mary Ann Caws, "would mean the ability at once to challenge institutional presentations and individual visions and to invent our own fictions of seeing." In The Art of Interference Caws argues for a "personally passionate criticism," emphasizing that reading texts of literature and visual art can never be a fixed and closed process. She addresses the issues of how to look for, read, and know what is important when considering literary and visual works and how to establish relations and enhance "seeing" by such techniques as framing, bridging, fragmenting, integrating, and multiplying. These chapters are filled with Caws's own readings, which demonstrate the richness of connection-making. Written in a free, unpedantic style, this book opens up works to the imagination, making many original and significant connections between texts and art works. The author covers various movements in modern literature, art, and architecture, such as modernism, Dadaism, surrealism, concretism, and spatialism. In so doing, she draws relationships between painting and poetry, analyzing, among others, the work of Tintoretto, Van Gogh, Cornell, Stevens, Bataille, Mallarm, Derrida, and Arakawa.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691014787/?tag=2022091-20
( A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence...)
A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence—great company, delicious food. More than thirty years ago, Mary Ann Caws, then a young professor, moved to Provence to translate the poetry of Provençal poet René Char. What sounded like a simple romantic sojourn turned into a journey of self-discovery on the joys of living simply and enjoying the maxims of the Provençal "good life"—good company, good food, and great wine, preferably from your neighbor's vineyard. There was little else in the way of material goods. Her little cottage, her cabanon, had no running water, no heat, no electricity. When she arrived that first day with her young family in tow, the house was even missing a wall and almost half of the roof. The rest of the place seemed held together only by weeds and brambles. Mary Ann and her family were never happier. The beauty of the olive trees, cherry orchards, marketplace and vineyards dictated the rhythm of their new lives. The process of preparing food and then sharing it with friends and neighbors came to embody the essence of their existence on the hillside of Mount Vertaux. Now, in this delightful and lyric meditation on Provence and its food, Mary Ann invites you to sit down at her table and share in some of her favorite recipes, the recipes of her neighbors, and her delicious memories of life in France.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/160598020X/?tag=2022091-20
(How do we look at looking? The essays in this volume, com...)
How do we look at looking? The essays in this volume, coming as they do from highly varied viewpoints and representing the perspectives of thinkers and critics in three different fields, are a collective effort toward some notion of the wide range of possibilities for further exploration in the embattled and actual area of perceptual studies.
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( Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and ...)
Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and articulate of the Abstract Expressionists. This book, written by a friend of the artist, the well-known writer and critic Mary Ann Caws, examines Motherwell’s way of thinking and writing in relation to his paintings. The artist, American by birth, yet simultaneously American and European in his way of visualizing and vocalizing artistic and philosophical traditions, always worked between these two poles, and it is this tension that imbues his œuvre with its particular intensity. The author bases her analysis of Motherwell on the artist’s own writings and readings, as well as on extensive conversations and interviews with him. She considers his work and interests in relation to those of other Abstract Expressionists as well as to the work of the Surrealists. Her book highlights his deep attraction to France and French literature and art, and his concern with the idea of elegy and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. His singularly American spirit provided him with a manner of painting and thinking unique among the Abstract Expressionists, as well as with a distinctive and highly personal filter through which to interpret his fascination with European literature and history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1861891415/?tag=2022091-20
historian art historian university professor
Caws, Mary Ann was born on September 10, 1933 in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States. Daughter of Harmon Chadbourn and Margaret Devereux (Lippitt) Rorison.
Bachelor, Bryn Mawr College, 1954. Master of Arts, Yale University, 1956. Doctor of Philosophy, University Kansas, 1962.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Union College, 1983.
She is currently Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New New York She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell.
She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabèson
She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies including Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Surrealism, Twentieth-Century French Literature. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Among the positions she has held are President, Association for Study of Dada and Surrealism, 1971-1975 and President, Modern Language Association of America, 1983, Academy of Literary Studies, 1984-1985, and the American Comparative Literature Association, 1989-1991. In October 2004, she published her autobiography, To the Boathouse: a Memoir (University Alabama Press), and in November 2008, a cookbook memoir: Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France (Pegasus Books).
Forthcoming are her edition of Pierre Reverdy (with 14 translators), New York Review Books, and The Modern Art Cookbook (Reaktion Books).
(How do we look at looking? The essays in this volume, com...)
(Maria McDonald Jolas, a member of a distinguished Kentuck...)
(The "Overlook Illustrated Lives" series offers visual lit...)
( For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry...)
( Mary Ann Caws presents in detail an important feature o...)
( Mary Ann Caws presents in detail an important feature o...)
( This book explores the life and art of seven extraordin...)
(Not since the publication of Paul Auster's The Random Hou...)
( "Having the freedom of our perceptual conviction," writ...)
( Caws discusses the artist's paintings, drawings, and co...)
( To the Boathouse is the memoir of a southern girl and h...)
(Scolarly edition of journal devoted to Dada and Surrealis...)
( The Description for this book, The Inner Theatre of Rec...)
( The Description for this book, The Eye in the Text: Ess...)
("Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell de...)
(Three Bloomsbury women: a great writer, a talented painte...)
(Three Bloomsbury women: a great writer, a talented painte...)
( Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and ...)
( A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence...)
( Acclaimed scholar Mary Ann Caws examines the details of...)
( A savory tribute to the simple joys of life in Provence...)
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
(Book by Caws, Mary Ann)
(Book by Caws, Mary Ann)
(Reprint)
Member Modern Language Association (executive council 1973-1977, vice president 1982-1983, president 1983-1984), American Association Teachers French, Association for Study Dada and Surrealism (president 1982-1986), International Association Philosophy and Literature (executive board since 1982, chairman 1984), Academy Literature Studies (president 1985), American Comparative Literature Association (executive committee 1981, vice president since 1986, president 1989-1991), American Academy Arts & Sciences.
Married Peter Caws, June 2, 1956 (divorced 1987). Children: Hilary, Matthew. Married Boyce Bennett, November 3, 2007.