Join the University of Iowa Libraries and the Department of French and Italian for a special event celebrating the impact of French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.
Experience his groundbreaking poem “Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)” read in both French and English by Rosemarie Scullion and Emily Wieder. Then, learn more through a lecture by Roxanna Curto about Mallarmé’s trajectory from a writer of structured poems influenced by Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine to a creator of radical, visual poetry.
This event is part of programming for the spring 2025 Main Library Gallery exhibition, A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive, curated by Rich Dana.
More about the lecture: “Stéphane Mallarmé in the Age of Mechanical/Digital (Re)production”
19th-century French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé revolutionized the poetry of his time through works that played with the role of sound in meaning and the display of words on a page. This lecture will explore Mallarmé’s trajectory from a writer of structured poems influenced by Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine to a creator of radical, visual poetry that anticipates modes of reading in the age of the Internet.
Speakers:
Roxanna Curto is associate professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2016) and co-editor of the volume Pour le sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2021). She has published essays on the role of technology in the work of poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Denis Roche.
Rosemarie Scullion is associate professor French in the Department of French and Italian. Her research and teaching focus on 20th-21st-century French literary and cultural studies, French women writers and feminist/gender theory, contemporary European literary theory, French cinema, and modern French history and historiography.
Emily Wieder is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian, working on a dissertation focused on the roles of women Surrealists in the French Resistance. Avant-garde poetry has been her academic motivation, and she enjoys working with Dr. Tim Shipe in the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa Libraries where she explores poetry, periodicals, and so much more in multiple languages.