Bodleian Libraries

Purpose: To review the trend in academic libraries toward including scholarly communication, and by extension, electronic publishing, as part of their core mission, using the Cornell University Library as an example. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes several manifestations of publishing activity organized under the Library's Center for Innovative Publishing, including the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org), and DPubS (http://DPubS.org). Findings: Libraries bring many competencies to the scholarly communications process, including expertise in digital initiatives, close connections with authors and readers, and a commitment to preservation. To add publishing to their responsibilities, they need to develop expertise in content acquisition, editorial management, contract negotiation, marketing, and subscription management. Originality/value: Academic libraries are making formal and informal publishing a part of their core activity. A variety of models exist. The Cornell University Library has created a framework for supporting publishing called the Center for Innovative Publishing, and through it supports a successful open access repository (arXiv), a sustainable webhosting service for journals in math and statistics (Project Euclid) and a content management tool (DPubS) to enable other institutions (libraries, scholarly societies, presses) to engage in similar ventures to increase the dissemination of scholarship and to lower the barriers to its access.

 This work provides a survey of Indian funeral rites, concentrating on ceremonies performed by rural mainland Hindus, who have been divided into the broad social categories of brahmins, caste Hindus and outcastes/tribes. The primary intention is to identify a core of ritual, which can be used as a baseline against which particular funeral performances can be checked. This work also examines the variation of brahminical ritual over time through a survey of ethnographic material taken from Gazetteers and Government Ethnographic Surveys; the Purāṇas , represented by a version of the Garuda Purāṇa and a work known as the Garuda Purāṇa Sāroddāra ; and Caland's summary of Vedic ritual in Die altindischen Todten- und Bestattungsgebrauche . In each of these three sections the funeral rituals have been divided into six stages and these stages have been further divided into sub-sections containing specific rituals or groups of rituals. Sections on untimely death and the role of the widow...

PEER English 5 (2010): 125-37
This paper uses two case studies to illustrate the poles of one of the axes on which the translator must situate herself when tackling particular types of literary or scriptural writing.  It will look at two accounts of translation: Philo of Alexandria's description of the creation of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, and John Crombie's introduction to his own translation of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes.  Both accounts exhibit a concern about the inadequacy of translation to convey vital aspects of the source text.  Philo seeks to allay this anxiety by inventing the miracle of corroborating versions—he claims that numerous scholars produced identical texts—thereby implying a divine authority for the translation.  Crombie meanwhile self-consciously avoids using the word translation altogether, referring to his text as a version.
Analysing both accounts, this paper will demonstrate which aspects of the source texts have given rise to the authors' anxieties.  It will argue that Philo is driven by a sense that, for his readership, it does not behove a sacred text to be subject to synonymy—that the form of the words themselves, as much as their meaning, bears the spiritual message.  Yet Philo cannot fully commit to his invented miracle, and his account is undermined by a number of half-hidden vacillations.  Crombie, on the other hand, exhibits the opposite anxiety—that in maintaining the form of Queneau's highly stylised source text, he has strayed too far from it's meaning to warrant the term translation.

Jan 2012: Comparative Literature 64(1): 94-109

A recurring problem in much critical writing about the Oulipo is a tendency to homogenize the output of the group’s writers in order to present a universal poetics of constrained writing. Oulipians rightly bristle at these attempts to oversimplify the group’s history. Nevertheless one useful distinction has been made by Jacques Roubaud who notes the widening of the group’s membership which began with himself in 1966, and postulates that a second era—the “Perecquian era”—of the Oulipo began in 1969, when Georges Perec published his infamous novel without the letter e, La Disparition.

This paper will look closely at the theoretical writing of Italo Calvino over the six year period from 1967 to 1973—the years between his translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Les Fleurs bleues and his full election to the Oulipo—arguing that, during this time, Calvino’s own poetics underwent a significant change with regard to the perceived relationship between creativity and constraint. The paper will make its case by analogy with two authors often cited by the Oulipo—the medieval theologian Ramón Llull and the Atomist philosopher Lucretius—between whom Calvino draws a parallel in one of his final works, the undelivered lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Instead of a parallel, however, this paper will argue that Llull and Lucretius represent two opposing models of the combinatorics, and that the former encapsulates Calvino’s views at the start of the period in question, while the latter neatly exemplifies his later position. It will suggest too that the trend in Calvino’s thought is germane to the distinction which Roubaud makes—that Calvino’s earlier position is characteristic of the “pre-Perecquian Oulipo,” while his later views are closer to those expressed by some of his peers among the group’s second wave.

In the summer of 1868, the young Stéphane Mallarmé was living in Avignon and working as a schoolteacher. In poor health, both mentally and physically, his limited income combined unhappily with his natural profligacy to create a somewhat precarious existence for the poet and his young family. To make matters worse, Mallarmé was frustrated at his inability to write the great work he had recently envisaged, the vast, multiform masterpiece he referred to as Le Livre -The Book -and which, he intended, would encapsulate the post-Christian values of the age ('L'explication orpique de la Terre' -'The Orphic explanation of the Earth' -as he would later describe it to Verlaine). 1 Missing the cosmopolitan milieu of Paris and resenting the Provençals as uncultured rustics, he wrote to his friend Eugène Lefébure, asking him to make enquiries as to where a good hammock might be obtained, reasoning that if one can't write poetry, one might at least relax in the shade.