Australia’s Lily Brayton: Performer and theatre artist

Recognition is the aim of this account of an artist who is now remembered largely for her beauty, her wide iconic fame achieved by mass distribution of her image via photography and postcards, and her professional association with a internationally prominent producer who was also her husband. It is however a historically situated study, confining itself to readings of the kind of theatrical, social and cultural work performed by Brayton's presence in a rapidly-modernising Australia during the period between Federation in 1901 and the first World War, which event marks a disjuncture in the patterns of entertainment and cultural discourse in the new nation. Pre-war Australian theatre and vaudeville managements competed vigorously to secure the most acclaimed artists, seeing it as a kind of service and duty to boost their country's prestige along with their own coffers. Meanwhile, local playwrights and producers promoted a burgeoning repertoire of Australian dramas and films which played alongside the imported products in a complex network of cultural codes and affects.

Blueprint of proposed lily pond at DeVeaux Hall drawn by T. Wiley

Blueprint of proposed lily pond at DeVeaux Hall drawn by T. Wiley, Apr. 1916.

Note regarding the phone tender from Newman Brothers for the lily pond

Note regarding the phone tender from Newman Brothers for the lily pond, n.d.

The dialectic of silence and remembrance in Lily Brett’s ''Things could be worse''

The dynamics of silence and remembrance in Australian writer Lily Brett’s autobiographic fiction Things Could Be Worse reflects the crisis of memory and understanding experienced by both first and second-generation Holocaust survivors within the diasporic space of contemporary Australia. It leads to issues of handling traumatic and transgenerational memory, the latter also known as postmemory (M. Hirsch), in the long aftermath of atrocities, and problematises the role of forgetting in shielding displaced identities against total dissolution of the self. This paper explores the mechanisms of remembrance and forgetting in L. Brett’s narrative by mainly focusing on two female characters, mother and daughter, whose coming to terms with (the necessary) silence, on the one hand, and articulated memories, on the other, reflects different modes of comprehending and eventually coping with individual trauma. By differentiating between several types of silence encountered in Brett’s prose (that of the voiceless victims, of survivors and their offspring, respectively), I argue that silence can equally voice and hush traumatic experience, that it is never empty, but invested with individual and collective meaning. Essentially, I contend that beside the (self-)damaging effects of silence, there are also beneficial consequences of it, in that it plays a crucial role in emplacing the displaced, rebuilding their shattered self, and contributing to their reintegration, survival and even partial healing.

Die Frauenfrage di Lily Braun. Proposta di traduzione di alcuni estratti

Il presente lavoro propone una traduzione, corredata di commento introduttivo, del primo capitolo di “Die Frauenfrage: ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche Seite��� di Lily Braun, un’opera non ancora tradotta in italiano, in cui l’autrice tedesca (femminista e socialdemocratica, nata nel 1865) traccia una storia della condizione femminile e tenta non solo di decostruire, secondo una visione economicistica e materialistica della storia, il mito della “naturale��� subordinazione della donna all’uomo, ma anche di combattere il pregiudizio socialista della “subalternità” della questione femminile rispetto alla lotta di classe. Il primo capitolo di “Die Frauenfrage��� indaga la condizione femminile nell’antichità, partendo dalla preistoria, e analizza le forme famigliari primitive, lo sviluppo della monogamia, la nascita del patriarcato, la condizione della donna nell’Oriente antico, in Grecia (riservando particolare attenzione alle posizioni di Platone e di Aristotele sul ruolo della donna nella società), a Roma e presso i popoli barbari. Nel commento introduttivo, sono state fornite alcune notizie storiche essenziali sull’autrice, sull’opera e sulla temperie politica e culturale in cui è stata concepita, e sono stati messi in luce i principali problemi traduttivi incontrati durante il lavoro di preparazione: in particolare, problemi legati alla terminologia delle scienze umane (sociologia, antropologia, filosofia), alle peculiarità retorico-stilistiche e sintattiche della scrittura saggistica, al “dialogo” intertestuale (citazioni da testi antichi, allusioni colte) e alla scelta fra traduzione semantica e traduzione comunicativa.

The Lily and the Lotus: Notes on Translation

This critical/creative project considers Stéphane Mallarmé’s critical poems in his 1897 Divagations as an invitation to explore the notion of criticism and the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual aspects of writing and thinking. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of theTranslator” and the myth of Orpheus, I consider ways to approach that which may not be said or thought by following Mallarmé’s method of combining poetry and criticism to create a wandering, unclassifiable text where we may imagine the nonconceptual as a remoteness, as the presence of an absence.

Daniel and Lily

http://commons.clarku.edu/vpadrl/1072/thumbnail.jpg

Lily Crawforth als Brangäne, Rollenbild, Kniestück, in: Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

Signatur des Originals: S 36/F03384

Lily Hanburg, Brustbild

Signatur des Originals: S 36/F08759

Lily Hanburg, Kniestück

Signatur des Originals: S 36/F08760

Lily Hanburg, Kniestück, Profil

Signatur des Originals: S 36/F08761