This academic year the Literatures and Languages Library (LLL) will participate in a joint Ithaka S+R and Modern Languages Association project to gather data on how local faculty carry out their research. Over the course of the year, Paula Carns, Head of LLL, and Matt Roberts, Librarian for English, will work closely with UIUC faculty to learn about their research habits and in response will create services to better meet their needs.

More on the project can be found here: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/announcing-a-new-project-on-language-and-literature/

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Oxford Bibliographies: Linguistics
Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics is an entirely new and unique type of reference tool that has been specially created to meet a great need among today’s students and scholars. It offers more than other bibliography initiatives on- and offline by providing expert commentary to help students and scholars find, negotiate, and assess the large amount of information readily available to them. It facilitates research in a way that other guides cannot by providing direct links to online library catalogs and other online resources. Organizing the resource around discrete subject entries will allow for quick and easy navigation that users expect when working on screen. For more information: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/linguistics.

  Oxford Bibliography in Literary and Critical Theory

Literary theory has become the hegemonic methodology for the study of text and is often regarded both as a sub-discipline in itself and as a critical tool through which to liberate deeper and more complex meanings from texts. It encompasses a massive range of topics, including periods, movements, themes and works that make it a dynamic field of study. It is constantly evolving as writers from different areas make connections with what might be termed mainstream literary theory and these writers, in turn, become part of the theoretical enterprise. While this presents problems for the classifier and the bibliographer, it is an example of the dynamic and constantly-developing aspects of the field that have made it such an indispensable tool in the area of reading texts, be these texts written, iconic or socio-cultural. As such, this area invites trans-disciplinary collaboration with fields as varied as literature, history, cultural studies, and philosophy making it challenging for students and scholars to stay informed about every applicable area. Given that literary theory draws from other disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, the social sciences and work from non-Anglophone cultures and traditions, the very scope which makes it a necessary tool for contemporary academics and intellectuals can be off-putting in terms of locating a starting point for any specific inquiry. Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory will offer clearly-signposted pathways through the different areas, and will make clear references to the other disciplines which feed in to, and are often transformed by, literary theory. For more: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/Literary-and-Critical-Theory

On Thursday September 22 from 3-4 the Literatures and Languages Library will celebrate the opening of its new space in room 200 and the opening of its Classics Library Collection in room 225. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

As the Literatures and Languages Library prepares to celebrate 200-year anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, we delight in the news that an unknown poem written around the time she authored Jane Eyre was recently discovered. It will enrich the already remarkable collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum of Haworth, England, being  the last addition to the Brontë juvenilia involving Charlotte, their brother Branwell, and their mother, the owner of the book in which the letter was found carefully folded.

Known as Currer Bell, Charlotte penned many poems, which she and her sisters published in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), that at the time it sold only two copies. This newly discovered poem, like her entire work, makes us ponder whether to treat her creation through the lens of the personal or to treat women writers the way they were treated by their nineteenth-century contemporaries in an impersonal manner. As Columbia Professor Edward Mendelsohn once said, the reader and the critic alike need to get in touch with their own feelings to understand literature. Charlotte’s poems show her beautifully describing interwoven relationships and emotions among a group of people that only a self-introspective nature could observe and feel. Charlotte’s letters edited by Margaret Smith (The letters of Charlotte Brontë : with a selection of letters by family and friends,1995-2004, vol. 1-3, and an Oxford edition of 2007, available in our library) are all about family and friends and they alone will tell us how she would want us to understand her life and her work.

Our library acquired a new biography of the Brontë sisters The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen (Cambridge 2012), in which of particular interest might be Janet Gezari’s chapter on their poetry. To place Charlotte in particular in the context of her family, society, and her work’s chronology, check our library holding, A Brontë Family Chronology by Edward Chitham (Palgrave, 2003).