Join Carol Mavor for a performative reading and visual romp through her latest book Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale (Reaktion Books, 2017)
Aurelia awakens the fairy-tale realm in a wide range of authors, artists, books and objects which fall down its hole. Beyond the expected Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll, there are more surprising inclusions, like the magical materiality of glass; the discovery of Lascaux as a fairy-tale dream; Langston Hughes’s brown fairies for America’s children of “color”; the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood reimagined by the Japanese photographer Miwa Yanagi as Hiroshima after the bombing.
With each chapter, Aurelia falls deeper and deeper into darkness. With the melancholic rhythm of the fairy tale’s close cousin the nursery rhyme, Aurelia’s golden cradle falls, and down comes baby, cradle and all. Humpty Dumpty has a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty together again. With its plummet into racial hatred in America, Aurelia’s final chapter arrives full stop, head over heels.
Carol Mavor is a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, racial hatred, child-loving and the maternal). She shares this provocative approach with her students as Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her books include Reading Boyishly: J.M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicottand Blue Mythologies.
Carol Mavor will be a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, for the full year of 2019.
Time and place:
September 11. 19:00-21:00
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Festsalen
Kongens Nytorv 1
1050 Copenhagen K
Hosted by:
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies & The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Admission is free