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Double Book Launch: Heather Ladd and Dale Tracy
Please join us for an English Department celebration of Declaration Month and the launch of Dale Tracy’s Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press) and Heather Ladd’s English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 (University of Delaware Press). This will be a great opportunity for faculty members, staff, and students to mingle over light refreshments and hear short readings from these two new books.
Date: Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Time: 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. PST
Where: Arbutus 1780 (the ground floor of the Library in the back)
Derelict Bicycles
This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we’ve built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is—they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like. Unconventional but interested in convention, they turn the world in on itself until “[i]t’s almost like a curtain / has been pulled and it’s a different world. / A curtain has been pulled, but I can’t see the curtain.” Dale Tracy mines the intersection of the surreal and the philosophical, with a sprinkling of Samuel Beckett and a dash of Hélène Cixous. Tracy is a fresh, original voice in Canadian poetry, locking her startling surprises and beautiful enigmas in quiet but emphatic lines. Each poem in Derelict Bicycles takes things too far, to the edges of its own form.
English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800
The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and applications beyond the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theatre people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reaches into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private and fictionalizing the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first century celebrity culture.