Visuals

Brenna Twohy slams it out of the park with her poem ‘Fantastic Breasts and Where to Find Them’

Don’t you give me raw meatand tell me it is nourishment,I know a slaughterhouse when I see one - Brenna Twohy Hailing from Portland, Oregon Brenna Twohy's performance was one of the highlights of the 2014 National Poetry Slam take took place in Oakland last month. Her poem 'Fantastic Breasts and Where to Find Them,' a powerful combination that is part homage to Harry Potter and part feminist response to porn and male aggression, is a stark reminder of the sexual madness that still permeates our male-dominated culture.  Just her coming up with the term 'Potterotica' was enough to get my vote.  [youtube]http://youtu.be/bXey2_i7GOA[/youtube] Here...

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A 21st Century Literary Atlas of Europe

The impetus for the project is simple: Where is literature set and why? For over a hundred years "literary criticism has been struggling with the question of how best to depict literary spaces on maps in an adequate and objectively accurate manner" Combining the fields of literary geography and cartography researchers at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation in  Zurich have been at work since 2006 compiling new interactive tools to assist researchers and others with an interest in literature and place. Subjects like "fictionalization processes over time (of a region, a city); interactions between fiction and reality; and last but not least coherences between natural...

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Shame and Literacy

Unfortunately, I missed the boat when The Reader by Bernhard Schlink first hit American shores in 1997.  Originally published in Germany it went on to sell, after an Oprah push, over two million copies in the U.S. and became the first German book to top The New York Times bestseller list. I did; however, watch the 2008 film version recently and have been thinking about it ever since. It has to rank among the most powerful films dealing with literacy ever made. The film follows the relationship between Hanna Schmitz (played by Kate Winslet, who won an Academy Award for performance) and a 15-year-old boy Michael (played...

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