In the last twenty years, the American artist has combined the old predilection for ignoble material with the European bricoleur’s predilection for slapdash technique. But the effect is not a total abdication of artistic control; instead it is often peculiarly charming, since the locus of the failure lies not in the artist but in art itself. In this talk, Albright will examine the operations of this studied nonchalance in the poetry of John Ashbery and Charles Wright--what might be called the anti-ideogrammic method--and in the illegible graphisms of the painter Cy Twombley and the composers Earle Brown and Christian Wolff.

Daniel Albright is Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities at the University of Rochester. He is the author of numerous books, including Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov; Schoenberg, Lyricality and English Literature; Stravinsky: the Music Box and the Nightingale; Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, and Eliot and the Science of Modernism, and most recently Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and other Arts. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Senior Fellow.

This event is co-sponsored by the UCSB Departments of English, Music, and the History of Art & Architecture, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.