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Adam Frank

Professor
University of British Columbia
Radio Free Stein: Composition, Expression, Performativity
01 September 2018 - 30 June 2019
Literature
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Adam Frank is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He has won the James W. Gargano Award for outstanding scholarly essay on Edgar Allan Poe (2005) and a Fundación Valparaíso residency award (2007). In 2013 he was awarded a multi-year Insight Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to pursue the Radio Free Stein project. The author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (2015) and co-author of The Silvan Tomkins Handbook (forthcoming), he has also produced recorded musical audiodramas, as well as a chamber opera that premiered in New York City in 2018.

Research interests

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and media, modernist theater, affect and object-relations theory, history of graphic technologies, sound studies, music theater.

Radio Free Stein: Composition, Expression, Performativity

Radio Free Stein is a large-scale critical sound project that addresses the contradictory reception of Gertrude Stein's plays and poetics in twentieth-century theater history by turning to the medium of radio and recorded sound. The project aims to advance the study and understanding of Stein’s plays and poetics in relation to modernist theater and post-modern performance practices; to intervene in the scholarship on radio broadcasting and sound studies by forwarding the conceptual methods of affect and object-relations theory; and to offer contemporary composers an opportunity to explore the relations between words and other sonic elements. The project poses a series of related questions: How can we understand the remarkable influence of Stein's "landscape" poetics on avant-garde, experimental, and other non-naturalist theater? How do Stein's poetics address the relation beween dramatic form and twentieth-century institutions and technologies of broadcasting media, as these seek to regulate affective experience? What might a critical attention to compositional techniques in contemporary music (after John Cage) tell us about these histories? Radio Free Stein proposes a historical, conceptual, and experiential account of Stein's poetics and the music theater tradition it helped to initiate.

Concert and round table organized by A. Frank (2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow)
26 Jun 2019 19:00 -
26 Jun 2019 21:30,
Paris :
What Happened | Plays
Talk by A. Frank, 2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow
18 Apr 2019 17:00 -
18 Apr 2019 19:00,
Paris :
'A thing I do not see' - Gertrude Stein's Radio Theater
Talk by A. Frank, 2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow
08 Apr 2019 17:30 -
08 Apr 2019 19:00,
Paris :
Sounding Out Stein's Plays: Exercises in Group Analysis
Lecture by A. Frank, 2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow
06 Apr 2019 12:00 -
06 Apr 2019 12:45,
Amsterdam :
The Radio Free Stein project
Talk by A. Frank, 2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow
29 Jan 2019 17:30 -
29 Jan 2019 19:00,
Coventry :
Hollow Utterance or Expression: Austin with Stein
Adam Frank presents his research project within the framework of the weekly internal seminar
22 Jan 2019 10:00 -
22 Jan 2019 13:00,
Paris :
Radio Free Stein: Composition, Expression, Performativity
Talk by A. Frank, 2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow
28 Nov 2018 10:30 -
28 Nov 2018 11:40,
Gand :
Many Many Voices: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Radio

University of Minnesota Press
Research project: "Radio Free Stein: Composition, Expression, Performativity"
18049
2018-2019
Contemporary period (1789-…)
World or no region