Carol Mavor “Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour”
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join them to celebrate the recent publication of Carol Mavor’s new book Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (Reaktion Books, 2013).
The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book take the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.
In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’s essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Mavor teaches at the University of Manchester. Her previous books include Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (Duke University Press, 2012), and Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Duke University Press, 2007).
[Image: Milk from Lactarius indigo (indigo milk mushroom). Photo Alan Rockefeller.]
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Schedule
February 14, 2014 from 19:00 to 21:00