Larissa Wodtke, photo supplied
UWinnipeg’s Larissa Wodtke launches her book Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible (Repeater Books) tonight, Wednesday, May 3, 2017 at 7:00 pm, at McNally Robinson Booksellers Atrium at 1120 Grant Avenue in Winnipeg.
The Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved bands of the past thirty years. Their third album The Holy Bible (1994) is generally acknowledged to be their most enduring and fascinating work, and one of the most compelling and challenging records of the nineties. Triptych reconsiders The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and popular accessibility with intellectual attention to the album’s depth and complexity. Rhian E. Jones considers The Holy Bible in terms of its political context, setting it within the de-industrialised Welsh landscape of the 1990s; Daniel Lukes looks at the album’s literary and artistic sources; and Wodtke analyzes the way the album links with philosophical ideas of memory and the archive.
Wodtke is the Research Coordinator at the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg and the Managing Editor of the academic journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. She has published research on MP3s, crowdfunding, and affective labour in popular music in Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society and Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, as well as research on the architecture of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.
