Burke, Carolyn

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Burke, Carolyn

PERSONAL: Born in Australia; married; children: a daughter.

ADDRESSES: Home—Santa Cruz, CA. Agent—George Borchardt Literary Agency, 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Art critic, translator, and writer. University of California, Santa Cruz, research associate in humanities, c. 1998–. Teacher at the University of Western Sydney, University of New South Wales, the Sorbonne, and the University of Lille.

AWARDS, HONORS: Independent Scholars Prize finalist, Modern Language Association, 1997, for Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy; National Book Critics Circle Biography award nomination, 2006, for Lee Miller: A Life.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(Translator, with Catherine Porter) Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1985.

(Translator, with Gillian C. Gill) Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (philosophy), Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1993.

(Editor, with Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford) Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (philosophy), Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (biography), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1996.

Lee Miller: A Life (biography), Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Poetry Flash, Sulfer, PN Review, Heat, HOW(ever), and Art in America.

SIDELIGHTS: Carolyn Burke is an art critic and translator who gained wide attention in the publishing world with her biography Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. The book is a study of the flamboyant and controversial English feminist, artist, and poet Mina Loy, who died in Aspen, Colorado, in 1966.

Becoming Modern traces Loy's life from her origins as the daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish haberdasher in London to her participation in many of the leading European artistic circles of the early twentieth century. Burke also relates such events as the mysterious disappearance of Loy's second husband off the coast of Mexico and details of Loy's life after World War II in the Bowery section of New York, where she became an eccentric figure, constructing artworks out of found objects and associating with local derelicts.

In a Booklist review of the biography, Donna Seaman wrote that "Burke chronicles all the intriguing intricacies of Loy's adventurous life with great insight and animation." In the New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Fox Weber called the book "informative" and noted the "remarkable emotional detachment" with which Burke approaches her subject. Describing the biography as "faithful" and "serious" in the New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler commented that Becoming Modern "summons up very capably the successive artistic milieus in which Loy found herself, and gives a decent amount of attention to her writing (while not attempting to whitewash Loy's frequently appalling irresponsibility toward her children)." Harriet Zinnes, critiquing the work in the Nation, described Becoming Modern as a "fine biography" and noted that the volume contains "wonderful photographs" and vivid descriptions of Loy's "legendary life in the art centers of Paris, Berlin, Florence and New York in the early decades of this century." Megan Harlan, writing in the online magazine Salon, was concerned about the book's lack of attention to Loy's writing: "The biography re-creates a marvelous legend, but, offering no examination of the poetry except as windows into Loy's personal life, invariably leads to this glaring question: what of the poetry?" Harlan also had praise for Becoming Modern, though, calling it a "lush, nuanced biography" and "a tract on international Modernist history with one beautiful woman 'genius' at its center." Publishers Weekly reviewer Genevieve Stuttaford similarly lauded the biography, hailing it as "an important contribution to a neglected corner of modern literary history."

Burke wrote about another woman who traveled in artistic circles in her biography Lee Miller: A Life. Miller was a beautiful girl who was sexually traumatized in childhood. Donna Seaman described her in Booklist as "a glamorous phoenix, fearless and defiant." Miller worked as a fashion model for a time, then decided to try getting behind the camera. She traveled to Paris to study with Man Ray, the surrealist photographer-artist. Miller modeled for Ray, learned from him, and became his lover, but eventually left him to start her own studio. She later gained recognition for her work as a wartime photojournalist, being one of the first to document the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. That terrible experience never left her, as she later told Burke. According to a reviewer for Economist, Burke's Lee Miller is a "sympathetic tribute" that "sheds further light on the lives of this highly original, often misunderstood woman."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, summer, 1997, Dian Blakely Shoaf, review of Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, p. 380.

Atlantic Monthly, August, 1996, review of Becoming Modern, p. 93.

Booklist, April 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Becoming Modern, p. 1410; December 15, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Lee Miller: A Life, p. 11.

Economist, December 3, 2005, review of Lee Miller, p. 81.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2005, review of Lee Miller, p. 1120.

Nation, February 10, 1997, Harriet Zinnes, review of Becoming Modern, p. 29.

New Leader, August 12, 1996, Phoebe Pettingell, review of Becoming Modern, p. 24.

New Republic, May 26, 1997, Mark Ford, review of Becoming Modern, p. 38.

New Statesman, December 5, 2005, Christie Hickman, review of Lee Miller, p. 51.

New York Review of Books, September 19, 1996, Helen Vendler, review of Becoming Modern, pp. 57-60.

New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1996, Nicholas Fox Weber, review of Becoming Modern, p. 23.

Observer, December 4, 2005, Peter Conrad, review of Lee Miller.

Publishers Weekly, May 6, 1996, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Becoming Modern, p. 61; October 3, 2005, review of Lee Miller, p. 61.

Signs, winter, 2000, Ellen G. Friedman, review of Becoming Modern, p. 552.

W, November, 2005, Venessa Lau, review of Lee Miller, p. 138.