30 Nov 2010

Shelly's Ghost and 'Literary Worlds' Online

Some archive news:

The National archives wins award


'Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family'.
New exhibition opening 3 Dec at the Bodleian
  1. Getty images - Shelly manuscripts
  2. article on the exhibit


Literary Worlds: Illumination of the Mind
"Reading the work of an author, it is not typical to think about what a writer does to produce a poem or a book. This exhibition focuses on the creative processes that writers go through from the idea, to the writing, to the working with publishers, to the editing, to the selling of the work. Manuscripts, letters, drafts, editorial comments, and websites are ways in which the craft of writing is shared."

9 Nov 2010

Dickens's Manuscripts in Trouble

Manuscripts in the news - V&A pleads for cash to save Charles Dickens's manuscripts

"At the moment we can't display these manuscripts safely because they are so damaged and so fragile," said John Meriton, deputy keeper of word and image at the V&A. "They were last conserved in the 1960s, when they were rebound and placed in what are called 'guard books'. But the backing paper used, unfortunately, was very acidic, causing a lot of stress to the original manuscript leaves."


Hopefully the V&A can raise the funds. You can support the campaign here.

28 Oct 2010

Registration open for Interfaces Conference

Dear all,
a quick plug for a conference I'm organising at Exeter for January 2011 which may be of interest for its aspects relating to archives and non-textual materials...
Lisa



REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
University of Exeter, Department of English
Interfaces: encounters beyond the page / screen / stage
1 Day Postgraduate Research Workshop and Exhibition, 29th January 2011
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr Judith Buchanan (University of York)
AHRC Beyond Text Student-led Initiative Scheme
VISIT THE EVENT BLOG @: www.interfaces-beyond-text.blogspot.com

Registration is now open for Interfaces. This multidisciplinary research training event examines questions of mediation and memory in encounters with non-textual archival materials in the arts. By creating dialogues between presenting postgraduates and experienced researchers, the event seeks to investigate issues that take the researcher beyond the text in the use of objects and artefacts that constitute non-textual interfaces between film, literature and theatre.

The event features five core workshops on the following panel themes: Performativity / Beyond Screen / Forms of Engagement / Digital cultures / Rethinking Archives.

Participating delegates are invited to attend two central parallel workshop events in the University’s Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture and Exeter’s Special Collections, where hands-on explorations of key filmic, theatrical and literary non-textual materials will be led by the curators of these archives.

The Interfaces Exhibition also accompanies the event, showcasing Beyond Text materials and artwork from participating delegates.

ALL WELCOME!

To register, please visit the College of Humanities webpages:
http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/interfaces/

Conference fee (includes buffet lunch and tea and coffee throughout the day ): £15
Please direct all enquires to Lisa (lrs204@ex.ac.uk.

5 Oct 2010

Thank you!

Carrie and I would like to extend our thanks to everyone who attended the Reclamation & Representation conference over the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of October. The standard of papers was excellent and were overwhelmed by everyone’s enthusiasm and the extremely high quality of debate and discussion.
The event went off with very few glitches, and we are extremely grateful for the positive feedback and kind comments we received from many who attended.
We extend a final thank you to the University of Exeter for hosting the event, and to Exeter’s Special Collections and Centre for South West Writing for supporting this venture. Thank you once again, also, to our wonderful keynotes, Professor Helen Taylor and Dr Wim Van Mierlo.
We are keen to keep the project alive beyond the conference event itself. As such, we will be continuing to update this blog, and we encourage the continued submission of any research pieces, examples, questions or suggestions to be featured on the site. We welcome any information such as links to relevant press coverage, materials or academic news relating to the archive world in general.
Comments can be posted on existing blog posts, and any material you’d like featured can be emailed to myself or Carrie (lrs204@ex.ac.uk / crs202@ex.ac.uk).
We include below the concluding remarks from the event, along with a handful of photographs.
All the very best,
Lisa and Carrie

Concluding remarks (Lisa Stead, University of Exeter)

Archives tell stories, but also offer a multi-textual environment that invites a range of methodological tools and approaches.

Authenticity persists as a challenge and as a point of debate—whether this be the authenticity and authority of the source material, or the authenticity of the attribution of sources and texts.

Our work as researchers in varied literary fields, locations and timeframes engages different forms of re-representation—such as; the creation of new archives and new ways of collating and presenting materials; the reframing of biographies, of individual works and the historical significance of particular writers; and the recontextualisation of such writers and works within a network of interconnected individuals, locations, institutions and traditions.

The archive engages the researcher materially and theoretically. A range of speakers across the conference sought to deal with the nature of the archive itself through a theoretical lens. In doing so, the papers engaged with the concept and experience of archives, as social, cultural, material and intellectual encounters.

Some of the papers offered challenges to the ways in which we conceive of the structuring and collection of archive holdings and collections. A strong case was made generally for the precedence of archival coherence in the centralisation of author specific collections.

Economic factors are, as ever, a huge influence upon the shaping of archives and the kind of scholarship that we as researchers are able to undertake. The merits and demerits of the powerful American University archives are still very much a point of contestation! Economic restraints further dictate the digital future of archives.

The conference also asked what else the archive can or will be. Can it be a performance, or a history of performances? A cultural or textual ‘effect’? An organic entity, a creator in itself? --or an entity so focused upon the hallowed literary creator that, as some of our presenters suggested, other lines of research, other questions and other stories of equal or potentially greater value are closed down?

We hope to keep these insights and debates alive across this blog, continuing the productive and interactive atmosphere of the conference through research pieces, reflections, links and networking.





Woolf in the Digital World

Woolf in the Digital World

Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections, Smith College

www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/karenkukil.htm

In June 2003 when Smith College hosted the thirteenth international conference on Virginia Woolf, we mounted an exhibition in Neilson Library. Woolf in the World echoed the theme of our conference and featured photographs from Leslie Stephen’s family album, manuscripts, drawings, and Hogarth press editions. I hoped to publish a catalog of the show for the conference, but I ran out of time. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

After the conference we had everything in the show professionally scanned by Pivot Media (http://www.pivotmedia.com/). This local company provided high resolution scans, which were also delivered in medium and large files for the web. Jessica Bumpous, a recent graduate of Smith College designed an online version of the exhibition with help from her library mentor, Sika Berger. This project cost less than one fifth the price of a published catalog and the high resolution scans continue to be purchased by scholars for fifteen dollars each, generating income for the library.

Before the digital show went public on the Mortimer Rare Book Room’s website, I applied to the copyright holders for permission to publish these rare photographs and manuscripts from our collection (http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions).Since our website is non-commercial, educational, and open to the public, the permission process was relatively straightforward.
Finding copyright holders can be tricky. The WATCH (Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders) database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, photographers, and prominent figures in other creative fields is run jointly by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Reading Library. It is the best place to begin a search for copyright information (tyler.hrc.utexas.edu). Another good site for general information about fair use is the Cornell University Copyright Information Center (http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/). Peter B. Hirtle also provides a detailed guide to “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States” on the Cornell site.

All of the literary agencies waived their normal permission fees for our project. At the bottom of our online exhibition Woolf in the World is a list of the copyright holders, including the Society of Authors, which represents the estates of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Lytton Strachey, among others. We received a three-year license from the Society to display electronic facsimiles of over fifty images on our website. This license can be extended.

The following June during one of the functions in London at the fourteenth international conference on Virginia Woolf, I happened to sit next to Henrietta Garnett. She had a stack of mail in her hand and the top letter was addressed to me. Instead of mailing the envelope, she simply handed it to me. Her letter very kindly gave us permission to reproduce photographs, illustrations, and dust jacket designs by her grandmother, Vanessa Bell.

I have heard anecdotally that our online exhibitions and library guides are more useful to students and scholars around the globe than a limited run of an exhibition catalog. Mark Hussey added a link to our site in his introduction to the recent Harcourt edition of To the Lighthouse. Various Virginia Woolf societies have also provided links on their websites to “Virginia Woolf in the Virtual World,” our library study guide by Robin Kinder for students (www.smith.edu/libraries/fyi/woolf.htm).

Our online exhibitions have also attracted new gifts to Smith College. Last fall we received over twenty family photographs from the estate of Mary L. S. Bennett (1913-2005), who was the daughter of Lettice and H. A. L. Fisher. They include Pattle, Fisher, Jackson, and Stephen family photographs by G. C. Beresford, Gabriel Loppé, and O. G. Rejlander, among others.

These photographs and other additions to the collection will be displayed this spring in a new exhibition in Neilson Library. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group: A Pen and a Press of Their Own (April 8-July 31, 2010) will supplement the traveling art installation in the Smith College Museum of Art—A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections (April 3-June 15, 2010). Between the shows in the museum and the library we will display hundreds of paintings, watercolors, prints, drawings, woodcuts, broadsides, photographs, letters, manuscripts, books, dust jacket designs, fabrics, embroidery, furniture, tiles, rugs, pottery, and sculpture associated with the Bloomsbury Group (www.smith.edu/artmuseum/exhibitions/index.php).

Other digital and media projects to which we have contributed during the past five years will also be featured in my library exhibition. They include the textual project begun by Julia Briggs in 2005 and now online (http://www.woolfonline.com/). Virginia Woolf’s corrected page proof of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse is on this site along with photographs from our Leslie Stephen album. With additional funding, we hope the Woolf Online site will eventually include the entire novel.
Over the past three years, Smith psychology professor Michele Wick and videographer Kate Lee have created a website on Woolf, Creativity, and Madness, which features streaming videos about Virginia Woolf and her family. The scripts are Woolf’s words from her journals and memoirs and most of the images come from the Mortimer Rare Book Room. Once permissions are secured, Professor Wick will formally launch the Smith website, complete with a genogram of Woolf’s extended family and links to reliable scientific websites.

Next spring we will begin an archives program for undergraduates at Smith College (www.smith.edu/archives/index.php). Senior projects in the program may be creative and practical. They can include online exhibitions and finding aids for collections, such as the Mary Bennett photographs. In the future we will be able to link images to the finding aids for collections in the Five College Archives and Manuscript Collections database (asteria.fivecolleges.edu/index.html)

Over the past thirty years I have worked with countless authors, artists, agencies, manuscript repositories, and scholars. The families associated with Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group are extraordinary in their generosity and support of scholarship. Jeremy Crow at the Society of Authors is the consummate professional. Bloomsbury scholars are unusually congenial and supportive of each other. Whenever I turn my attention to a Bloomsbury-related project, I feel as if I am entering a green oasis or coming home.

10 Sept 2010

Research example: Making Public - Manuscripts and Reproduction

By Mariya Ustymenko, University of Essex

I would like to thank Carrie Smith for starting this wonderful discussion on manuscript editing and add a few observations on the subject hoping to make use of this great opportunity to share thoughts in an informal environment.

“Spelling and Strikethrough” made me think of parts of the authors´ artistic production “unintended for viewing”. How much legal weight do these parts hold against the later ‘better´ versions? Is it the author or the reader who has the right nowadays in the decision making?

The origin of manuscripts is private and for this reason alone the moral issues raised by the blog essay are both numerous and complicated. We live in a reading culture that considers great authors´ and artists´ letters to be integral part of their body of work and seldom questions their publishing. Letters and diaries are valued because they display the artist´s thinking process, document their aesthetic, social and political attitudes, and provide readers with additional access to his/her mind. But should these papers be published? From a researcher´s point of view the answer “no” would sound suicidal but publication raises a number of practical and moral questions. How does an editor decide which papers should be made available to the general public and which ones are best ‘kept´ in the author´s archive? What kind of omission would later be viewed as an editorial “crime”? Should a letter addressed to a fellow ‘great mind´ be considered of higher importance and interest than a scribble addressed to the neighbour about an annoying cat? What is an important mark and what is a doodle?

How many of our yesterday´s emails would we have saved ourselves for posterity and if they have all gone public what picture of us would they present?

Emily Dickinson seems to be a perfect example of an ‘unpublished´ writer sending her “letters to the world” that for a long time had been unaware of their existence. But the distinction between ‘letter´ and ‘poem´ is often difficult to establish when we are faced with the author´s manuscripts. What knowledge do we lose while taking the role of the reader unintended?

One of the major questions posed by Dickinson scholarship has to do with the fact that the poet remained nearly completely ‘unpublished´ in her times. Sharon Cameron, the author of the critically acclaimed Choosing Not Choosing, published in 1993, has persuasively argued that “the problems of reading and the problems of choice are in this [Dickinson´s] poetry inseparable” (247) as “it is not that Dickinson couldn´t publish, or that she chose not to”, “it is rather that she couldn´t choose how to do so” (241). Another distinguished Dickinson scholar, Martha Nell Smith, has provided extensive support towards the argument that it was in reality printing that Dickinson chose not to choose, while the poet retained complete control over her work through the distribution of her artistic production among her many correspondents.

Lately, in Dickinson scholarship there seems to be a visible shift in the direction of research focusing on Dickinson´s manuscripts as its core primary materials. In 1998 Suzanne Juhasz stated that: “In the 1990s we have been struck by certain material facts about Dickinson as writer: that her writing exists almost entirely in manuscript; that she regularly suggested alternative words or phrases to her poems and produced alternative versions of her poems; that she wrote letters with poems attached to them, embedded in them; that her writing forms possess such fluidity that we cannot precisely say what is prose and what is poetry. As a consequence, the way she wrote, the materiality of her writing, has everything to do with what and how we read when we are “reading Dickinson.”” (427)

Since this article´s publication, things have changed slightly: scholarly works aimed at analysing what can be treated as prose and what constitutes a poem in Dickinson´s body of work have been substituted by explorations of issues that encompass not only text-related features of manuscripts but also include materials which are not usually associated with literary analysis. This kind of research is represented by scholarly publications that deal with the gaps between the words and pages of the fascicles, the positioning of handwritten lines, paper embossments and their relation to the written texts.

Although there would be many scholars voicing their doubts towards what may be called the ‘fetishism of the document’, the strong trend for making the manuscripts primary sources of investigation seems to attract more and more supporters each year leading to a higher demand for wider scholarly access to the manuscripts. This seems to raise the standard for editing even higher as the editors of today have to not only avoid the violation of the author’s text but forefend the silencing of the text’s material environment leading us back to the big question – what is less ‘relevant’ and who decides?

--------------------
Cameron, Sharon, “Amplified Contexts: Emily Dickinson and the Fascicles”, Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, 1996). Pp. 240-247.

Juhasz, Suzanne, “Materiality and the Poet”, The Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Pp. 247-440.

Smith, Martha Nell, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (University of Texas Press, 1992).

Research example: The plasticity of the manuscript; the flattened text

By Wim Van Mierlo, University of London

This is a rejoinder (or conjoinder, rather) to Carrie Smith’s fine post on the about Spelling and strikethrough, typing manuscripts and silent editing. The kind of “silent editing” that she describes in Christopher Reid’s edition of The Letters of Ted Hughes is all too a common a practice. To smooth over minor slips of the pen seems for most a sensible thing to do; a minor intervention to help readability can only be a minor offence. Yet it begs the question, as Smith rightly asks, how much of the editor is there in the text. What annoys me most about it, I guess, is that it is always done in the name of the reader: it is the reader (editors or publishers claim) that do not want such troubling detail. These are usually also the kind of editors that find footnotes or annotations disturbing.

I don’t find slips of the pen disturbing. The Oxford Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats (under the general editorship of John Kelly) is in a fine example of an edition that retains detail of the hand that wrote the letters and thus gives a sense of the man behind the letters.

There are other features, too, that don’t find their way into printed editions. Among Ted Hughes’s letters to Leonard Baskin in the British Library (some of which Reid included in his volume) are written on “aerogram” paper, a type of blue, lightweight, gummed paper that could be folded to form an envelope which was used for airmail. Inevitably the “letter” sometimes overran the space on the paper, and Hughes would squeeze in a few extra lines, an ending, a greeting or a PS, to the sides of the page. None of this is ever found in a print edition of letters. Nor are any of the other features that one customarily finds in autograph letters—the space left between date, header, address; the inward-tapering left margin, and so on.

So there is a larger issue—an issue that has to do with the differences between manuscript and print. Print flattens text. A manuscript has three dimensions; the printed page has only two. The manuscript page, like the printed page, has width and length; the text moves—generally—from the top left corner to the bottom right. Generally, I say, because the writing on the manuscript can move in any direction in a way that print (barring some exceptional cases) does not. Print is limited by the sequentiality of the text; words appear in a strictly linear order. The text on the manuscript, by contrast, can move in any direction; the process of writing creates an order that is relational. Furthermore, as the text in the manuscript is not subjected to a strictly linear form, the temporal element of the manuscript is highlighted: the time of inscription becomes more apparent through the apparent simultaneity of textual elements—through co-existence of different moments of inscription—within one space.

The printed page of course has its own spatial possibilities; from the use of marginal glosses and footnotes in learned books to the dancing words of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, examples of the versatility of mise-en-page abound. But it is simply that the manuscript naturally lends itself to an exploitation of all the dimensions of the page. Every manuscript is, in a sense, a palimpsest, even when the words are not actually written on top of one another. This is the plasticity of the manuscript.

The printed page, moreover, is not well suited to capture the elasticity of hand-writing: words written hastily, words written with great care; words crammed in a corner; words written on top of other words; words that are malformed. Print cannot quite adequately handle these. And yet they are what makes a manuscript a manuscript. They tell you something about the moment of inscription, the psychology of the writer, the circumstances in which the words were written.

An example of this can be found in an annotated copy of W.B. Yeats Poems (1901), now at Senate House Library, which contains some very sloppy pencil marginalia in an almost childish hand among otherwise reasonably clear and legible notes. The conclusion that the annotator, the poet and artist T. Sturge Moore, had taken his book with him and was writing on an unstable surface immediately presented itself. Or perhaps the surface was stable, but the writing hand was being rocked about by motion? It seems likely that Sturge Moore was reading his book on the train.

Besides handwriting, print can still at best only approximate the idiosyncratic features of a manuscript. With proper page-making skills, and a powerful DTP software package, one can go a long way towards capturing the irregular elements of a manuscript. It wouldn’t be totally impossible, for example, to produce a diplomatic transcription of one of Swinburne’s drafts, with his beautiful drooping, ever-expanding, never-ending lines. But the more detail is added, the less clear the printed text actually becomes. With a manuscript like this, the fact that one has practically no leading—the spacing between the lines—on sections of verse that curve downwards one above the other, could make the printed text actually less legible than the manuscript.



So print is less flexible. But approaching the point differently, one can accept that this is precisely the function of print. The printing press may have been invented to increase the rate at which texts can be duplicated and disseminated, but one of its effects was that it has standardized text. A book produced in the sixteenth century does not look essentially different from a book published in the twenty-first century. The coming and going of blackletter printing in Germany is certainly the best indication of how this standardization works. Even the world wide web still in many respects emulates the printed page, despite claims about a digital revolution. Print flattens text—indeed. But it is supposed to do so. And this has important implications for the way we perceive manuscripts.

Just a few months into the writing of his new book, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, on October 1923, sending him some new drafts: “Today I send you the rough sheets with a plan of the verse and a forgotten page of H.C.E. But please don't read them yet—in fact, they are illegible”. He was not exaggerating. Joyce’s much-reworked early drafts, though sometimes written in a large, clear hand, are challenging for anyone to read, because of their inchoate nature and elaborate overlay. Soon after Joyce would send Weaver a fair copy or typescript which would be much easier to read. But illegibility seems to be part and partial of his practice. About a month earlier he had written to her about another piece he had completed: “I had it typed at once in order to read it”. This time for his own benefit. There’s a point, in other words, at which the manuscript reaches saturation. The page, literally, has its limits; as the striations become so intricate that the page is bursting at the seams, the need to have the text flattened arises. The writer, after all, must also be a reader. Writing cannot forever dwell in the realm of the possible; if composition wants to move forward, the text needs to be fixed at some point, even if for a brief moment.

To return to the issue of silent editing—what position, then, should the editor or transcriber take? When editing documents, one should not interfere with the text of the document. That should be the first principle, and so I personally wouldn’t regularize occasional, but obvious errors and slips of the pen. But as an editor one has a duty towards the printed text as well. In their edition of Finnegans Wake (The Houyhnhnm Press, 2010), Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have rendered the opening line thus: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs”. In the phrase “to Howth Castle and Environs” from the 1939 text, they emended “and” to “&”. They did so on the grounds that that was what Joyce first wrote in his manuscript (in a draft from 1926), and that (they argue) Joyce preferred the ampersand over the “distancing effect of the word ‘and’ in this context”. Editorially, critically, this is not a wholly straightforward decision, however. The “&” was indeed changed to “and” without Joyce’s express authorization on the galley proofs for the 1939 Faber edition— though remarkably after having been left to stand by several typists and typesetters as the text was transmitted in typescript and page proof through several iterations, including serialization in transition magazine. Now the ampersand is a ordinary feature of a manuscript—a symbol used for brevity, economy—that would in normal cases be normalized in print. The fact that it did not happen for so long has created an editorial problem.

Joyce’s typists and typesetters have, in other words, inadvertently acted as good documentary editors, until someone finally did erase the manuscript feature. This example shows just how plentiful the issues are when confronted by the idiosyncrasies of the minutiae in a manuscript. Editors (including editors like Reid) are not always conscious of these features—and the “manuscript culture” they encounter—in the manuscripts in front of them. Documentary editors, by contrast, are faced with a plethora of issues which they have to solve practically and with consistency. What, for example, if the slip of the pen is not really a slip? What when it poses a problem not unlike the ampersand in Joyce? What, in other words, if the misformed word is neither an abbreviation, nor a slip, but something not fully formed like this:



This detail from a manuscript by Lady Augusta Gregory for The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), a play she wrote in collaboration with W.B. Yeats, has a phrase which reads “that work in the business”. The word “the”, however, does not look like the; it rather looks like “te”. Yet to transcribe it that way would be pedantic, if not nonsensical. “Te” is not a standard abbreviation, the way it was customary up until the eighteenth century to shorten “the” to “ye” or “which” to “wh” or “wch”. The use of these abbreviations had something to do with the physical processes of writing by hand and using a quill and ink. (The disappearance of many of these abbreviations can, I guess, be attributed to the introduction of the steel pen nib.) Similarly, Lady Gregory “te” is a kind of elision effected for ease of writing and for speed, so that the pace of the hand can better keep up with the flow of the brain.

The straight slip of the pen is of course similar. What causes the writer to write one word for another is a momentary cognitive lapse; the intended word takes a different shape as the hand is forced to jump, like a faulty record or CD to keep up, with the flow of inspiration. The difference between the slip of the pen and “te” is that the slip is not a mistake that occurs consistently.

The case might therefore be made in favour for diplomatic transcription of “te”, but then the problem really has no end. What is it that the transcriber actually sees: is it “te”? Or is it “the”, with its letters rung together? Or even “th”? Take this example from the same folio, which reads: “but the weight of the business falls on Henry & myself – I wouldn’t”



The words “falls”, “myself” and “wouldn’t” show the same signs of being swiftly formed as “the”, but they are clearly no abbreviations or contractions, yet one needs some imagination (and a practiced eye) to decipher the individual letters of the double “ll” in “falls” and “my” in “myself”; even the standard contraction in “wouldn’t” is interesting because it has the apostrophe, but no separation of the letters “n” and “t”. Looking again at the first example, one can ponder whether “that” is that or this, two words that in Lady Gregory’s hands are not easy to distinguish. In this case it is “that” for the word fits syntactically with the rest of sentence, but the untrained would first take this word as “this”.

Such detail is intriguing and cumbersome at the same time. Pragmatically one sometimes has to flatten the text and opt for what is intended, not for what one sees, or thinks one sees, on the page. Ultimately, the plasticity of the manuscript is not something that can rendered in a perfect way, but as long the business of editors is to edit, they need to make decisions. However, what has to be kept in mind is that the text that results from the editorial process—whether through silent editing or diplomatic transcription—is a representation, not a reclamation of the manuscript.

6 Sept 2010

Research Example: Looking for audiences in the archive

By Lisa Stead, University of Exeter


A question I'm repeatedly asked when presenting research about the writing of early female cinema fans is how such examples can be verified as authentic. In reference to my own research, this problem is fairly specific. In an effort to gain a sense of what silent cinema audiences actually thought and felt about the cinema they consumed, I have frequently plundered the film ephemera archive for literary examples of audience participation. By "ephemeral archive" I refer to that which houses books, prints, artefacts and ephemera relating to cinema history and prehistory, as opposed to archival film prints. Fan magazines form a key part of Exeter's ephemeral archive--the Bill Douglas Centre. Fan letters located in the letter and poetry pages of fan magazines offer one of the few access points to the opinions and creative writing of an audience now some 100 years in the past.



These examples challenge the researcher to prove that such letters were written by actual audience--and not by magazine editors--and further challenge what we consider to be 'literary' in the archive, and what types of archives can be considered 'literary'. The problem of authenticity, moreover, is a much larger one in relation to all archival study.

Since the title of the conference specifically addresses what we consider the boundaries of the literary archive, I'm curious as to whether the film ephemera archive is able to cross over into the literary--and whether the problems of authenticating the plethora of individual voices contained within discount the ephemera archive from 'serious' literary study, distinct as it is from the more traditional format of author's papers or manuscript collections.

Women’s fan writing about silent cinema as it appears in British fan magazines presents one of the most interesting generative aspects of film culture as female cultural practice. Fan letters are an example of women’s involvement in creating film culture as a topic to be written about. British women found a platform to express their interpretation of their nationally specific cinematic encounters within the fan magazine as a new form of extra-textual print ephemera shadowing the growth of cinema culture.

Women's fan magazine writing allows the researcher to explore female fan culture beyond the confines of the exhibition site, reading silent cinema as a phenomenon that reached, influenced and fundamentally was used by women in multiple representational spheres. Published fan letters testify to the personal resonance that filmic encounters held for working and lower-middle class British women in the immediate post-war era. Further than this, they challenge the superficiality of leisure experiences, emphasizing the way in which ephemeral traces of women’s engagement with leisure forms insist upon themselves as historically significant traces of a period of cultural transformation for British women.

But, as I'm frequently asked when presenting fan letters in this way, how do we know whether these letters were really written by female cinemagoers, and not penned by editors? As many who have worked in publishing have testified at such events, it is common practice for women's magazine editors to pad the letters pages with false questions, queries and comments from imaginary readers. In the 1930s, this practice apparently often occurred in fan magazines. Further, since film magazines had strong ties to the film industry financially, it would seem likely that editors may be inclined to invent letters singing the praises of particular stars, studios or recent releases... Yet the sheer variety of fan debate and opinion on display within the silent era fan magazines would seem to suggest otherwise.



So what tactics might we employ in an effort to affirm, to some degree, the likelihood of these letters being authentic? Details of editorial practices for specific magazines at this time are near impossible to unearth.

My own methodological inclination has been to approach the material quantatively, analyzing the subject matter of fan writing and reading this against the types of female stars in particular that the magazine officially promoted. This reveals, for example, a volume of letter writing about particular stars who appear nowhere in the 'official' content of the magazine. Such quantative data might suggest, therefore, that these letters are authentic, since a precedent does not exists for the championing of these individual performers within the magazine as a whole.

The question remains of how much weighting to give such letters as an example of female audiences and audience writing. Are they less important academically than the writings of, say, Virginia Woolf upon cinema in the same era? Is the ephemera archive of less scholastic value than the authorial archive? Are published fan letters good enough evidence of actual audiences from an era now unreachable for any kind of retrospective oral history research?

My own feeling is that such traces of fan writing insist upon themselves, exceeding their status as ephemeral by-products of commercialised consumer leisure culture. Attention to lowbrow literary forms assists in the writing of different kinds of women “back into film history” (Hastie 2006, 229) in a manner which gives voice to the diversity of female film culture in this period, moving away from the big names of literary modernism, like Woolf...

________
Hastie, Amelie. 'The Miscellany of Film History.' Film History. Vol 18: no. 2 (2006): 222-230.

25 Aug 2010

Research Example: Spelling and strikethrough, typing manuscripts and silent editing


By Carrie Smith, University of Exeter

This is just a little collection of thoughts on the difficulties of manuscripts, something to start us off so that we can cast them aside! As many of you will have noticed from the manuscript image we have used in the poster (generously allowed by Carol Hughes), Ted Hughes’s writing is expressive, which is sometimes a generous word for ‘unreadable’. His editor at Faber Christopher Reid effectively described it as “galloping” (xii). In his editors introduction to Hughes’s collected letters Reid writes that although he has ‘silently’ corrected some spelling mistakes in the letters to avoid littering the text with [sic], he has left unchanged unusual spellings which he believes to be “stubborn eccentricities” (xiv). For example ‘develope’ -which Microsoft word keeps autocorrecting adding a modern twist to the idea of ‘silent’ editing an idea which I’m sure will be contested throughout the conference! Clearly here Reid is influencing the presentation of Hughes in his own letters and so as a topic of interest, how much of Reid is now present in The Letters of Ted Hughes and could Hughes simply not spell?! To avoid becoming too dull and technical and listing every occurrence where Hughes took on English spelling single handed, I am going to move on to what Hughes himself thinks of manuscripts.

Early on in his writing career Hughes used the sale of manuscripts to support his young family. Aside from a monetary value, however, Hughes was fast to realise the potential for literary understanding. In 1968 he wrote an introduction to Emily Dickinson’s verse which was emphatic in its defence of the importance of retaining her original punctuation. The dashes for which she is now famous, were often edited into ‘normalised’ punctuation, yet another example of that secret/not-so-secret editing hand and the importance of the original manuscripts. Hughes writes “Emily Dickinson’s eccentric dashes are an integral part of her method and style, and cannot be translated to commas, semicolons and the rest without deadening the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems” (154).

Later, as Hughes headed towards the major sale of 2.5 tons of papers to Emory University in Atlanta, he reflected again on manuscripts and their use in analysing poetry. He wrote an essay ‘The Evolution of ‘Sheep in the Fog’’ which progresses through Sylvia Plath’s drafts of this poem examining the “depth charges” which resonate through this poem. The final piece does not contain explicit references to mythologies such as Icarus which are only present in early drafts. In the final word choices of this poem Hughes finds resonances of these abandoned mythologies which he believes gives this poem its eerie overwhelming significance belying its apparent simplicity. I would certainly suggest reading the essay which contains facsimiles of her drafts to follow along with his argument. Whether you agree with Hughes’s assessment of Plath’s poem or not, it is interesting to examine the technique of how he gets to grips with navigating the pathways of someone else’s words.

Putting aside whether you support Hughes’s reading or technique, even the representation of a manuscript in a typed critical piece has been a topic of much debate. Tim Kendall in his book Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study represents her manuscripts in the following way: “Red, mottled, like cut throats/ The throats of Jews.” (the part in bold actually had a strikethrough, but that didn't work on here) (112). Kendall allows the reader to grasp the development and mutation of Plath’s thought throughout the manuscript and, like Hughes, uses this to elucidate the affect of her final word choice in the finished poem. Kendall touches on the moral issue of representing a manuscript which is not the final version the author intended to be seen. He notes that Plath’s removal of the image quoted above is “fortunate” as it is “potentially offensive” (112), and yet now readers have access to such material. The ethics of Hughes’s action of destroying certain Plath papers and the ethics of examining a literary estate when it has been placed in a public collection are topics of high controversy.

If the moral issue is pushed aside, Kendall’s visual representation of Plath’s drafts could be perceived as problematic. A single line strikethrough does not give adequate representation to the vehemence of some of Plath’s scribbling out, nor does it acknowledge the ambiguity created by Plath’s use of arrows or the presence of two words squashed into one space. This kind of representation prompted Susan Howe’s semi critical, semi poetic book The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American Literary History. Like Hughes, Howe examines the treatment of the papers of Emily Dickenson in scholarship and finds their representation unsatisfactory. She takes the debate further, however, by arguing that there is intention behind all the marks on the manuscripts and that even the angle of one of Dickenson’s dashes can bring new meaning to a poem. She sees the normalization of Dickinson’s punctuation as a kind of violence against the original. She negotiates this problem by reproducing photographs of the manuscripts, and where using typed versions she photocopies Dickinson’s handwritten marks in between the typed words.

Here I have attempted a very brief indication of a few of the issues that surround the topic of this conference – so called ‘silent’ editing and how influential this unseen editing is, the validity of tracing authorial intention through poetic drafts, and difficulties in the visual representation of manuscripts and the potential for ‘violence’ to the author’s intention.

Lisa and I hope that these pieces will provide a start point for discussion about the conference and provide some interesting background to the papers. Please email in to either of us a piece from 500 words upwards! And feel free to comment and start discussion!

Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Hughes, Ted. Winter Pollen. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
----------------- Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.

Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.

Request for short written pieces on archival practice

In the coming weeks, Carrie and I will be adding short snippets of writing to the Reclamation blog as brief examples of archival practice and experiences. We intend these posts to be very informal exercises, with the hope of prompting discussion and debate ahead of the conference, and continuing afterwards.

We would welcome contributions from delegates--these can be very short, perhaps posing a series of reflective questions about archival work and research, or writing about archival experiences and encounters.

We intend this to be as informal as possible--any amusing archival experiences would be very much welcomed! The intention is to generate a community around the conference, creating dialogues about the appeal and challenges of archival research, from a range perspectives.

Please email the organisers Lisa and Carrie(lrs204@ex.ac.uk and crs202@ex.ac.uk) with text and any images you would like included, and we will post them to the blog asap.

26 Jul 2010

Conference Programme



Literary Archives Draft Schedule, 2 – 3rd October 2010
Day 1, Saturday Oct. 2nd
9 .00 ‐ 9.30 REGISTRATION
_______________________________________________
9.30 ‐ 9.45 Introductory remarks
_______________________________________________
9.45 ‐ 10.45 KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Professor Helen Taylor (University of Exeter)
‘Dangerous Diplomacy: Writers, Scholars, Family Archives and Secrets’
_______________________________________________
10.45 ‐ 11.00 COFFEE BREAK
_______________________________________________
11.00 ‐12.15 PANEL 1: Archiving South West Writers

• Alison Harvey (Cardiff University) ‘Fragmentary acquisition and the changing face of Edward Thomas (1878 ‐ 1917)

• Simon Barker (University of Gloucestershire) ‘Lost Property: John Galsworthy , Dartmoor, and the search for ‘that stuffed shirt’

• Philip Lancaster (University of Exeter) ‘Reconstructing Ivor Gurney in the Archive’

________________________________________________
12.15 ‐1.15 LUNCH
________________________________________________
1.15 ‐3.00 SPECIAL COLLECTIONS EVENT (Research Commons)
________________________________________________
3.00 ‐ 3.15 COFFEE BREAK
________________________________________________

3.15 ‐ 4.55 PANEL 2: Constructed Silences

• Isabelle Cosgrave (University of Exeter) ‘Untrustworthy Reproductions and Doctored Archives: undoing the sins of a Victorian Biographer’

Robert Ritter (Oxford University) ‘Stopping Wessex: the battle for Hardy’s punctuation’

• Sophie Bush (University of Sheffield) ‘Several Timberlake Wertenbakers: the attractions and dangers of biographical ‘insights’

• Sarah Hutton (National Archives) ‘Constance Emily Kent ‐ Lost in Literary Legacy?’


_______________________________________________

4.55 ‐ 5.10 COFFEE BREAK
_______________________________________________
5.10 ‐ 6.25 PANEL 3: Archiving Intersections: non-textual archival encounters
• Bob Lawson Peebles (University of Exeter) ‘Influence and Authenticity: some suggestions for the use of the Exeter American music collection’

• Amanda Wrigley (Northwestern University) ‘Preparing the scripts of Louis MacNeice’s radio features for publication’

• Jennifer Barnes (University of Exeter) ‘The Body as Archive and Artefact: Laurence Olivier's Memorial Service, 1989’

______________________________________________
6.30 CLOSE OF DAY 1
______________________________________________

Day 2 , Sunday Oct. 3rd
9.15 ‐ 9.30 Welcome remarks and coffee
______________________________________________
9.30 ‐ 10.30
KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Dr Wim Van Mierlo (University of London)
‘The Archaeology of the Poem’
______________________________________________
10.30 ‐ 10.45 COFFEE BREAK
______________________________________________
10.45 ‐ 12.00 PANEL 1: Theorizing the Archive

• Jane Dowson (De Montfort University) ‘From Fragmentation to Fixity: written to electronic archives, Elizabeth Jennings: a case study

• Jennifer Douglas (University of Toronto) ‘Original order, added value?: the Douglas Coupland fonds

• Gail Low (University of Dundee) ‘Close Reading in the archive’

_______________________________________________
12.00 ‐1.00 LUNCH
_______________________________________________
1.00 ‐ 2.15 PANEL 2: Rethinking the Archive

• Iain Bailey (University of Manchester) ‘But what does this prove?’ Intertextuality, Exogensis and Authority’

• Jem Bloomfield (University of Exeter) ‘With divers things printed’: the Playbook as Archive’

• David Roberts (Birmingham City University) ‘The Library of a Seventeenth‐Century Actor: Thomas Betterton and Pinachotheca Bettertonaeana’

________________________________________________
2.15 – 2.30 COFFEE BREAK
________________________________________________
2.30 - 4.10 PANEL 3: Editing the Archive / Archiving Editing

• Jason Harding (University of Durham) ‘The Use of Archival Material in the
Preparation of T S Eliot's Complete Prose'

• Fran Baker (University of Manchester) ‘The Double Life of the Ghost in the Garden Room: Charles Dickens edits Elizabeth Gaskell’

• Christine Faunch (University of Exeter) ‘The Treasure of the Text.’ How do we seek to construct the entity of the author in the archive?
_______________________________________________

4.10 -4.25 COFFEE BREAK
_______________________________________________
4.25 ‐ 5.40 PANEL 4: Reclamation and Representation

• Jo Powell (Edge Hill University) ‘The Other du Maurier Girl’

• Liz Adams (University of Nottingham) ‘High’ versus ‘low’ art: the manuscripts of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’

• Mariya Ustymenko (University of Essex) ‘Zooming into Page: the document as a whole picture’
______________________________________________
5.40 – 6.00 Roundtable

6.00 CLOSE

17 May 2010

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for the forthcoming Reclamation and Representation conference to be held at the University of Exeter 2-3 October 2010.
The blog will be regularly updated leading up to the conference, and feature draft schedules, revelant notices, accommodation and travls details and links to academic profiles.