Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and other Essays


Hans Walter Gabler

Description

This collection of essays from world-renowned scholar Hans Walter Gabler contains writings from a decade and a half of retirement spent exploring textual criticism, genetic criticism, and literary criticism. In these sixteen stimulating contributions, he develops theories of textual criticism and editing that are inflected by our advance into the digital era; structurally analyses arts of composition in literature and music; and traces the cultural implications discernible in book design, and in the canonisation of works of literature and their authors.

Distinctive and ambitious, these essays move beyond the concerns of the community of critics and scholars. Gabler responds innovatively to the issues involved and often endeavours to re-think their urgencies by bringing together the orthodox tenets of different schools of textual criticism. He moves between a variety of topics, ranging from fresh genetic approaches to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to significant contributions to the theorisation of scholarly editing in the digital age.

Written in Gabler’s fluent style, these rich and elegant compositions are essential reading for literary and textual critics, scholarly editors, readers of James Joyce, New Modernism specialists, and all those interested in textual scholarship and digital editing under the umbrella of Digital Humanities.

Sujets

• Book design
• Textual criticism
• Literary criticism
• Composition
• Canonisation

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 20 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783743667
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

TEXT GENETICS IN LITERARY MODERNISM


Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays
Hans Walter Gabler






http://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2018 Hans Walter Gabler


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Hans Walter Gabler, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0120
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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-363-6
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-364-3
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-365-0
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-366-7
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-367-4
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0120
The OBP team involved in the production of this book: Alessandra Tosi (managing editor), Lucy Barnes (editing and copyediting), Bianca Gualandi (layout and digital production) and Anna Gatti (cover design).
Cover image: The Milton manuscript (17th century). Image courtesy and copyright Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.
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Contents
Foreword
1
1.
The Rocky Road to Ulysses
11
2.
‘He chronicled with patience’: Early Joycean Progressions Between Non-Fiction and Fiction
47
3.
James Joyce Interpreneur
65
4.
Structures of Memory and Orientation: Steering a Course Through Wandering Rocks
81
5.
Editing Text—Editing Work
111
6.
Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition
121
7.
Thoughts on Scholarly Editing
143
8.
Beyond Author-Centricity in Scholarly Editing
169
9.
Sourcing and Editing Shakespeare: The Bibliographical Fallacy
195
10.
The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism
209
11.
A Tale of Two Texts: Or, How One Might Edit Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
221
12.
Auto-Palimpsests: Virginia Woolf’s Late Drafting of Her Early Life
257
13.
From Memory to Fiction: An Essay in Genetic Criticism
287
14.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two-Choir Passion
301
15.
Argument into Design: Editions as a Sub-Species of the Printed Book
315
16.
Cultural versus Editorial Canonising: The Cases of Shakespeare, of Joyce
363
Bibliography
383
Acknowledgments
391
List of Illustrations
395
Index
399



Foreword


© Hans Walter Gabler , CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0120.17
On the front and back covers of this collection of essays is shadowed, and across the ensuing opening we discern, the entire evidence in writing of John Milton ’s composition of the poem he began under the title Song and developed by stages of revision into At a Solemn Musick . John Milton is not a modernist author. Yet this double-page spread in his autograph of his earlier writing preserved as ‘The Milton Manuscript’’ (shelfmark R.3.4) in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, shows every characteristic of authorial drafts from later times in later hands.


Fig. 1 John Milton, Song , in process of revision towards At a Solemn Musick . © Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0
Owing to a large tear in the leaf, a long set of line openings or middles of lines from the first writing attempt is lost, but the line fragments remaining indicate a draft in a sequence of thirty lines predominantly in pentameter, though intermittently shorter. There are frequent and significant revisions in wording—the last line goes through several permutations—as well as of line lengths. With a wholesale crossing-out of the block of writing in the page’s upper half, the second attempt commences in the white space below. Twenty-two lines towards a second draft of the poem, inclusive of two lines at the bottom of the page that show in the manuscript as heavily deleted, are here accommodated. Short lines segment groups of full pentameter-length lines into what appears to be a considered patterning. Verbal revision is again frequent. The second draft is brought to an end with eight lines that form the uppermost of three blocks of writing on the second manuscript page. Before the heavy deletion of the bottom lines on the first manuscript page, the second draft once more totals thirty lines. The second block of twelve lines on the second page revises the eight-line block above it and represents what material evidence the manuscript provides for a third draft of the poem. This third draft was not separately written out in its entirety, but is mirrored in the fair-copy text of At a Solemn Musick resulting from it. The last block in the lower half of the second page constitutes that fair copy. Relating the second draft and the fair copy to one another reveals the extent of the recomposition of the second draft into the third draft. The rewrite involved, implicitly, a cutting of the second four lines of the second draft on page one, and also confirms the heavy deletion of the last two lines on page one. The revision of the upper block into the middle block of page two evidences both significant variation of preexisting text and an expansion from eight to twelve lines. After the wholesale crossings-out of all second-draft and third-draft writing blocks, the fair copy alone, uncrossed-out, concludes the writing on the manuscript’s second page and ends the composition of the poem, except only for one significant revision of its last line when the poem appears in print. The manuscript line ‘To live and sing with him in endlesse morne of light.’ becomes in the published text: ‘To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.’ This, besides muting the homeliness of living and singing along with Him, reproportions the line’s 3 : 3 stresses in the fair copy into 2 : 4 stresses in the published poem. This reproportioning instantiates for an additional and final time the 1 : 2 ratio of the double octave by which the poem is multiply structured. In the fresh-text addition to the second version, the proportion is conceptualised by its recondite technical term in Greek as ‘perfect diapason’ (line 23 of At a Solemn Musick ). In reenacting in its last line that double-octave relationship, the poem climaxes prosodically in its heightened vision of sharing with the heavenly hosts anew ‘the faire musick that all creatures made | To thire great Lord whose Love thire motion sway’d’ (lines 21–22). This solemn music is what the poem is about.
To understand how the two versions differently articulate the Song and envision the Solemn Musick , it is the numbers of Milton’s composition that crave attention. Numerological significance had strong roots in Hebrew erudition and Christian religion, as well as in the philosophic thought of Antiquity. For John Milton , numbers and number proportions were still semantically charged: theologically, philosophically, indeed musically. Writing Song in thirty lines and segmenting these as twenty-two plus eight lines reflects the fact that Milton knew twenty-two as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet by which Old Testament Scripture, and thus the old dispensation, could be signified. The number eight, by contrast, stood for the day of Christ’s resurrection, to which for example the octangular design of baptismal churches and fonts symbolically relate, and thus signifies the new dispensation of the New Testament. In terms of the number division of its lines, Song articulates through its form the subject that it sings. The revision of Song into At a Solemn Musick represents a rethinking of how to articulate the poem through its numbers. Its Solemn Musick becomes insistently expressed through musical proportions, now less of Biblical and Christian than of Platonic and Pythagorean origins. The dominant proportion is that of the octave and double octave . Milton’s strategic use of short lines to group the poem’s regular pentameter lines ensures that the poem’s stru