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What if the makers of digital scholarly editions reimagined the edition as an exhibition? There is no shortage of vision when it comes to reimagining the digital edition for the future, but innovation always lags behind vision. This affects in particular the call for reader-oriented editions. Digital scholarly editions are, on the whole, rich and useful resources developed to support the critical work of their users. But as resources they can also be complex and somewhat daunting, which does not make them “usable” for a broad spectrum of readers. Bringing curation into the editorial process can help make editions more inclusive and reach a wider readership. To do so is not to change the nature of the game or the purpose of the edition, but to think about simple solutions for how the data and editorial argument can be communicated more clearly and effectively. Though separate activities, curating and editing clearly intersect with one another in the creative-critical modes that they apply to historical artifacts. The aim of both is to contextualize, historicize, and mediate the past for the present. Borrowing some of the verbal, visual, and multimedia tools that curators employ in exhibitions can augment the edition, help guide the reader through the complex data, and support her in becoming the kind of relational reader that the digital scholarly edition envisions.

From production to transmission, from genesis to reception, text is an infinitely complex object of study that we can approach and represent from a wide range of perspectives. Influenced by technological inventions and transnational trends, the field of textual scholarship continues to evolve: we refine or alter our methodologies and we broaden our research focus. Technological developments have become a research topic in and by themselves, as we study how digitality affects modes of presenta...

Annotation and commentary have been little considered in discussions about scholarly editing, despite being some of the most used segments of the scholarly edition. What treatments do exist mostly focus on practical aspects about the quality and style of annotation. This essay analyses some of the theoretical assumptions that underlie annotational practices with specific reference to the editing of modernist works. It puts into question, first of all, some common perceptions about annotation, which is sometimes viewed as interfering with the readerly experience, to address the matter of the reader: what kind of reader are annotations for? Because annotations are a contextual and hermeneutic device to bridge the gap between the literary work that has come to us from the past and the reader's present, not all readers are served by a single style of annotation. Conversely, to accept this hermeneutic value also means that annotation is never neutral or objective; while editorial practices tend to avoid open interpretive annotation, annotations nonetheless direct the process of reading and interpretation. Annotation thus participates in the sense-making process and, like all other editorial interventions, it represents an act of mediation.

In 1967, the French scholar Louis Hay published an opinion piece in Le Monde under the title “Des manuscrits, pour quoi faire?” Hay’s piece came at the start of a critical practice, called “critiqu...

What happens when we consider the traditional, ‘Romantic’ notions of inspiration and imagination in the light of the often messy, chaotic traces of the creative process that we observe in a poet’s drafts and manuscripts? Although the archive may at first sight belie that there is such a thing as inspiration at all, Wim Van Mierlo contends that composition and inspiration are not simply each other’s opposite. Instead, he argues that inspiration and the imagination are very much integral to composition and revision. In discussing Wordsworth’s and Yeats’s composition methods—how they begin and complete their poems—he puts into question the perceived dichotomy between ‘first’ and ‘second thoughts’, original composition and revision. Adopting a cognitive perspective, he finds that there are no grounds to accept that revisions are somehow less inspired and creative. The creative economy at work in revision is no less the result of a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Library & Information History on 18 June 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17583489.2019.1571811.

This book chapter was published in the book New Quotatoes: Joycean Exogenesis in the Digital Age [© Brill]. The publisher's website is at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004319622_010

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has been received as a canonical instance of postmodernism. The novel appears to subvert traditional definitions of plot and characterization, yet the narrative retains a nagging sense of order underneath the represented chaos. Simultaneously evoking and undoing patterns on all levels of its narrative structure, Gravity’s Rainbow surreptitiously evokes the presence of a night journey (Martindale, 1979). An empirical content analysis of the novel confirms this ambiguous attitude with respect to patterning in the novel, and thus constitutes a first and modest step towards the quantification of postmodernism. First, a thematic analysis, calculating the co-variations of words across the chapters, corroborates the idea of a connectedness that seems to belie, in part, the pervasive presence of a paranoid hermeneutic. Second, a dictionary-based analysis of narrative sequences reveals an inverse night journey pattern that differs markedly from other patterns found for modernist novels. The configurations that were obtained in these analyses show that content analysis can distinguish empirically between two literary - historical concepts.

Joyce’s works have been blessed—some might say: burdened—with a vast body of critical writing. While that body of writing is not all academic—it began with a good number of critical appreciations by Joyce’s friends, supporters and acolytes in literary journals and booklength studies that appeared alongside book reviews and critical notices in the popular press—it is certainly worth reflecting on how academic writing has shaped and guided the reception of Joyce’s œuvre. That this is not purely an academic question is contained in the fact that readers (whether they belong to that first generation of readers puzzled by Joyce’s radically modernist style in the thirties and forties or to the vast class of Joyce enthusiasts and graduate students who struggle with the allusive detail or narrative and intertextual complexity of the later writings) so often approach Joyce through the critics. 1 Sifting through the various responses to academic Joyce criticism, a striking paradox emerges: on the one hand, an utterly hostile dismissal of Joyce criticism, amounting to a veritable industry with all its connotations of being overbearing and overproduced, comes from readers who find it hard to cope with the abstruse, self-indulgent discourse of academic criticism; on the other hand, the continuing use of “classics” of Joyce criticism, such as Ellmann’s biography, Gifford’s and McHugh’s annotations, Kenner, Hayman and Hart, Glasheen, Atherton, Campbell and Robinson, Tyndall

International audience; The digital edition Letters and Texts (http://tei.ibi.hu-berlin.de/berliner-intellektuelle/?en) was from its very beginning conceived to offer the quality of a scholarly edition as well as reader-friendly text presentation for a non-scholarly audience. For each document, both a diplomatic transcription and a reading version are being generated on the basis of the same TEI document. The reading version does not contain all the additions, deletions and line breaks and hence offers a linearly readable text. Additionally, a scan of the manuscript page is presented on the same level as the transcription. Metadata, entities and XML-document are also available on that same display level.While all of these displays are available, the standard view offered in the edition is that of a scan of the manuscript on the left side and the diplomatic transcription on the right side. By offering this view of the text first, the edition engages the reader to a predetermined reading - one that, in many ways, remains in the German editorial tradition. But the kind of information it transports is not the same as what print facsimile editions do. While digital editions do a complex work in establishing the chronology of text genesis (which is made necessary by the TEI-encoding, while a print facsimile edition is not compelled to produce this kind of analysis), there is a tendency not to render all glyphs and signs with the same precision as print facsimile editions do. The reader, so the editors’ assumption, should be able to establish the connection between the scan and the transcription by his/herself.On the one hand, editors of scholarly digital editions tend, like all editors, to confront their reader with their own image. On the other hand, they try to break away from the page format, without being able to do so completely, especially in the case of editions involving scans of originals. Addressing both these challenges is not the sole difficulty. A digital edition is not only (maybe not even primarily) for humans to read, but for them to search in, through links and search interfaces. Information connection is another level of reading for which it is not so easy to anticipate how the reader will approach it – on that level too, directing one’s reader towards one’s own interpretation of the text is not necessarily helpful. But which other options do we have?Finally, scholarly digital editions address computers - at least those editions that put their XML source code at disposal. When they do so, they are built for distant reading as well as close reading. How is it possible to address all of these readers and forms of reading? This paper presents the work that has been done in the context of the digital edition Letters and texts to that aim and it shows that asking oneself for whom one edits is a key to defining one’s own editorial hermeneutics.

Lo studio ricostruisce le diverse fasi della ricezione di James Joyce in Italia, dall’età pre-bellica agli anni 2000. Il saggio affronta anzitutto i rapporti di Joyce con gli scrittori e gli intellettuali italiani a lui coevi (da Carlo Linati, a Emilio Cecchi, a Nino Frank) e gli effetti delle prime traduzioni joyciane sulla cultura italiana. Si rivolge poi ad indagare l’impatto della prima traduzione integrale di Ulysses, ad opera di Giulio de Angelis, sugli scrittori sperimentali degli anni ’60, da Amelia Rosselli al gruppo al 63. Infine, viene affrontata la ricezione della traduzione italiana di Finnegans Wake nello stesso momento in cui la lezione di Joyce cessa di operare in modo esplicito, trasformandosi piuttosto in una sorta di eredità inconscia.