Born-Digital Manuscripts and the Contemporary Author. “Carport” from Marcel Beyer’s Ezra Pound Poem Cycle, for Example
Today, the basic material evidence of authorial activity has migrated to the electronic realm. Considering the theme of the 2022 ESTS conference Histories of the Holograph. From Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond, we find that there is no clear cut between “modern”, e.g. private documents, be...
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| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/variants, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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2024
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| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | Today, the basic material evidence of authorial activity has migrated to the electronic realm. Considering the theme of the 2022 ESTS conference Histories of the Holograph. From Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond, we find that there is no clear cut between “modern”, e.g. private documents, be they handwritten or typed, and “beyond”, e.g. digitally created. Rather, there is a transitory stage between modern and digital writing processes, which is the focus of the essay. This in-between does not only concern contemporary authors who were anchored in typewriting and then switched to creating their manuscripts on computers. The so-called digital natives born from the 1980s onwards have also grown up in a culture of paper, and publishing in books and other print media continues to coexist with digital forms of publication.From a philological and critique génétique perspective, the first part of the paper addresses the question to what extent the transitional situation is reflected in present born-digital writing processes. The genesis of “Carport”, a four-line poem by the 2016 Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer will serve as a case study for this. As part of a cycle on Ezra Pound, Beyer’s text may be of special interest to English-language scholars. Beyond its brevity, the poem lends itself to study: The born-digital writing process spans eight years and is documented in twelve bundles of drafts, saved in private storage media. In addition, the storages are carefully paginated, dated and annotated, which blends the roles of author and editor. We are thus faced with the rather uncommon situation, even in born-digital writing processes, that the author himself provides a well-ordered dossier génétique. A provocation for the editor? A fortunate circumstance for the textual scholar and the genetic critic?Engaging with digital writing processes usually means engaging with a living author. Moreover, in the present case, the drafts are embedded in a kind of logbook, generating an emphatic presence of the author beyond the writer in the sense of Roland Barthes. This is why the second part of this paper reflects on which questions the contemporaneity of author and scholar raises for research, especially with regard to the current boom in academic studies of contemporary literature. |
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