Reading Notes
Colloquium sponsored by the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS)
University of Antwerp, 6-7 December 2002
The practice of making reading notes has a long history, which was
cultivated by Samuel Coleridge and William Blake in their marginalia and
famously continued into the twentieth century by such writers as James
Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The habit was certainly not restricted to
literary authors only, but includes artists, philosophers, historians,
who variously commented with great enthusiasm on whatever they were reading.
Reading notes thus constitute a vast resource for an understanding of
literary history and culture as they tell us about what writers read as
well as how they read and what they used in their own work. As such,
they play an important role in both the reception and the production of
texts. They may be a helpful tool in intertextual research or the study
of influence, but they are also an interesting subject of research in
their own right. Reading notes can take many different shapes, ranging
from autograph marginalia in books and explanatory glosses to jottings
on loose scraps of paper or more systematic entries in notebooks,
diaries and letters.
This subject of research is a junction of several fields of research and
therefore offers an opportunity to establish contacts and bridge gaps
between separate disciplines with a common ground, such as the history
of the book, the history of reading, and the history of writing,
including textual genetics (the analysis, commentary and critical
interpretation of the way in which works of art come into being), as
well as textual criticism and scholarly editing, focusing on the ways
reading notes might be presented, electronically or otherwise, and
possibly integrated in scholarly editions.
The organizers invite the submission of individual papers on all aspects
of reading notes. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length.
Individual proposals should include a brief abstract (500 words) of the
proposed paper as well as the name, e-mail address, and institutional
affiliation of the participant.
Suggested topics:
Marginalia: the cultural value of writing in the margins (cf. H. J. Jackson)
Reading notes and intertextuality
Marginalia as paralipomena: to be incorporated in scholarly editions or not?
Value Added Text: the processing of reading notes in manuscripts
(Electronic) scholarly editing of notes
The anxiety of reading notes
The notebook as physical object
Reading notes between reception and literary tradition
Reading notes and the act of writing
Inquiries and proposals should be sent to:
Dirk Van Hulle (vanhulle@uia.ua.ac.be) or Wim Van Mierlo
(Wim.Van-Mierlo@sas.ac.uk)
University of Antwerp
UIA-GER
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium
Fax: +32.3.820.27.62
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