The Digital ‘Anon’: a New Edition of Virginia Woolf’s Final Essay Drafts
Dr Joshua Phillips
In the final year of her life, Virginia Woolf’s thoughts turned to the literary past and she began to draft a history of English literature. Note, began. She would not live to finish the constellation of forty-three draft fragments that she referred to, variously, as ‘Turning the Page’ or ‘Reading at Random’, but which have come to be known by the dual title of ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’. This presentation explores the bibliographic and editorial history of the drafts and my rationale for producing this new edition, one premised on the messy textuality of this fragmented corpus, and presents my new digital edition. Woolf’s literary-historical drafts do not just show her attempts to write a history of English literature; rather, they are experiments in writing a form of new-old subjectivity, and the very textuality that my edition seeks to convey is key to unlocking novel ways to understand her experiment.
Digital Genetic Editions, Collaborative Authorship and Recordings as Text: The Case of Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays
Dr Pim Verhulst
Prose works do not pose many difficulties when it comes to mapping their social aspect in digital genetic editions. Remarks by a co-author, publisher, editor or translator tend to manifest themselves textually, either directly as annotations on drafts or in letters. Dramatic genres present more challenges, since the collaborative aspect behind their geneses typically does not occur until the post-textual phase, in rehearsal or performance, which are fleeting and variable. Still, these collaborative interactions also leave traces on material documents (e.g. notebooks, playscripts, etc). Productions for broadcast media like radio or televison are less ephemeral and less unstable than theatrical performances, in that recordings typically precede transmission. Fixed in time and space, these are not just ‘versions’ of the work but also ‘texts’. This talk uses the Television Plays module in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project to explore some ramifications of collaborative authorship in audiovisual media for scholarly editing.
