TAE Course Assignments
To give yourself some experience working with the tools of descriptive bibliography, report on the history of editions of a single work of literature, preferably American or English. The paper will clearly work best with a work that has been published more than once. Be careful to identify the various editions you can locate and to distinguish among them. Based on the evidence you've uncovered, you might conclude by citing the most authoritative edition you have been able to locate or discussing reasons why an authoritative edition might be called for and how one might prepare it.
Some suggestions: Try to pick a work that is well established and has been around long enough to have been reprinted. You might turn to a literary work in a course you are now taking or have taken. You might explore English language editions in this country for foreign originals, if that's where your bent takes you. Review the chapter on descriptive bibliography in Williams and Abbott, and consider the format that such bibliographers use (although you needn't be entirely thorough about all the features of a standard entry). Consider the likelihood that this report requires some listing and format shifts beyond straight linear prose.
Bring a typed draft of the report and all the pertinent information about the
editions to class on February 10, 2002. We
will work together preparing the revised draft and advising you on ways to edit
the bibliography prior to handing it in on February 17.
Our class meeting in the Clarke Library will give you a chance to browse among several journals, diaries, or collections of correspondence and select one upon which to test your documentary editing skills. You should try some preliminary reading of the text and perusing it to get its scope and dimensions, then select a section that would be particularly rewarding to edit (the opening sections or most dramatic sections or concluding sections or combinations of these), and get those selected sections photocopied so that you can work on them outside the Clarke Library.
This is the major project of the course and will lead to a class anthology of edited manuscripts. Each editors portion will require an introduction to the edited manuscript (biographical, historical, textual, editorial backgrounds, including a note on the text as a whole and an explanation of the context for the sections you have selected), the edited manuscript or manuscript sections, and an apparatus of notes and/or references as appropriate to the manuscript. Our efforts toward the end of the course will focus specifically on this project but we'll also discuss our progress in class from time and I'll be available for consultation outside of class as well.
The limitations and parameters of the assignment will depend somewhat on the nature of the text you choose to work on and what your researches and readings lead you toward. As a starting point think of a significant portion of the whole--a month of entries, a dozen letters, all the entries about a particular event or a specific portion of a journey--things that would make the selections readable in their own right beyond the evidence of editorial effort.
We will refer to this assignment often in the weeks to come and use some of our class meeting time to workshop your progress on transcribing and annotating your manuscript.
The Historical Manuscript Project will be due on April 28. You should expect to hand in a master copy to Clarke Library and a copy for the teacher and each member of the class for the course anthology.