Note: Journalkeeping is a means of impromptu reflection and extemporaneous
expression. I encourage you to spend about 30 minutes on an entry
and to complete journal entries before the class session where they are
due, so that they help you prepare for class rather than give you frantic
make-up work at the end of the course. The entries will always be
either in response to something we've discussed, read, or done or in preparation
for something we'll do.
This course requires that
you keep a journal of reactions to your reading, your editing of other
people's writing, your editing of your own writing, class discussions of
editing, and your progress through the course. One promising place
to start the journal off would be your own experience as an editor and/or
as a reader of other writers' editions. For example, what kind of
editing do you do to your own writing before "publishing" it by submitting
it to a teacher, an editor, or another reader? What kinds of distinctions
do you make between revising, editing, and proofreading? What do
you look for when you engage in these activities? Why do you look
for it? Why do you think you ought to look for it? What's your
sense of the process that editors go through to produce published texts
you've read over the years? To what extent is a published literary
work the evidence of "authorial intentions" that your own student papers
or published writings are? What experience have you had with editing
beyond the editing of your own writing? Let these questions provoke
your impromptu writing of this journal entry for the next thirty minutes.
Today in class we discussed
some issues connected with the scholarly editing of texts. At home
or office examine published texts you own, particularly established literary
texts. What can you learn about how the editors of those books arrived
at those editions? In your library, how "authoritative" are the editions
you own? How do you know? What can you learn about other editions
of these books from the ones you have? What was your basis for selecting
the editions you have? What books do you have in their first editions?
in their "authorized" editions? in later editions? What can you tell
about the difference between a first edition and a later edition?
Use this journal entry to explore what you can learn about editions from
examining your own library.
Select two or three titles
of older literary works, preferably American or English but no more than
one of them translated from another language, and go to a bookstore and/or
a library to examine various editions of them, published at different times,
published by different publishers, edited by different editors. (If
you need to have some titles in mind before going, check a few authors
or titles in volumes of Books in Print near the reference
desk in Finch Fieldhouse.) What distinguishes the
various editions from one another? What are the relationships among
them? Which editions seem to you to be the most authoritative or
reliable? Consider these issues in this journal entry.
TAE Journal #4: Examining Published Manuscripts
Choosing among the texts provided examine the edition of a collection of letters or diary entries or journal entries. Reflect on the ways the manuscript material has been represented in print, the decisions the editor or editors have made about indicating the writer's handwritten text, the apparatus for explaining the text, the problems with the text, and the context of the text. In general explain what has been done to make the reader understand not only the meaning of the words in the manuscript but the orthography and characteristic presentation elements of the text. You might think as well how the published text differs from a photographic reproduction of the actual manuscript.
Texts used in this journal entry:
TAE Journal #5: Examining Editions
Below this journal entry is a listing of well-known modern scholarly editions of established works and authors. Using one of them as the focus for your attention explore the nature of the scholarly edition. What are the features of the editing that strike you as particularly scholarly? What differentiates the edition from, say, a non-scholary edition aimed at the average reader? What rationales do the editors provide to understand the materials that have been examined and the kind of editing that has been done? What does the reader have to understand about the text provided before beginning to read it? Do a thorough perusal of one of these editions and let it serve as the basis of this journal entry.
Behn. The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. Janet Todd. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. v. 1-4. [PR3317 .A6 1992]
Burney. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Ed. Joyce Hemlow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972-73. [PR3316 .A4 Z552 v. 1-iv]
Coleridge. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957- . [PR4470 .F69 v.1-4]
Coleridge. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-. [PR 4483 .A25 v. 1-3]
Cooper. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. Ed. James Franklin Beard. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1960-68. [PS1431 .A3 1960 v. 1-6; see also PS1408 .A2 S37 1987; PS1410 .A2 R8; PS1416 .A1 1984]
Crane. The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane. Ed. Fredson Bowers. 10 Vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969-76.[PS1449 .C85 1969 v.1-9]
Emerson. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1971-. [PS1600 .F71 v. 1-5]
Emerson. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1960-1982. [PS1631 .A3 1960 v. 1-16]
Fielding. The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. Ed. W. B. Coley et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967-. [PR3454 .H57 1975x v. 1-2]
Hawthorne. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Text Ed. Fredson Bowers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962-. [PS1850 .F63 v 1-20]
Howells. A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells. Ed. Edwin H. Cady et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968-. [PS2020 .F68 v. 1-32]
Irving. The Complete Works of Washington Irving. Ed. Henry A. Pochmann et al. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, and Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1969-. [PS2050 .F70x; PS2066 .A2 S6 1978; PS2070 .A2 H25 1987; PS2081 .A4 1978]
Johnson. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958-. [PR3521 .Y3 v. 1-16]
Melville. The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1968-. [PS2380 .F68 v. 1-15]
Simms. The Writings of William Gilmore Simms: Centennial Edition. Ed. John Caldwell Guilds and James B. Meriwether. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969-. [PS2840 .A1 1969 v. 1-3]
Thoreau. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Ed. William L. Howarth et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971-. [PS3053 .A25 1981 v. 1-2; PS3042 .G69 1973; PS3042 .M8 1975]
Twain. The Works of Mark Twain. Ed. Frederick Anderson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972- [PS1300 .F72 v. 1-19; PS1302 .A48 1975 v. 1-3] {Remember that Twain is catalogued as Clemens.}
Whitman. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen et al. New York: New York University Press, 1961-. [PS3202 1963 v. 1-2; PS3231 .A23 1978 v. 1-3; PS3231 .M48 v. 1-5]
TAE Journal #6: Speculating on Diplomatic Editing
You've had some time to work on the transcription, introduction and apparatus, and the background research on your manuscripts from the Clarke Library. Time for an update on your progress. In this journal entry let me know the status of your project by explaining:
Let these topics inspire your speculations in this journal entry.
TAE Journal #7: Editing in Scholarly Journals
We're going to be moving in the direction of the editing of scholarly or professional periodicals in the next few weeks. As a preparation for that, examine some scholarly journals of your choice and speculate about the following. You might browse your subscriptions at home, if they include professional publications like English Journal, College English, Language Arts, PMLA, Journal of Teaching Writing, South Atlantic Quarterly, Indiana Review, and the like, or browse the holdings at the library in the sections appropriate to your interests (P–PS in periodicals cover most of the stuff in our field). What do you think the editors look for when they review articles for their journals? What can you tell about the journals you're examining that tell you what would be publishable in one and not be publishable in another? If you were an editor for any of these journals, how would you characterize what one would except and another wouldn't? Ruminate, speculate, reflect on these issues and write about what you observe in this entry.
TAE Journal #8: Speculating on Your Graduate Writing Portfolio
Review your writing as a student. What kinds of assignments have you done? For what courses? How well did you succeed in writing the kind of papers your professors wanted you to write? the kind that you intended to write? What's the range of graduate student writing you've done? What's the range of courses you've done assignments for? What adjustments did you have to make for subject matter, format, professor? How similar were the papers for different courses in formats, composing processes, rhetorical demands? If you were writing an introduction to a portfolio of representative writing you've done as a graduate student, what would you say? Use these questions to prompt your reflections in this journal entry.
TAE Journal #9: Speculating on Standards
We're going to try to critique some of the articles we’ve all written, thinking about them in terms of publication in an academic journal, perhaps one like Language Arts Journal of Michigan or Pedagogy. Given that you have been an English graduate student writing papers and possibly have read those of others before, speculate in this journal entry the difference between specific papers you’ve written and published articles on the same subject. If you were to consider recommending work for publication, what would you be looking for in work that ought to be immediately accepted for publication? What would qualify a paper to be provisionally accepted, that is, to be accepted with qualifications? What would you assume a text would be deficient in without penalty to the author? (That is, what could be wrong with it that still wouldn't disqualify it?) Reflect on these ideas in light of your own experience writing and reading academic or creative texts.
TAE Journal #10: Speculating on What to Tell a Reader
You've brought a paper to class for us to work on together. Make up a set of guidelines for your own paper that takes into account where you are in the process of writing the paper, what demands it needs to meet for another reader or audience than the people in the class, and what aspects of the argument or the presentation you most want given attention and guidance about. This may involve explaining the circumstances of composition, including assignment guidelines.
TAE Journal #11: Speculating on Editing and Being Edited
Throughout the course so far you have mostly been editors of other people's work, right up to the moment you edited papers classmates have written for other courses, which now puts you in the position of being edited. How does it feel being edited now that you have been an editor? What happened to your paper in the hands of your editors? Assess what was valuable or pertinent in their recommendations. Then compare it to your editing of their papers. What happened to the papers in your hands? Assess what was valuable or pertinent in your recommendations. Let your speculations on editing and being edited guide this journal entry.
TAE Journal #12: Speculating on What You Know About Your Manuscript
Having by now transcribed most or all of the manuscript you’re editing for the major course project, reflect in writing upon the kinds of problems you’ve faced, the kinds of problems you’ve overcome, and the kinds of problems you have yet to master. What advice would you give another person working on this same manuscript? What advice would you give another person working on editing a different manuscript?
TAE Journal #13: Speculating on What You Need to Do
Coming down toward the homestretch in the course, what do you still have to do to prepare your manuscript as a readable edition? What kinds of things are you going to put in the introduction? What kinds of things do you think you need to say about the text? What kinds of things do you need to annotate? Where are you going to get the necessary information?
NOTE: The Final Journal Entry, #14, Speculating on Editing, will be written in class on the final class meeting, April 22, and handed in with the rest of the Journal Entries.