Processes of Creation
This course will focus on approaches to processes of literary and artistic creation, with the main toolbox being textual and genetic criticism: the careful analysis of the evolution of texts from outlines, research, and sketches through drafts to published versions. The texts in question can be of various kinds: literary works, paintings, musical compositions, filmscripts, plays, essays, and from history, philosophy, and the social sciences. The important central questions in the course will be:
- how do texts evolve?
- what decisions do authors or creators take at different points in the process of creation?
- how do we talk about authorial intention?
- is publication an end or just another stage?
The theoretical background will include Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author” and The Preparation of the Novel), Michel Foucault (“What is an Author?”), Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and discussions of it by Sally Bushell, the essays collected in the Yale French Studies special issue on “Drafts,” the essays collected in Deppman et al.’s Genetic Criticism, Sally Bushell’s Text as Process, John Bryant’s The Fluid Text, Dirk van Hulle’s Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature, Peter Shillingsburg’s From Gutenberg to Google. For those who read French, works by Pierre Marc di Biasi, Anne Herschberg, Jacques Neefs, Daniel Ferrer and Almuth Grésillon. For those who read Spanish, Élida Lois’s Génesis de escritura, Fernando Colla et al.’s Crítica genética y edición de textos hispánicos and Jerónimo Pizarro’s La mediación editorial. Other readings available in other languages. There are also collections on textual genesis in music and theater (Kinderman et al.) and other fields.
The seminar will be organized around both the theoretical work in the field and also hands-on work, first on common texts in English and then on texts from the students’ fields of expertise and linguistic backgrounds. There will be work with diplomatic and other kinds of transcription, with digital tools such as TextLab, Fair Copy and Versioning Machine, and with how to present or publish the results of digital transcriptions. Considerable attention will be paid to critical editions of works that are, or purport to be, based on “avant-textes,” working papers and manuscripts. Archival materials in Special Collections at the Hillman Library will be the focus of research projects, as will be digital archives.
Daniel Balderston is Mellon Professor of Modern Languages in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. An expert on Borges and the literatures of Brazil and the Southern Cone countries (as well as of gender and sexuality studies and translation studies), he is best known in recent years for his work on Borges manuscripts, which have resulted in five book publications: How Borges Wrote (University of Virginia Press, 2018, with French version in 2019 and Spanish version in 2021), Lo marginal es lo más bello: Borges en sus manuscritos (Eudeba, 2022), and three volumes of Borges manuscripts with introductions, typographical transcriptions and notes (with María Celeste Martín: Poemas y prosas breves, 2018, Ensayos, 2019 and Cuentos, 2020). He has also worked on the manuscripts of Manuel Puig, Silvina Ocampo, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer and Juan Carlos Onetti, resulting in numerous articles and critical editions. His current focus is on Borges notebooks that are related to the author’s talks between 1949 (when he lost his fear of public speaking) and 1955 (when he went blind), a collaborative project involving two dozen scholars around the world. Variaciones Borges, the journal he edits, has published work on the Borges notebooks in issues 52 (fall 2021) and 54 (fall 2022), and a large collaborative book is in the works. Another unrelated project is on some books that once belonged to the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, that were found in a garbage dump in Chapadmalal on the South Atlantic coast of Argentina and were brought to Paraguay in July 2022; he is working on Roa’s notes in Julio César Chaves’s El supremo dictador, Roa’s main source for his great novel Yo el Supremo, on the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (who ruled from 1814 to 1840); he will be giving a keynote talk on this new material in October 2022.