Modernist Remediations

Course Number: 965a

This seminar investigates the digital humanities, its implementations of contemporary editorial theory and practice, and its transformation of the ways in which we read the texts of literary modernism from Europe and North America. A signal example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation,” this digital transformation of print media has radically changed the interpretation and dissemination of information about the textual artifacts of the modernist period and its print cultures.

We begin with a representative survey of editorial theories and methodologies in the fields of textual studies, the digital humanities, and new media. Our subsequent readings engage with selections from print and digital editions of European and Anglo-American (James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Lorignhoven) and North American (Irene Baird, Earle Birney, William Faulkner, Frederick Philip Grove, A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt, Walt Whitman) anglophone modernist authors. We will also look at some large-scale collaborative digital humanities initiatives such as Sean Latham and Robert Scholes’s Modernist Journals Project at Brown and Tulsa Universities, Pericles Lewis’s Modernist Lab at Yale, and the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project at Dalhousie University and its transnational network of partner institutions. In doing so, we will interrogate the practices of editors and digital humanists of the past few decades and the rationales that inform their critical editions and digital archives of modernist authors.

Throughout the seminar, we will demo and preview tools created for textual analysis, editing, and visualization of digital texts and witness their application to the production of editions affiliated with the EMiC project and its partners. Students enrolled in this course will receive hands-on training to enable them to participate as collaborators in the production of EMiC digital editions.

Satisfies the 20th-/21st-Century course requirement.

Instructors

Dean Irvine
M 9:25-11:15