Virginia Woolf, Anechoic Architecture, and the Acoustic Hermeneutic

This article describes Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with acoustics and its relationship both to her writing process and to the development of sensibility that she narrativizes in The Waves. It situates Woolf's theoretical and fictional models of listening with respect to the rising science of architectural acoustics and to the social imperative to control sound in urban spaces. It argues that Woolf responds to the psychological and social exigencies of modern sound by integrating textual and architectural listening modes in an acoustic hermeneutic: a listening practice common to the objects of architecture and text, one that accommodates both scientific and aesthetic ends. The acoustic hermeneutic marks the convergence of oft-estranged listening practices—one that apprehends the silent materiality of the text as if it were an audible room and, conversely, one that apprehends architecture with the auditory imagination traditionally exerted toward literature. While the article explores Woolf's particular invocations of auditory science in her formal innovation, it also aims toward a widely applicable critical approach to the inaudibilities of the novel.

The Materiality of the Text and Manuscript Culture

This article investigates the significance of the manuscripts of Virgil and other classical poets that Dante might have read. Calling attention to the presence of musical notation (neumes) in copies that share the particular Virgilian readings Dante quotes, this essay explores the resonance of one of those passages (Aeneas’ dream of Hector) in Dante’s poem. It shows how Dante uses this Virgilian episode to craft his encounter with Manfred where he considers the relationship of body and soul that constitutes one of the major differences between classical and Christian thought, as Augustine frequently noted. Just as Christian anthropology maintains that the body constitutes an essential element of the human person, this essay argues that the materiality of the texts Dante read constitutes a crucial source for understanding how Dante interpreted these texts.

A New Age of Photography: ‘DIY Digitization’ in Manuscript Studies

Since c. 2008 many special collections libraries have allowed researchers to take photographs of medieval manuscripts: this article calls such self-service photography ‘DIY digitization’. The article considers some possible effects of this digital tool for research on book history, especially on palaeography, comparing it in particular to the effects of institutionally-led digitization. ‘DIY digitization’ does assist with access to manuscripts, but less easily and with less open data than institutional digitization does. Instead, it allows the researcher’s intellectual agenda to guide the selection of what to photograph. The photographic process thereby becomes part of the process of analysis. Photography by the researcher is therefore limited by subjectivity but it also helps to highlight the role of subjective perspectives in scholarship. It can also balance a breadth or depth of perspective in ways different from institutional digitization. It could in theory foster increased textual scholarship but in practice has fostered attention to the materiality of the text.

The Letter of the Law

This chapter studies the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20–1). The main argument is that Ovid highlights the fundamental confluence of the love letter with legal correspondence. The discussion ranges widely through comparative material from contemporary Latin elegy (Propertius in particular) to its intertextual matrix (Callimachus’ Aetia), in order to spell out the dependence of both poetry and law on precedent. Core aspects of Heroides 20–1, such as the materiality of the text, iterability, performativity, and intertextuality show that the invention of love is inextricably related to the invention of law. The chapter further investigates the triangulated relations between magic spells (carmina), love poetry (carmina), and legal statements. In its historical context, the crucial role of epistolography in the production and communication of laws in the Roman Empire is important for understanding the legal force of Ovid’s love letters.

Materialism As Intentionalism: on the Possibility of a „New Materialist” Literary Criticism

In this article, I draw on the work of authors associated with New Materialism(s) and the material turn, in order to examine and compare various ways of developing a „new materialist” literary criticism/literary theory. I then set these projects against a more traditional historical materialist perspective, as exemplified for instance by Fredric Jameson, in order to point out some fundamental differences between literary criticism focused on the imagined „true” materiality of the text and one that chooses to emphasise instead the inherent materiality of the work of literature as such (on all its levels). Here, the oft-discussed Marxist distinction between the base and the superstructure provides a good example of how these two approaches, though ostensibly similar, may in fact represent two very different, even contradictory schools of thought and criticism. My goal is not to criticise new materialists for not maintaining some imagined Marxist dogma, but rather, to point out how a nominal attachment to the materiality of text, when combined with a desire to invent a new method of reading, may result in a point of view that, even on its own terms, cannot be seen as materialist. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s remarks on materialist criticism as a work of „demystification and de-idealisation” rather than a „positive” method, I then refer to the work of Walter Benn Michaels as an example of „negative” materialist criticism that, instead of providing us with a new way of „doing interpretation”, allows us to de-idealize the way we discuss literature.

Freud on the Acropolis

Freud’s essay “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is the focus of the third chapter. Freud’s short essay revisits an enigmatic memory from the visit to the Acropolis. Two different yet inseparable themes surface in the text; the chapter unravels their connectedness through their relation to the cultural and intellectual dual origins of Freud’s upbringing. In the essay the twofold thematics of Freud’s Jewish background at home and his classical education in the gymnasium intersect, creating a picture of a life of duality, ambivalence, and internal contradictions. The cultural intersection between Athens and Jerusalem constitutes the essence of Freud’s personal history and is responsible for the creation of his indissolubly tangled narrative. The chapter deals with the notion of the woven materiality of the text, the inner ties between antiquity and modernity, as well as those between Freud’s past and present, and the unconscious language of analogies.

This page will cry here for centuries… Słowacki, Yeats and the (Im)Materiality of the Text

This essay concerns the famous Polish Romantic poem written by Juliusz Słowacki. The close reading of the text leads me toward the genetics analysis of it’s first draft (which appears to be at once “lost” and “regained”) as well as evokes the meditation about the Słowacki’s philosophy of textual representation (which appears to be deeply ambiguous). My article is inspired by George Bornstein conception of textual materiality and by genetic criticism methodology. I also demonstrate the parallel between poem of Słowacki and lyric When You Are Old, written by W.B. Yeats.

Collage and the Anxiety of Self-description: Blood and Guts in High School

Chapter 2 addresses Acker’s practice of collage, and the anxiety of self-description. Blood and Guts in High School is positioned in relation to both the Dadaist collage and montage practices of artists such as Hannah Höch at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the subversive publications of the 1960s and 1970s: mimeographed magazines, and the punk and post-punk medium of Xeroxed publications. The original manuscript of Blood and Guts in High School housed in the archive possesses a different materiality to the published version of the novel. The materiality of the text in its collage and typographic experimentation is situated in a counter position to the language and hegemonic discourses within which Janey, the voice of the text, is imprisoned. Drawing on Acker’s practices of illegibility, and Denise Riley’s work on language and affect, the chapter argues that Blood and Guts in High School, through its experimental form, reveals the anxiety of self-description that Janey experiences within conventional language structures. Illustration, experimental typography, non-referential language, and the use of the poetic, function in Blood and Guts in High School as sites of an alternate language that emerges through compositional form and experimental forms of iteration.

Reading the Late-Romantic Lending Library: Authorship and the Anxiety of Anonymity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Late Work

Combining findings from the sociology of literature, the history of the book and reading, and studies on the materiality of the text, this paper reassesses a late-Romantic ‘scene of reading’ in E. T. A. Hoffmann’sMy Cousin’s Corner Window(1822). This ‘scene of reading’ presents the lending library as one of the central institutions of Romanticism and depicts anonymity as a crucial mode of Romantic authorship. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s ‘scene of reading’ focuses on the significant and problematic fact that literary communication is ‘anonymized’ by the uniform materiality of the bookbindings used in late-Romantic lending libraries and associated reading practices.