Variants The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 12-13 | 2016 Varia Wim Van Mierlo and Alexandre Fachard (dir.) Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/275 DOI: 10.4000/variants.275 ISSN: 1879-6095 Publisher European Society for Textual Scholarship Printed version Date of publication: 31 December 2016 ISSN: 1573-3084 Electronic reference Wim Van Mierlo and Alexandre Fachard (dir.), Variants, 12-13 | 2016 [Online], Online since 01 May 2017, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/variants/275 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/variants.275 This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020. The authors 1 This double issue of Variants: the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship is the first to appear in Open Access on the Revues.org platform. In subject matter, this issue offers a wide scope covering the music manuscripts of the thirteenth-century French trouvère poet Thibaut de Champagne (expertly discussed by Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan) to the digital genetic dossier of the twenty-first century Spanish experimental writer Robert Juan-Cantavella. The story of Juan- Cantavella’s “manuscripts” is an interesting: the dossier was handed on a USB stick to the scholar Bénédicte Vauthier for research; the files and their metadata became the subject of an extensive analysis of the writing history of his novel El Dorado (2008), proving that genetic criticism after the advent of the computer is still possible and necessary. In addition to Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth’s detailed consideration of the concept of “variant” and “variation” in the German historical-critical tradition of scholarly editing, the current volume contains four more theoretical exploration of this topic, which formed the topic of the 2013 Annual Conference of the Society that was held in Paris in November 2013. Proposing a rapprochement between genetic criticism and scholarly editing, Dirk Van Hulle writes about how five key aspects of genetic study – exogenesis, endogenesis, epigenesist, microgenesis and macrogenesis – can be modelled to fit into an appropriate digital editorial infrastructure to make this type of research amenable and effective. Daniel Ferrer revisits the old distinction – and division -- between genetic and textual criticism to consider where the two fields are apt to meet, viz. at the point where variants are not just accidental, the result of the exigencies of textual transmission, but deliberate and creative. Hans Walter Gabler looks into the questions as to what happens when we edit manuscripts: what transformations take place when the document, ontologically conceived as autographic, as “materiality-and-writing”, is paired down so to speak into text. The only viable way, Gabler argues, to achieve a proper editorial presentation that does not simply signify a loss of the autographic, is via the digital medium. Hannah Sullivan, finally, asks a bold question: Why do authors revise, and keep revising, their texts? This question leads her into an interesting theoretical exposition on the differences between a text that is still in process and a text that is finished, the difference being one of what she calls “textual apprehension”. It’s all a matter of perspective, in other words. In addition, Luca Crispi delves into the “fictional” and “textual” world of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to unearth, using the vast archive of manuscripts that Joyce produced during the work’s seven-year composition, a number of factual discrepancies in the novel, discrepancies which its writer lost track of. Gabriele Wix analyses the genesis of the Manhattan poems by the twentieth-century German poet Thomas Kling in an article that hones in on the poet’s archaeology of language and the deliberate forms of “sedimentation” and “stratigraphy” that characterize his composition method. Before closing off the volume with no less than 16 reviews of monographs, scholarly editions and digital editions, the section on “Work in Progress” reports on two on- going digital editorial projects: the LDoD Digital Archive, comprising the archival material for more than 500 hundred texts of Fernando Pessoa’s unfinished Livro do Desassossego, produced between 1913 and 1925, and CODEA, a digital primary corpus of Spanish historical documents. These projects represent some of the innovative, state- of-the-art thinking that is happening in scholarly editing in Europe at the moment. Variants, 12-13 | 2016 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Essays Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut de Champagne Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan Modelling a Digital Scholarly Edition for Genetic Criticism: A Rapprochement Dirk Van Hulle Genetic Criticism with Textual Criticism: From Variant to Variation Daniel Ferrer The Draft Manuscript as Material Foundation for Genetic Editing and Genetic Criticism Hans Walter Gabler Why Do Authors Produce Textual Variation on Purpose? Or, Why Publish a Text That Is Still Unfolding? Hannah Sullivan Some Textual and Factual Discrepancies in James Joyce's Ulysses: The Blooms’ Several “First Nights” Luca Crispi Stratigraphic Soundings: A Genetic Approach to the German Poet Thomas Kling Gabriele Wix Variations in Understanding Variants: (Hidden) Concepts of Text in German Critical Editions Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding out the (mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado by Robert Juan-Cantavella Bénédicte Vauthier Work in Progress Encoding, Visualizing, and Generating Variation in Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego Manuel Portela and António Rito Silva CODEA: A “Primary” Corpus of Spanish Historical Documents Ruth Miguel Franco and Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja Book Reviews Johnny Kondrup, Editionsfilologi Adam Borch James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities Geert Lernout Variants, 12-13 | 2016 3 David C. Parker, Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament: The Lyell Lectures Oxford Trinity Term 2011 Geert Lernout Luciano Gargan, Dante, la sua biblioteca e lo Studio di Bologna Alessandro Scafi Luigi Ferreri, L’Italia degli Umanisti: Marco Musuro Alessio Assonitis Ivo Castro, Editar Pessoa Simone Celani Fernando Pessoa, Apreciações Literárias Carlota Pimenta Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro Jessica Firmino Catherine Rovera, Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre Christine Collière-Whiteside The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Matthew Creasy James Joyce. Ulysses: Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition William S. Brockman Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Alice Wood Dirk Van Hulle, Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond Stefano Rosignoli Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier (eds.), Digital Critical Editions Ronan Crowley Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing : Theories, Models and Methods Elli Bleeker correspSearch Frederike Neuber Variants, 12-13 | 2016 4 Essays Variants, 12-13 | 2016 5 Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut de Champagne Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan 1 Scholars of Old French have long resisted the overly positivistic editorial policies associated with the nineteenth-century classical philologist Karl Lachmann, who sought to reveal an original text from extant, imperfect copies, scrubbed clean of scribal errors and contamination. Philologists subsequently turned to Joseph Bédier’s “best-text” approach as the most intellectually defensible policy: editors edit one witness for clarity and note all variants, regardless of their relative merit, in the apparatus. A few decades after Bédier’s passing, textual variants worked their way back to respectability as Paul Zumthor elucidated the fundamental notion of mouvance in Mediaeval textuality (1979, 610). Mediaeval texts are based, paradoxically, on instability.1 Manuscript witnesses preserve mere traces of ephemeral experience of Mediaeval texts that were read or performed aloud, heard by a public, transformed by subsequent performers, written down by someone, copied then by someone else, etc.2 As texts were constantly reworked, either consciously or otherwise through the stages of transmission, no single entity was responsible for what survives to this day. Editors must come to terms with this situation if they wish to convey the real conditions of the pre-print, oral culture that produced these works. 2 Editing trouvère lyric, the monophonic songs of Old French poets from roughly the second half of the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, poses several challenges, not least of which requires addressing variance on the level of text and melody. Thibaut IV, count of Brie and Champagne and king of Navarre, left aficionados of Mediaeval song a particularly large (more than sixty songs) and rich corpus in terms of generic breadth, registral subtlety, and melodic range. The first complete edition of Thibaut’s songs, published by Axel Wallensköld (1925), remains the standard reference work on Thibaut.3 Wallensköld takes an editorial position midway between Lachmann and Bédier, creating an ideal reading based on “[le] choix de la meilleure des variantes parmi celles que la filiation des manuscrits permet d’accepter” (1925, xcviii) (“the choice of the best variants that the manuscript filiations allow”) rather than recovering an urtext. The latter task proved impossible owing to the “contaminated” state of the Variants, 12-13 | 2016 6 manuscripts because “ils remontent directement