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E-book The Author as Annotator : Ambiguities of Self-Annotation in Pope and Byron

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Penilaian

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Ambiguity is the “co-existence of two or more meanings” that do not have to be mutually exclusive but that still have to be clearly distinct from one another (“Conceptual Framework” n.pag.; cf. also Winter-Froemel and Zirker 285). One would assume that annotations – be they written by editors or by authors themselves – are the last place in a literary work where one would find the strategic use and creation of ambiguity. After all, annotations are supposedly meant to explain the meaning(s) of a text – to uncover and expound existingambiguities in the annotated work. They are not meant to add completely new ones.In the present study, however, focussing on Alexander Pope and Lord Byron, I will argue that many literary self-annotations do exactly that. They use vari-ous strategies of ambiguation in order to proliferate the meanings of the pas-sages to which they are attached. In some cases, they even ambiguate the whole work in which they appear or, yet even more far-reaching, an author’s entire œuvre and public image. Thus, I will use the concept of ambiguity to gain a deeper insight into Pope’s and Byron’s practices of self-annotation and, in turn, use their authorial notes to learn more about strategic uses of ambigu-ity in literary texts.In the context of this book, the terms ‘authorial annotation’ and ‘self-annotation’ always mean notes that are written by the same author as the annotated text and that are published together with this text – usually as footnotes or endnotes.1 Other (para)textual features that are often subsumed under the concepts of ‘self-annotation’ or ‘self-commentary’ – e.g. handwritten marginal notes in authors’ copies of their own works,2 prefaces, headnotes, self-reflexive remarks within the main text, private letters, interviews, and essays by authors – are beyond the scope of this study and will not discussed in detail.3 Self-annotations differ from these other (para)textual features in four main ways. Firstly, unlike handwritten marginalia, private letters, and (usually) interviews, they appear in the same volume as the annotated text and, thus, are available to every reader of the work – they are, in Genette’s terminology, peri-texts rather than epitexts (cf. Genette 5). Secondly, and in contrast to headnotes, prefaces, etc., authorial annotations are lemmatised, i.e. they are ‘anchored’ in a smaller, more or less clearly identified part of the main text and address this section directly.4 Thirdly, unlike self-reflexive remarks within the main text, self-annotations comment on this text from the outside – with all the ambi-guities that this ‘distancing measure’ entails (see below p. 13). Fourthly, and most importantly, of all authorial paratexts, self-annotations have the most complex relationship to a certain type of editorial paratext, namely notes composed by scholars on others’ works. In what follows, these scholarly anno-tations written by editors on someone else’s text will be called xenographic annotations.5 Xenographic notes can be found as early as the sixth century BCin the form of scholia and glosses on Homer (cf. Novokhatko 30–32), while the practice of literary self-annotation began around 1300 (see p. 47 below).The present study is only concerned with self-annotations, not with xeno-graphic notes. However, as outlined in more detail below, I would like to sug-gest that self-annotations constantly evoke the conventions and functions of the scholarly discourse tradition of xenographic annotation,6 while also cre-atively transforming, flouting, and subverting the rules that govern this older tradition. In order to analyse how exactly self-annotations achieve this, I will spend the first part of this introduction outlining what exactly these conven-tions of xenographic annotation are. A brief glance at some pertinent examples of xenographic notes will then illustrate that even these scholarly annotations sometimes violate their own discourse conventions, which often results in ambiguity. Nevertheless, I will go on to argue that in xenographic notes ambi-guity always to some extent constitutes a flaw (from a purely scholarly point of view), whereas it is a defining (and desired) feature of literary self-annotations. Afterwards, I will show why existing studies that aim at providing a systematic overview of the strategies used in, and functions of, self-annotations (be it in the context of studying one work, author, or even self-annotations as a whole) often fall short of considering these notes in their fascinating intricacies, and I will propose an alternative approach to categorising authorial notes. In a next step, I will outline how the notion of ambiguity can be made fruitful for an analysis of literary self-annotations in their full complexity and how, in turn, the study of authorial notes can tell us more about literary uses of ambiguity. In a last step in this introduction, I will explain why Pope and Byron present two especially intriguing case-studies in the field of literary self-annotation.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

091 LAH t

Penerbit

Germany : BRILL., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

475 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783657795284

Klasifikasi

091

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Manuscript, Parchment, Scroll

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

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