Jeff Drouin

I recently presented some of my dissertation material for the first time at the 2009 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship at NYU. My presentation analyzed the fair copy manuscript of the “Wandering Rocks” episode (composed Jan-Feb 1919) of Ulysses in order to show evidence that the passages which make the time and space of the narrative the most relativistic were added in the margins after the main text was composed. This suggests to me that they were conceived as a unit all at the same time. As further material evidence that Joyce might have had physics in mind, I presented a handful of quotes from The Egoist magazine, where he was a contributor, that show an increase in discussion of physics (especially by Dora Marsden), astronomy, the city, and secular power, all of which are themes in “Wandering Rocks.” The presentation was somewhat open-ended, since I’m in the process of writing it now, but it generated some helpful discussion. I’m now finishing the writeup to submit contributions to Genetic Joyce Studies and Writing Technologies.

This year’s conference was absolutely fantastic! There were tons of panels on modernism and/or digital humanities. The plenary of the first evening, featuring George Bornstein, Robert Scholes, and Cliff Wulfman, was an excellent exposition of the material culture and publishing networks of literary modernism in the U.S. and Britain.  I saw some really cool digital archiving presentations, including one by a team from Duke who are digitizing Whitman flipbooks (paper sheets with multiple layers and sizes of attached newspaper cutouts, handwritten notes, and other materials that include marginalia). They’ve expanded TEI markup to cover ALL visual aspects of the flipbooks (i.e. the vertical breaks where one leaf partially covers an underlying object) as well as the three dimensional aspects of the material (some leaves have writing or print on the underside, as well as marginalia that cross layers). They’re designing an interface that will enable readers to view and “flip through” the materials in high quality images as well as digital transcriptions. Very, very cool.