Pitt's graduate students and faculty members are cordially invited to attend CLST's hybrid event on Wednesday, 25 October 2022, at which Professor Dan Balderston from Hispanic Languages and Literatures will present plans for the Cultural Studies Common Seminar he is scheduled to teach in 2023 on “Processes of Creation.”
Professor Balderston has provided a preview:
This course will focus on how to analyze the stages of composition of a given text or set of texts, using the techniques of French critique génétique. This approach focuses more on process than on final product, paying particular attention to notes and outlines (avant-textes) and to early drafts, showing how a text gets made not only from what is put in but also what is taken out. A set of tools developed initially for the study of complex literary archives like those of Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and Woolf, it has been applied to the study of writers’ papers in many fields and in a variety of languages. My own work in this area has been primarily on the dispersed archive of Jorge Luis Borges, but I have worked on a variety of other Latin American writers’ papers. There are books devoted to applications of genetic criticism to music and theatre, and to filmscripts and film archives, as well as to the study of the papers of major thinkers in a wide variety of fields. The attached illustration, for instance, is from a manuscript by the sociologist Max Weber, showing how he works from a typescript, rewriting on the page of the typescript but also adding manuscript sheets as he goes forward. A similar process can be observed in Marcel Proust’s manuscripts, which famously include obsessive rewriting, with extra sheets of paper added when he ran out of space.
Students will learn how to transcribe the contents of a given manuscript page in all of its complexity, applying digital tools if so desired, and paying particular attention to the stages of writing. The theoretical readings will be in English with additional readings in French, Spanish and other languages. I will guide students to find archives in their fields of interest that show evidence of a complex process of composition (as we can see in the Weber manuscript).
In the talk I will show a PowerPoint of a variety of archives, and then show the layers of information that the scholar can find in a given manuscript. My main example will be Borges’s 1951 essay “Del culto de los libros” (On the Cult of Books), a four page essay on questions of orality and literacy, from Homer to Mallarmé. The first draft of the essay has abundant bibliographical information in Borges’s hand on the things he consulted in the process of composition, and shows his usual wide range of possibilities at the level of word, sentence and paragraph, resolved mostly in the second draft (which was sent for publication in the Argentine newspaper La Nación).
Read more here.