ENGL 413 - 001

Regular Academic Session

4249

Graduate

3 units

Graded

An introduction to major textual theories and their history. Topics may include such issues as analytic and descriptive bibliography, theories of copy-text, theoretical and practical issues in editing, and forms of textuality, including manuscript, print and digital.

Department Consent Required

Restricted to Graduate School students.

This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of textual criticism through a focus on modernist poetic networks and the editing of letters. We will study modernist poetry as it was published in a variety of media¿newspapers, magazines, single-author volumes, textbooks¿as well as the extratextual materials that circulate around various versions of poems, such as author portraits, book jackets, advertisements, and blurbs, paying attention to how literary works change as their bibliographic codes and material contexts change. Studying letters between poets and between poets and their editors will provide insights into relationships and conversations that show modernist poetry in formation, as they work through the labor that precedes publication: the queries, submissions, revisions, rejections, and financial transactions that bridge artistic creation and public consumption. Throughout, we will focus on the interpretive work that goes into producing critical scholarly editions of poets¿ letters. What does it mean to turn private exchanges into a scholarly text, and what kinds of choices must an editor make in selecting, transcribing, decoding, and editing a representative collection? We will take as our case study the letters of American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925) to and from poets such as H.D., Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost, and poetry editors such as Poetry magazine¿s Harriet Monroe and The Little Review¿s Margaret Anderson. ENGL 413 will be cross-listed with the graduate practicum in Digital Humanities (DIGH 500). This course may count towards the certificate in Digital Humanities. While ENGL 413 students are not required to have previous knowledge of or experience in Digital Humanities and may actively participate in the course without engaging it, they may choose to contribute to the Amy Lowell Letters Project, a digital critical edition of Lowell¿s professional correspondence housed here at Loyola¿s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, as a credited project team member. This could include transcribing and decoding handwritten letters, encoding letters in TEI/XML to make them machine-readable, creating a timeline, or creating and interpreting data visualizations. The term project may be based on that work, or on broader course themes. Our work will be informed by readings and discussion on historic debates in scholarly editing, editing correspondences, paleography, and literary digital humanities, as well as readings on the New Poetry movement and early 20th century magazine culture. This class requires department consent. Please contact Dr. Ian Cornelius at icornelius@luc.edu or (773) 508-2332 for permission.

Melissa Bradshaw

We 7:00PM - 9:30PM

01/13/2025 - 04/26/2025

In person

Lake Shore Campus

Lake Shore Campus

Open

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