Creative Ecologies

The Oeuvre-in-Motion as a Creative Ecology

As mentioned above, the print medium has had a significant impact on the conceptualization of the CWE, and a digital paradigm diverges from the print paradigm in at least four important ways: (1) It challenges the single-text logic, which has dominated the print model for decades; (2) it provides an inclusive approach to the author’s canon in the sense that it opens it up to include all the traces of its genesis and presents the completed works as an “oeuvre in motion”; (3) it withstands the tendency to compartmentalise that comes inevitably with the print model’s need to separate the works into volumes; and (4) it offers an alternative form of reading: in addition to the syntagmatic axis of following the text’s narrative sequence, it also enables users to read across versions, along the paradigmatic axis of comparing lexical alternatives (i.e., how the phrasing of a passage changed from one stage to the next).

The first divergence challenges the single-text logic. The print medium has prompted editors to present authors’ “complete works” as a sort of wastewater treatment plant, separating the “pure” text from impurities, which are treated in the backwater of the critical apparatus. This purity discourse marks, for instance, the influential Greg-Bowers tradition of copy-text editing. Fredson Bowers presented the goal of textual criticism as follows: “The recovery of the initial purity of an author’s text and of any revision (insofar as this is possible from the preserved documents), and the preservation of this purity despite the usual corrupting process of reprint transmission, is the aim of textual criticism.”1 One of Bowers’s critics, the Swiss textual scholar Hans Zeller, found fault with the eclectic copy-text method because it “contaminatingly synchronises that which occurred diachronically,”2 but he still employed a similar discourse of purity in his criticism. In the past few decades, this purity discourse has been questioned and criticized in editorial theory, but in editorial practice it has turned out to be difficult to find adequate alternatives.3

Besides safeguarding so-called textual purity, the CWE has always been an instrument in the processes of canonization. The traditional single-text edition in print format tends to reinforce two forms of canonization. It often helps establish an author’s fame and status as belonging to the best writers of their period in literary history. At the same time, the CWE also plays a role in establishing an author’s own canon, the set of works that are recognized as being genuinely by this author. This latter canon usually serves as the endpoint of the CWE: the reading notes, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and so on are mentioned only insofar as they have resulted in the published telos. This teleological approach certainly has its merits, but it raises questions both about the completeness of a CWE and about what constitutes the work or works.

The second divergence is an inclusive approach to the author’s canon in that it opens up the canon and presents it as an “oeuvre in motion.” As for the completeness of a “complete works” edition, it is often unclear what belongs to the writer’s canon and what does not. Sometimes a complete works edition includes works that were not published during the author’s lifetime. Archival research often unearths more, sometimes unknown unpublished works, which raises the question: Should they be included in a CWE? Even if the answer is yes, the obvious practical problem would be that it is impossible to publish a revised print CWE each time a new draft is discovered. Besides, writers sometimes keep notebooks that contain ideas and loose jottings that did not necessarily lead to any particular work. Some notes turned out to be dead ends, while others ended up in multiple works. The writer’s manuscripts and other relevant materials (such as letters, notebooks, and diaries) have been dubbed the “grey canon” by S. E. Gontarski.4 But even this revaluation suggests a hierarchy between the “real” canon and the “grey” canon. Items from this grey canon are traditionally regarded (and treated) as mere satellites orbiting around the central planet of the canon of the published works.

The third divergence counteracts the tendency to compartmentalize the oeuvre into a sum of works, contained in separate volumes. Perhaps even more fundamental than the issue of completeness is the question of what is meant by works. CWEs usually have a rationale that is quite explicit about such things as the choice of copy-text, but often less explicit about their organization. For CWEs in print, there seems to be an implicit consensus about the conceptual and material division between the reading texts and the critical apparatus. While the reading texts are the product of textual criticism, the apparatus is often regarded and treated as its by-product. This is the result of an ingrained teleological conceptualization of a CWE, which is to a large extent conditioned by the print medium. The first decades of scholarly editing in the digital age have seen quite a few interesting new, pioneering editorial enterprises, but seldom involving “complete works.” In terms of scope, at least two tendencies mark the development of digital scholarly editions and digital archives at this moment. As to digital editions—probably because the development of a digital scholarly edition is a time-consuming task and funding opportunities are usually precarious and/or for the short term—many editing projects limit their scope to a single work, such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (woolfonline.com), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (digitalthoreau.org), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust (faustedition.net), or to a selection from the author’s oeuvre, such as Arthur Schnitzler digital (arthur-schnitzler.de). The more comprehensive initiatives are usually conceived as digital “archives,” which aim for completeness but are usually not designed to highlight the connections between the documents they host (e.g., Jonathan Swift Archive; Thomas Gray Archive; Shelley-Godwin Archive; Charles W. Chesnutt Archive; Walt Whitman Archive; Beckett Digital Manuscript Project; Charles Harpur Critical Archive; James Joyce Digital Archive). In other words, while most digital editions privilege a teleological approach and have a limited scope, the archive model is usually more complete but offers few connections between the documents.

These connections or relations between different documents are key elements in what distinguishes a digital edition from a digital archive. Similarly, relations also to a large extent distinguish a digital CWE from a print CWE. Due to limited space and the codex format, a printed CWE often necessarily presents a literary oeuvre as a set of individual works, bottled up in separate volumes. As a result, the writer’s complete works appear as a sum of parts. By means of introductions and annotations, the editor usually has to remedy this by explaining that the oeuvre also constitutes a Gestalt, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

And that brings us to the fourth divergence: A Gestalt is not only greater than but also different from the sum of its parts. As Caroll Pratt writes in the introduction to Wolfgang Köhler’s The Task of Gestalt Psychology, it is a common error to leave out the word “different” and simply define a Gestalt as “the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”5 This definition mistakenly ignores that a relationship between the parts is itself something that is not present in the individual parts themselves.6 While a digital archive lays out all the parts, a digital edition assembles them by establishing the connections. When we treat the oeuvre as a Gestalt, this also raises the question of whether the work of art is a clear-cut “figure” (a finished product), or rather the dialectics between “figure” and “ground” (in the visual example of Edgar Rubin’s famous drawing: between the vase and the two faces). Up till now, the editorial theory and practice of producing a CWE have considered the work of art to be the finished product (in the metaphor, say, the figure of a vase), which implies that the manuscripts and other traces of the production process are merely a background. But, even if that is the case, it is important that these traces of the writing process are recognized as such: as a ground whose contours give shape to the figure. Modern authors are often well aware of the function of the ground against which this figure came to the fore, and many of them therefore voluntarily place those traces of the creative process at their readers’ disposal. Schnitzler, for instance, suggested that some of his unfinished “failures” would, in the future, be just as, or even more, interesting to his readers than the “successful” finished products. If these products are successful, they apparently hit a nerve among their audiences; they seem to “work.” The rationale behind a genetic CWE model is that, in order to find out why a particular literary oeuvre “works,” it is crucial to know how it was made.

A digital genetic CWE enables users to read across versions. The challenge is to reconceptualize the CWE in such a way that the literary oeuvre is presented in all its complexity: something that is both greater than and different from its parts because of the relations between them. Precisely because of this complexity, the challenge is to provide readers with the tools to navigate the labyrinth of documents, to discover the relations between them and find the genetic paths.

Deep Hermeneutics: Combining Digital Editing and Genetic Criticism

To realize this, it may be beneficial to combine insights from digital scholarly editing and genetic criticism. The digital format allows for greater flexibility and scope; genetic criticism introduces draft material into the edition.

Digital scholarly editions, according to Patrick Sahle, are “guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and practice.”7 This “digital paradigm” is characterized by the use of multimedia, hypertextuality, modularized structures, fluid publication, and collaborative editing.8 According to Hans Walter Gabler, this implies that “manuscript editing in the digital medium constitutes a fundamental extension of the modes of scholarly editing.”9 For this “fundamental extension,” John Bryant’s “fluid text” theory has laid an important foundation. Bryant duly notes that most texts exist in various versions, but “the problem of access” is a major reason why “fluid texts have not been analyzed much as fluid texts.”10 Although Bryant’s theory stretches the boundaries of the fluid text beyond the author’s life and includes all forms of adaptation and cultural appropriation, which is broader than what the suggested CWE model encompasses, it indicates a mentality switch that is largely conditioned by the technological advances in digital humanities, toward the text as a process rather than a (static and finished) product.

Genetic criticism challenges a single-text paradigm that, to a large extent, reflects a product-oriented logic similar to the one that characterized structuralism, dominated—according to Pierre-Marc de Biasi—by “a synchronic obsession with form.”11 This “synchronic” focus relates to the syntagmatic dimension of the CWE (the edited reading text, following the narrative sequence). Since the second half of the 1960s, genetic criticism supplements this with a “diachronic” axis, thus adding a paradigmatic dimension to the syntagmatic one. Genetic editions such as the FaustEdition give shape to this paradigmatic dimension, but only for one work or for a limited set of works. My suggestion is to combine the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes for an author’s entire oeuvre. The rationale is that, when both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions are mapped for the complete oeuvre, the edition fully enables readers to perform intertextual and intratextual research across versions.

Intertextuality is defined by Michael Riffaterre as “the reader’s experience of links” between different works.12 This also includes the genetically informed reader. A writer’s manuscripts often contain allusions and references to external source texts that may be gradually obscured or undone in the subsequent drafts. If the CWE is conceived and presented as a creative ecology, it provides readers with an edition that enables the detection of this kind of invisible intertextuality, allowing them to discover layers of meaning that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

Intratextuality can be defined as a set of “links established by a reader between at least two texts written by the same author.”13 Writers often allude to their previous works, creating an intratextual network of references. For this kind of intratextual research across versions, readers require access not only to the “complete works,” but to all the manuscripts as well. A CWE can thus enable readers to discover the manuscripts’ hermeneutic potential. This kind of deep hermeneutics across versions is useful, not only for scholars. It is also beneficial to a wider readership, even high-school students, as it appeals to a younger, computer-savvy generation’s strongly developed visual and digital literacy. The rationale is that manuscripts are not just texts; their digital facsimiles are digital images, containing deletions, additions, drawings, and doodles. Thanks to the online presence of this type of modern manuscript material, it becomes increasingly possible for these students’ earliest encounters with literature to be a visual one, sparking a new generation’s interest in literature in a novel way.

If a CWE really aims to be complete, it would ideally present the entirety of the author’s writings, not just the polished end result of the published works, separated from the textual “impurities.” These writings include marginalia in the books the author read, notes in separate copybooks, drafts, typescripts, sketches, doodles, self-translations, or corrected page proofs. This raises several questions: How can we present a writer’s oeuvre as a creative ecology, a web of intertextual and intratextual relations, and thus open up new insights and give readers the opportunity to discover new avenues for interpretation? What is the role of the editor in such an undertaking? How does the production of a CWE according to a new paradigm impact the editor’s role as it changes from being the executor of the author’s will who “purifies” the texts to become a maker of connections, providing readers with tools to navigate the complete works? And how can we enable the macroanalysis of authors’ complete oeuvres across versions?

Modeling the Edition: Four Axes

This is a suggestion to model the CWE in such a way that the reader/researcher can navigate the proliferation of relevant documents and analyses that such an endeavor generates. A good model, according to Willard McCarty, can be fruitful in two ways: “either by fulfilling our expectations, and so strengthening its theoretical basis, or by violating them, and so bringing that basis into question.”14 The envisioned model is of the latter type, as it challenges the status quo of the print paradigm. It operates along four axes:

1. Teleology and Dysteleology: Readers are enabled to approach the materials both in a teleological and in a nonteleological way. The teleological approach starts from the published works and organizes the edition accordingly (for instance by numbering the sentences of an anchor text or base text in order to enable a synoptic sentence view; or by providing a collation engine). The dysteleological approach organizes the edition according to the logic of the continuous process of writing, not just the chronology of publication.15 This approach regards the work less as œuvre than as travail—the hard work that goes into writing, that does not necessarily make it into publication, and that proceeds without necessarily having a clear goal. Some of the digital tools that support this approach are (1) the organization of the genetic edition using the notebook as a pivot, (2) the search engine, which searches across works and across versions, not only for text, but also for visual elements such as doodles,16 (3) the author’s digitized library insofar as it is still extant or their virtual library insofar as it can be reconstructed on the basis of the author’s reading notes, and (4) three levels of chronology: small (on the word level, by means of genetic paths and collation),17 medium (on the level of individual works, by means of genetic maps), and large (on the level of the oeuvre, by means of a manuscript chronology).
2. Digital Archive and Digital Edition: The difference between a digital archive and a digital edition is not marked by a clear-cut border, but it is a matter of degree.18 One editorial project can serve both as an archive and as an edition, depending on the way the reader wishes to use the materials. This continuum between digital archive and digital edition is the second of the four axes. The decisive criterion that distinguishes a digital edition from a digital archive is the editor’s role in establishing connections between the various versions and works. Instead of generating a single, critically edited reading text, the editorial team maps the genetic “paths” through the genetic dossier by indicating how a particular note derives from a particular source text and feeds into a particular draft. This involves discovering and making links, on the one hand, between exogenesis, endogenesis, and epigenesis, and on the other hand, between the microgenesis and the macrogenesis.
3. Endogenesis, Exogenesis, and Epigenesis: In addition to “endogenesis” and “exogenesis,” denoting respectively the “inside” (the drafts and successive revised versions) and the “outside” (the author’s interaction with external source texts that have left traces in the genetic dossier) of the writing process, the edition can also take account of the “epigenesis” (the continuation of the genesis after publication), acknowledging that at any point there is the possibility that exogenetic material colors the endogenesis and epigenesis.
4. Macrogenesis, Microgenesis, and Nanogenesis: The model enables the study of both the macrogenesis (the genesis of the oeuvre in its entirety across multiple versions) and the microgenesis (the processing of a particular exogenetic source text; the revision history of one specific textual instance across endogenetic and/or epigenetic versions; the revisions within one single version). Moreover, in the case of born-digital works, especially if writers make use of keystroke-logging software, it is even possible to examine the genesis on the level of the nanogenesis (the genesis on the level of individual characters). The increase of born-digital works was initially believed to imply the end of genetic criticism.19 In the meantime, studies of digital writing processes examining various file formats and media types,20 making use of digital forensics21 or of keystroke logging software,22 show that, on the contrary, the genesis of born-digital works can open up areas of research (on the level of the single character or keystroke) that were beyond reach in analogue genetic criticism.

Creative Ecologies: The Writer’s Desk

Against the backdrop of the preceding paragraphs, especially with regard to issues such as textual versus documentary orientation, teleological versus dysteleological approaches, and the digital archive-edition-continuum, one of the promising futures of digital scholarly editing is a sustained attempt to think in terms of creative ecologies instead of dichotomies. Opening up the genesis to the level of the oeuvre as a whole has consequences for genetic criticism as well. In de Biasi’s seminal typology of the genetic documentation, for instance, the implied focus is on the avant-texte of separate works in relative isolation from the rest of the oeuvre.23 Genetic criticism has traditionally focused on the unit of one publication, one work as a structural principle, for the same reasons digital scholarly editing has: the complexity of the material. But I think that both disciplines have reached enough critical mass and maturity to start thinking more in terms of the digital CWE. It is good to expand the notion of the genetic dossier. Instead of working with the notion of the avant-texte, instead of focusing on the genesis of one individual work, it would be useful to focus on the genesis of the oeuvre as a whole and work with the notion of the sous-oeuvre, in a slightly more specific sense than Thomas C. Connolly’s understanding of the term24 as the marginalized parts of a work that are traditionally eclipsed.

It would be beneficial, therefore, to open up the canon to include all the notes and drafts, sketches, and even books in the author’s personal library, if it is still preserved. Writers often have several book projects underway concurrently. If we want to pay extra attention to forms of concurrent writing or creative concurrence in genetic criticism,25 this implies that we reconstruct the everyday reality of how a work, in all its draft versions, interacted with the other works that populated the author’s writing desk at any given moment.

To illustrate how intermingled the geneses of an author’s individual works can be, it suffices to glance at Samuel Beckett’s writing desk in the late 1970s.26 The situation can be summarized as follows: Beckett was already working on a longer piece of prose called Company when he received a commission. In 1977, the actor David Warrilow asked him to write “a monologue on death.”27 Beckett replied on October 1 with the line “My birth was my death,”28 and the very next day, under the preliminary title “Gone,” he already started developing the theme: “My birth was my death”29 is the opening sentence of the first draft that was to become a play called A Piece of Monologue. In other words, as soon as one is born, one starts dying. In the top left corner of this manuscript, Beckett wrote the rather mysterious note, “all 3^rd”; and indeed in the next version (the first typescript, UoR MS 2069), the narrative voice suddenly changes from a first-person to a third-person narrator. As a result, the opening line becomes more ambiguous, for the sentence “Birth was his death” leaves open the possibility that the protagonist’s birth meant the death of someone else. This ambiguity is even more pronounced in the published version of A Piece of Monologue: “Birth was the death of him.” There is an autobiographical dimension to this ambiguity. Since Beckett was born on Good Friday 1906, the death of “him” was also Jesus Christ’s suffering on the cross.

The transition from the manuscript to the typescript is quite a jump, and one wonders whether there have not been any intermediary versions that give us a sense of how and why Beckett made the change from first to third person narration in this play. Around the same time, on a piece of paper, Beckett was drafting a French poem (“fleuves et océans”) that is dated “Ussy Toussaint 77” (November 1, 1977). The next day, on November 2, he wrote to Jocelyn Herbert that he was writing several pieces simultaneously. The manuscripts indicate that, on November 1, he was working on at least three literary projects in three different genres at the same time: the prose piece Company, the play A Piece of Monologue, and the poem “fleuves et océans.” On the one hand, the commissioned play had a thematic impact on the content of the poem, which opens with a pun on the standard expression “ils l’ont laissé pour mort” (“they left him for dead”): “fleuves et océans / l’ont laissé pour vivant.” Like in the opening sentence of A Piece of Monologue, being alive (vivant) is presented as a process of dying. The creative concurrence becomes material in this case, because the poem is drafted on one side of a scrap of paper, the other side of which is covered with notes for A Piece of Monologue.30 It is not entirely clear which of the two sides was written first, and it cannot be excluded that, vice versa, the poem also had an impact on the play. The loose jottings at the back of the poem’s draft also thematize death: “Less dying to be done”; “Less to die. To die from. To die with. Ever less”; “Not much left to die” and “Dead & gone / Dying & going.” Toward the end of the scrap of paper, the jottings become more concrete and start reading like stage settings for A Piece of Monologue, such as the following idea for the opening stage directions:

Fade up. 10”.“Birth.” 10”. “Birth was his death. Etc.”

The line “Birth was his death” corresponds with the first typescript of A Piece of Monologue, which suggests that there is a synergy between the third person narrative in this version of the play and the third person in the poem “fleuves et océans / l’ont laissé pour vivant.” And the note is also the initial idea for a stage direction, so it can be considered as a first draft of the stage direction that was typed out for the first time in the second typescript (UoR MS 2070).

All the while, however, the manuscript of the prose text Company was still on Beckett’s desk as well. The concurrence between the drafts of Company and A Piece of Monologue even became a form of confluence at some point.31 After having been working on both projects concurrently for about eight months, Beckett tried on May 17, 1978, to insert an excerpt from A Piece of Monologue into Company, resulting in yet another change of the personal pronoun: birth was neither “my death” nor “his death,” but “the death of you.”32 Soon, however, he decided that this merger did not work after all, and he cancelled the insertion in the Company manuscript with a large St. Andrew’s cross (MS UoR 1822, 25r). After this brief attempt to merge the play and the prose piece, the three concurrent projects were published separately. Still, the creative concurrence remains noticeable in the themes of life as a form of dying and “his” birth being both the death of the protagonist and that of Christ.

Intratextuality across Versions

In addition to this creative concurrence, the oeuvre-in-motion is also marked by recurrence. In the stage directions of A Piece of Monologue, there is a word that recurs frequently throughout the play. The first word of the stage directions in the published version is “Faint.” It has all kinds of variants in the previous versions, such as “Faintest” or “Infinitely faint.” And the word recurs in various forms throughout the text. In and of itself, this word is rather inconspicuous. It is indeed faint, also in the sense that it does not strike anyone as particularly strong. It is a word that rather tries to efface itself, which makes it so suitable for this play, consisting of only one speaker onstage and next to him a standard lamp of the “same height” with a “skull-sized white globe, faintly lit.” The plan on the scrap of paper indicated that, at the end of the play, the light was to fade out: “End: fade out general light. Hold on globe. Fade out globe.” (UoR MS 2460). And in the published version, the light of the globe is said to be “unutterably faint.” There are more than a dozen occurrences of the word “faint” in the play:

• Faint diffuse light. Speaker stands well off centre downstage audience left. . . .
• Two metres to his left, same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit. . . .
• Till faint light from standard lamp. Wick turned low. And now. This night. Up at nightfall. Every nightfall. Faint light in room. . . .
• Room once full of sounds. Faint sounds. . . .
• Fewer and fainter as time wore on. . . .
• Faint light in room. Unutterably faint. . . .
• Faint cry in his ear. Mouth agape. . . .
• Turns away at last and gropes through faint unaccountable light to unseen lamp. . . .
• Nothing faintly stirring. . . .
• Nothing stirring. Faintly stirring. . . .
• On all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint. The globe alone. Alone gone.33

At first sight, its function seems mainly to translate the cycle of birth and death to the visual metaphor of the globe, the switching on and off of the mind in the skull. But faint also applies to sounds. There is both a visual and an auditory dimension to this word. And sometimes it refers to a combination of both senses, as in “faintly stirring.” Beckett seems to convey a sense of synaesthesia by means of this word. This synaesthetic dimension may not be particularly striking if this play is analyzed as a separate unit, even if one has access to the entire genetic dossier. But when one opens up the genetic dossier to include the entire sous-oeuvre, the entire Beckett canon, including all the manuscripts—the entire genetic underground so to speak—the genetically informed reader may discover something else. In the avant-texte of another work by Beckett, called Stirrings Still (1989), there is an interesting moment in the genesis relating to the word faint. Among the drafts of this work, Beckett connected this word to a specific quotation.34 The quotation reads, per lungo silenzio fioco, followed by Beckett’s own translation, marked by an open variant: “faint / hoarse from long silence.” The passage derives from Dante’s Inferno, canto I, where Virgil appears for the first time as Dante’s guide. He appears fioco, which can be either faint (in visual terms) or hoarse, weak, or feeble (in auditory terms). Because Virgil has not spoken for centuries, the auditory interpretation would make sense, were it not that, at that moment in the text, Virgil has not yet spoken to Dante, so his voice cannot appear “hoarse.” Beckett made this observation in the 1920s in one of his student notebooks, when he studied Italian literature. More than fifty years later, he was apparently still preoccupied by this dilemma. This opens up a whole new intratextual dimension: since the word faint clearly had a very specific intertextual, Dantean meaning for Beckett, the next step is to see how this word functions in all of Beckett’s works and to what degree it has a similarly Dantean resonance over the course of his career.

In conclusion, it is beneficial to any genetic research project to place a work in the context of the oeuvre as a whole, including the sous-oeuvre, to stay with the underground metaphor. Our notion of the oeuvre is often colored by the print paradigm. This print paradigm has conditioned us to focus on single-reading texts and to compartmentalize the oeuvre in separate volumes. One could compare it to a railway system in a big city like London: every volume corresponds to a railway station, and every railway station is a separate unit, an endpoint. The challenge for genetic critics is to create a metro system that connects these termini by discovering the underground connections among them. In the example of the word faint in Stirrings Still, archival research shows that there is an underground connection to something Beckett read fifty years earlier, Dante’s Divina Commedia, and that this in turn connects to various instances of the word faint in several of Beckett’s other works. By taking account of this wider range of the oeuvre as a whole, we may be able to discover more of these underground connections. For that is the strength of a CWE: thanks to making the connections, it presents the oeuvre not just as a set of works, but as a Gestalt, as something that is not just more than the sum of its parts, but also different from the sum of its parts.

Notes

1. 1. Fredson Bowers, “Textual Criticism,” in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association, 1970), 30 (emphasis added).

2. 2. Hans Zeller, “Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American Textual Editing,” in Contemporary German Editorial Theory, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 106.

3. 3. See, for instance John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Paul Eggert, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Hans Walter Gabler, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays (Cambridge: Open Book, 2018); Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); Peter Shillingsburg, Textuality and Knowledge (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2017).

4. 4. S. E.Gontarski, “Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance,” in Beckett after Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 141–57.

5. 5. Caroll C. Pratt, Introduction to Wolfgang Köhler’s The Task of Gestalt Psychology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 9.

6. 6. Pratt, 10.

7. 7. Patrick Sahle, “What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?,” in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, ed. Elena Pierazzo and Matthew Driscoll (Cambridge: Open Book, 2016), 28.

8. 8. Sahle, 18–19.

9. 9. Gabler, Text Genetics, 133.

10. 10. Bryant, Fluid Text, 9.

11. 11. Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis and the Genesis of the Work,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 41.

12. 12. Michael Riffaterre, “La Trace de l’intertexte,” Pensée 215 (1980): 4–18 (emphasis added).

13. 13. Kareen Martel, “Les notions d’intertextualité et d’intratextualité dans les théories de la reception,” Protée 33, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 93–102.

14. 14. Willard McCarty, “Knowing . . . : Modeling in Literary Studies,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 395.

15. 15. Dirk Van Hulle, “Sheherazade’s Notebook: Editing Textual Dysteleology and Autographic Modernism,” Modernist Cultures 15, no. 1 (2020): 12–28.

16. 16. To make them searchable, the Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project categorizes the doodles according to a typology, divided into four main categories: objects, organisms, shapes, and symbols, each of which is subdivided into subcategories. Thus, the category “organisms” contains the subcategory “humanoid.” By selecting this subcategory, the reader is presented with all the humanoid doodles in the author’s manuscripts. The encoding also facilitates other searches such as the systematic search for dates, gaps (blank spaces in manuscripts), calculations and intertextual references. The latter category partially links up with the author’s personal library.

17. 17. For suggestions on integrating automatic collation in a digital edition, see Ronald Haentjens Dekker, Dirk van Hulle, Gregor Middell, Vincent Neyt, and Joris van Zundert, “Computer-Supported Collation of Modern Manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30, no. 3 (2015): 452–70, doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu007; Dirk Van Hulle, Elli Bleeker, Bram Buitendijk, Ronald Haentjens Dekker, and Vincent Neyt, “Layers of Variation: A Computational Approach to Collating Texts with Revisions,” DHQ: digital humanities quarterly 16, no. 1 (2022): 1–29. On “genetic paths,” see Paolo D’Iorio, “Nietzsche on New Paths: The HyperNietzsche Project and Open Scholarship on the Web,” in Friedrich Nietzsche: Edizioni e interpretazioni, ed. Maria Christina Fornari (Pisa: ETS, 2006): 474–96.

18. 18. Paul Eggert, “The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse,” Variants 14 (2019): 3–22.

19. 19. Marita Mathijsen, “Genetic Textual Editing: The End of an Era,” in Was Ist Textkritik? Zur Geschichte und Relevanz eines Zentralbegriffs der Editionswissenschaft, ed. Gertraud Mitterauer, Werner Maria Bauer, and Sabine Hofer, Beihefte zu Editio 28 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), 233–40.

20. 20. Bénédicte Vauthier, “Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding out the (Mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado,” Variants 12–13 (2016): 163–86; Melinda Vásári, “Securing the Literary Evidence. Some Perspectives on Digital Forensics,” in Philology in the Making: Analog/Digital Cultures of Scholarly Writing and Reading, ed. Pál Kelemen and Nicolas Pethes (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019), 287–309.

21. 21. Thorsten Ries, “The Rationale of the Born-Digital Dossier Génétique: Digital Forensics and the Writing Process, with Examples from the Thomas Kling Archive,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33, no. 2 (2018): 391–424.

22. 22. Lamyk Bekius, “The Reconstruction of the Author’s Movement through the Text, or How to Encode Keystroke Logged Writing Processes in TEI-XML,” Variants 15–16 (2021): 3–43.

23. 23. Dirk Van Hulle, Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 120.

24. 24. Thomas C. Connolly, Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Œuvre (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018).

25. 25. Dirk Van Hulle, “Creative Concurrence: Gearing Genetic Criticism for the Sociology of Writing,” Variants 15–16 (2021): 45–62.

26. 26. This case study was partly developed for the colloquium “Imperfect Itineraries: Literature and Literary Research in the Archives,” March 4, 2022, Université de Lorraine–Nancy, and used as an example in the above-mentioned article in Variants 15–16.

27. 27. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (1966–1989), ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 471n1.

28. 28. Beckett, 471n1.

29. 29. University of Reading, UoR MS 2068, fol. 01r.

30. 30. UoR MS 2460, m18, fols. 01r–v; Dirk Van Hulle, “Beckett’s Art of the Commonplace: The ‘Sottisier’ Notebook and Mirlitonnades Drafts,” Journal of Beckett Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 67–89.

31. 31. See Matthijs Engelberts, Défis du récit scénique: formes et enjeux du mode narratif dans le théâtre de Beckett et Duras (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 2001).

32. 32. Samuel Beckett, Company / Compagnie: A Digital Genetic Edition, ed. Georgina Nugent-Folan and Vincent Neyt (Brussels: University of Antwerp, 2024), BDMP9, EM, fol. 25r (emphasis added), https://www.beckettarchive.org/.

33. 33. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 115–21.

34. 34. Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / What is the Word: A Digital Genetic Edition, ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt, (Brussels: University Press Antwerp, 2011), https://www.beckettarchive.org/.