An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Artur R. Boelderl (Digital Visiting Research Fellow, 2025)
Necessary and Impossible: The Haunting Persistence of ‘the Book’ in Digital Online Editions
In the context of my overall project entitled The Book Not to Come, which aims to explore the impact of digitisation on literary research and textual theory, the question of the book is crucial. MUSIL ONLINE proposes a hybrid solution to the dual challenge facing online editions of literary text corpora: While no reader interested in literature wants to read (or actually reads) a novel online, no literary scholar sees his or her work as something to be done on the basis of electronic data. Both peer groups insist on the printed book, albeit for quite heterogeneous, if not contradictory, reasons. MUSIL ONLINE therefore offers them a 12-volume collected edition and a one-stop-shop web portal, which are closely linked by the fact that the reading text is the same in both the printed and online editions, the difference between the two formats being that the user has the option of adding several dimensions to this very reading text that cannot be reproduced in a book: Not only digital scans of documents related to the text (facsimiles) and TEI versions of the latter, but also, and most importantly, an interdiscursive commentary that introduces, explains and contextualises the text and that grows and improves over time. While this seems to promise a sustainable approach to the above challenge, the question of whether it remains bound to the modern mindset, which is practically formatted by the concept and image of the book in a way that does not allow such projects to take full advantage of the new technology for the benefit of both the reader and the scholar, must be openly discussed. In my talk, I will refer both to the early Derrida and his famous statement in Of Grammatology that the end of the book is the beginning of writing, and to the late Serres, who in Thumbelina, one of his last publications, called for a move away from the spatial format of the book and the page in favour of something else that has yet to be discovered by the new digital technologies.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
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