Editing Archival Materials: Robin Blaser’s Astonishment Tapes

Fri, Dec 5, 2014

4:00 PM

English Department Lounge (Room 4409)

How do we bring something of the cultural past to a clear light without falsifying its complicated historical context? Join literary scholar Miriam Nichols as she discusses the work behind her publication of Robin Blaser’s Astonishment Tapes, an 800+ page transcript of 20 audiotapes. Cutting conversational static and repetitions to emphasize narrative threads and create a document of publishable length is not always the goal. But should scholars abandon the book form and post the whole thing online? Following her talk, Nichols will be joined by Ammiel Alcalay and Lost & Found editors Iemanja Brown, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, Claudia Moreno Parsons, Josh Schneiderman, Talia Shalev, and Kyle Waugh in a round-table discussion on problems in contemporary textual scholarship.

Cosponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative; the MFA in Art Criticism & Writing at School for Visual Arts thePhD Program in English.

Participants

Tags
Archives Poetry Literature