Revising the Self: textual composition and reformulations of the subject within the Modernist era.

According to Julia Kristeva, writing in 1992, we still do not have a 'science of writing'. Writing is often a private act, its traces easily eradicated. Moreover any such science is compromised by the 'observer's paradox', where the act of observation transforms the thing observed; any account of writing by the writing subject themselves is doubtful since the act of describing will affect the very process. This is especially true in the production of literary texts because they are, with rare exceptions, not produced as mechanically as, say, copied legal documents or texts produced by dictation. This does not prevent writers from describing the process of composition with recourse to fascinating and extreme metaphors. But such descriptions, though revealing in many ways, rarely give a clear or full picture of the actual processes involved / whether at a detailed microscopic level (i.e. in the alteration of words and letters) or a general 'macroscopic' one (i.e. where contracts with publishers are negotiated). Any reconstruction of these processes needs to examine the materials themselves carefully to qualify and enhance our sense of what is happening when someone is writing a literary text.

The possibility of a science of writing, or at least the development of a branch of it, is made a little more likely by the growing archives of modern literary manuscripts and these archives being made more widely available, whether transcribed, photostated or digitized. Literary manuscripts have always been material for scholarly research but mostly as a means for making a new or forgotten text available, or for qualifying the authority of an existing text. That is, they are rarely objects of study in their own right or read as witnesses of certain acts of writing that can be joined together and described as a process. Descriptions of this process partly form the work of a recent school of scholarship called 'genetic criticism'. This school looks in particular at the Modernist era because of the plethora of revised manuscripts. These manuscripts still await a range of methodologies for advancing analyses of their significance.

One kind of genetic criticism deploys psychoanalytic theory when it examines the composition and revision of, in particular, autobiographical work. This helps deal - literally - with the sense of the 'constructed nature' of the self and its representations. My work grows partly out of this. It has been argued that the self is put into question by the acts of writing (said differently by such self-reflective writers as Flaubert, Pater, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Woolf and Barthes). If this is so then, I contend, the particular processes of writing are likely to affect and be reflected by the particular ways in which the self is questioned. Both the hypothesis and contention will be examined. The study will thus provide a particular angle on a broader issue: how far formation relates to content.

I also see my research building bridges towards two other fields of scholarship.
Firstly, in recent work on the History of the Book, the history of literary form is often related to the material circumstances that helped form it. My work, examining the minutiae of writing moments, asks whether the determinism in this approach can be extended down to the level of composition or whether the control over letters is precisely where a sense of autonomy / or its illusion - is engendered. Secondly, my work aims to connect with recent work on histories of modernism, both 'material' and 'intellectual', showing new possibilities for research in the field of Modernism.

In general, my work aims to generate a new set of methodologies and bring together various strands in contemporary criticism and scholarship that will bring to life in new ways an exciting set of resources that are just beginning to come to a deservedly more widespread attention.