English 415
Fall 2011
The Unprinted Page: Working with Manuscripts
Professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler
Morgan Hall 101; phone 2186
kjsanchezepp@amherst.edu
Office hours: Wednesday 9-12
Class: Converse 308; Tues. & Thurs. 2-3:30
This course will focus on the manuscript culture of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury America, using manuscripts as a means of thinking about the act of writing, the
implications of audience and publication, and the relations between the private and public word.
We will study the more private forms of diaries and letters. We will confront the problems raised
by literary work that was never published during its author’s lifetime, heedful of the questions of
social propriety and power that often inform what can and can’t be published. We will also look
at the traces of the writing process in manuscripts of ultimately published works–the window
into the literary creation that manuscripts provide. The heart of this course will be individual
literary recovery projects as each student in the class will draw upon rich local archives to
explore, analyze, and research a manuscript discovery of their own. The written work of this
class will be devoted to this project.
Book List
Henry James, The Aspern Papers, Dover Thrift Edition ISBN 0486419223
Alice Hanley, Love across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis,
University of Massachusetts Press ISBN 1558490248
A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women Writers from 1764 to the Present,
Feminist Press ISBN 0935312501
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal: 1837-1861, edited by Damion Searls, New York Review
Books Classics ISBN 9781590173213
Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, University of Nebraska Press ISBN 0803218877
Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Warner Books ISBN 0446690295
Ernest Hemingway, Garden of Eden, Scribner ISBN 0684804522
Sylvia Plath, Ariel the Restored Edition, Harper Collins ISBN 0060732601
The books required for this course are available at Amherst Books. Because we will be working
so closely with the primary texts it is important that each student has his or her own copy. I have
asked Amherst Books to purchase used copies wherever possible. All other readings are
available on e-reserves. I have also put on reserve copies of the major texts and other resources
that I think might be helpful for your projects, or that supplement class readings.
Syllabus
Private Papers
Tuesday, September 6
Introduction to the course
Thursday, September 8
Henry James, The Aspern Papers, note, preface, and novella
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations (New York: Schoken Books, 1969) 217-252 (e-reserves)
Tuesday, September 13
Henry James, The Aspern Papers
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” in The Book History Reader (New
York: Routledge, 2006) 99-124 (e-reserves)
http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/index.html
Thursday, September 15
Meet at the Jones Library Special Collections
D. C, Greetham, “Making the Text: Bibliography of Manuscript Books” Textual
Scholarship an Introduction (New York: Garland, 1992) 46-75 [especially 46 and
72-75] (e-reserves)
Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Copying and Conversion: An 1824 Friendship Album ‘from a
Chinese Youth,” American Quarterly 59 (June 2007): 301-39 (e-reserves)
Daniel A. Cohen, “Rewriting the Token of Love: Sentimentalists, Sophisticates, and the
Transformation of American Girlhood, 1862-1940” Journal of the History of
Childhood and Youth (Spring 2011): 223-256 (e-reserves)
Tuesday, September 20
Meet at Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
Transcription exercise
Love across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis
“The Letters” and Phoebe R. Mitchell, “Unraveling the Mystery of the Letters” 11-54
Thursday, September 22
Love across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis
Kathy Peiss “Love across the Color Line” and Louis Wilson “The Springfield of
Channing Lewis, a Colored Man” 55-144
Tuesday, September 27
Visit to the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
Jan-Dirk Müller, “The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to
Print” The Book History Reader 182-190 (e-reserves)
Jay David Bolter, “Writing as Technology” Writing Space: Computers Hypertext and the
Remediation of Print (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 2001) 14-26 (e-reserves)
John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen¸
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002) 1-16 (e-reserves)
Thursday, September 29
Philippe Lejeune, “Journal de Jeune Fille” in Nineteenth-Century France” in Inscribing
the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996) 107-122 (e-reserves)
A Day at a Time, introduction and “In the Fatherland”
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Tuesday, October 4
A Day at a Time, “The Journey Out” and “Personal and Political”
Thursday, October 6
Assignment 1: Identification. By now you need to have selected the manuscript you intend to
work on this semester. You are going to be spending a lot of time with this manuscript so be
sure that you choose well, that you have found something that you feel confident will hold your
interest. Write a brief account of what draws you to this document, what about it attracts you.
Then provide a physical description of this manuscript, what kind of object is it? Write as
detailed an account of its physical characteristics as you can. (4 pages)
Turn in your assignment on our course website by Wednesday at 4pm
Discuss Identification Assignments (in preparation please read each other’s papers)
Fall Break
Thursday, October 13
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal intro xiii-xxiii, 3-24, 31-59, 71-84
Tuesday, October 18
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 105-174
Sharon Cameron, “The Journal against Walden: a Preliminary Perspective,” Writing
Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 3-26 (e-reserves)
Thursday, October 20
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal lets each design our own reading strategies for
engaging with—grazing in—this book. You may also want to consult:
www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/writings_journals.html
5
Unpublished Novels
Tuesday, October 25
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977) 142-148 (e-reserves)
Michel Foucault “What is an Author?” Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979) 141-160 (e-reserves)
Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, introduction and chapters 1-8
Thursday, October 27
Class visit by Christopher Hager to talk about working with slave manuscripts
Assignment 2: Historical Context. What have you been able to discover about the context that
produced this manuscript? Biographical information about the author, information about social
or political context, literary history, all offer possible areas of research; in short you should
investigate any adjacent facts that can help you to understand what is a stake in the production of
this particular text. What occasioned this act of writing? What can you discover about the milieu
that surrounded the creation of this manuscript? What are its political or social ramifications?
Your paper should include a discussion of your manuscript. What does this context help you to
understand? (5-10 pages depending on how much you have to tell)
Tuesday, November 1
Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, chapters 9-21
Thursday, November 3
Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Handout)
Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, section 1
Tuesday, November 8
Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, sections 2 and 3
Thursday, November 10
Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite
Ernest Hemingway, Garden of Eden Book 1
John Updike, “The Sinister Sex,” The New Yorker, June 30, 1986: 85-88
Tom Jenks, “Editing Hemingway: The Garden of Eden” The Hemingway Review (Fall
1987) 30-33
Tuesday, November 15
Ernest Hemingway, Garden of Eden Books 2 and 3
Thursday, November 17
Ernest Hemingway, Garden of Eden Book 4
Robert E. Fleming, “The Endings of Hemingway’s Garden of Eden,” American
Literature (May 1989) 261-270 (e-reserves)
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Tuesday, November 29
Assignment 3: Genre. Compare your manuscript with other texts of a similar genre from the
same period. What do you know about this literary form? How much does your document
conform to literary conventions? How does it differ? What does this comparison tell you about
this particular text? Your paper should contain specific references to traits of your manuscript;
that is your discussion of genre should help you to read this text and your paper should include a
close literary analysis of a few short passages from your manuscript. Turn in on the course
website by Monday at 4pm. (5 pages)
In class discussion of Assignment 3 (in preparation please read each other’s papers)
Poetic Process
Thursday, December 1
Sylvia Plath, Ariel the Restored Edition
Tuesday, December 6
Sylvia Plath, Ariel the Restored Edition
Thursday, December 8
Visit to Smith College Archives and Special Collections
Sylvia Plath, Ariel the Restored Edition
Tuesday, December 13
Endings
Final Paper due Monday December 19th: Imagine that you are bringing out an edition of your
manuscript and write the introduction to that edition. You should draw on all your previous
assignments and I expect that they will prove very useful for this project. But your final paper
should not simply be a consecutive assemblage of these assignments. Instead you need to write a
piece that melds the textual and contextual information you have amassed about your manuscript
with literary analysis to provide an account of what matters about this material and why it is
worth reading. Turn in a paper copy to my box in Johnson Chapel. Please provide an address
letting me know where you would like me to return your papers.
(15 pages)