Roger Chartier, 'The Author's Hand: Literary Archives, Authorship, and Editing'

IPLAI Visiting Scholar, Professor Roger Chartier, will give a public lecture on 'The Author's Hand: Literary Archives, Authorship, and Editing'.  All are welcome.

Professor Chartier is Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and Professeur, College de France.

'The Author's Hand'

The starting point of the reflection is the first sentence that defines the aim of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: "The archives aims to collect, catalogue and process all kinds of documents connected with modern German literature (from 1750 up to the present day)". Why 1750?

The answer could be a very simple one: the modern literary archives collect and preserve documents that were not taken into consideration by traditional archives previously. They save a precious patrimony of modern records and papers that was ignored by national or regional archives and preserved instead by publishers or writers. The date of 1750 remains intriguing, however, because it raises another issue: would it have been possible to build literary archives for early modern times? Records of publishers and printers of the first three centuries after Gutenberg’s invention are really exceptional, as are authors’ manuscripts. Why? And why since the mid-eighteenth century were authorial autograph manuscripts kept and preserved? This fact makes evident that the constitution of literary archives cannot be separated from the construction of philosophical, aesthetic and juridical categories that defined a new regime for the composition, publication, and appropriation of texts. Such a fact has fundamental consequences: the author’s hand became the guarantee of the authenticity of his works and forging autograph manuscripts became an art of the time; the presence of abundant literary archives made more complex the delimitation of the "œuvre" itself and allowed multiple textual manipulations, and, finally, the existence of literary archives and the conceptual configuration that made them possible or necessary established a new relation relation between the author’s work and the writer’s life. The lecture would like to examine such issues that are decisive for editorial practices, literary biography, and the definition of "literature" itself.