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... Since the poets death in 1886, printing after printing of Dickinsons poems and letters has been produced, the most "authoritative" of which are now beginning to foreground photographic reproductions (see R. ... These photographic reproductions reveal the importance of Dickinsons handwritten experimentations in punctuation, lineation, and calligraphic orthography. Readers can see for themselves that Dickinsons punctuation signs more closely resemble rhetorical notation marks that angle up and down or curve than the en- and em- typographical dashes into which they have translated; that she often broke her lines mid-syllable or in other unexpected places rather than according to the tetrameter, trimeter, dimeter conventions of the hymnal stanza and poetic quatrain (conventions shored up by the regularization of print and the concomitant presumptions of editors); and that her calligraphic orthography often featured such sportive details as eyes that look back at the reader in the "es" in "seen" and "es" in "feet" that look like spread toes (see second stanza of "A narrow Fellow in / the Grass" [P 986; H B 193 copy to Sue])1 Other photographic representations show that Dickinson illustrated some writings with her own drawings and also experimented with mixed media layouts by scissoring illustrations from books in the family library and attaching them to poems she presented to friends.2 Somewhat ironically then, advances in the technologies of these ever-changing material reproductions demonstrate what the poet herself avers about the limitations of the medium when explaining to Thomas Higginson that she is not publishing her work in the conventional way. ... So we formed a Dickinson Editing Collective, the primary purpose of which is to discuss the many (and proliferating) formidable issues that confront anyone editing (or reading an edition of ) Dickinsons writings, whether or not that particular editor or reader is conscious of those challenges. The Collective has concluded that, in addition to the new variorum being prepared by Franklin, a hypermedia archive of her writings should be produced in order to take into account her method of publication and more fully disseminate the range of her manuscript art and poetic experimentation to her readers.
In such an archive, photographic reproductions and publication histories of all Dickinson documents could be made available to scholars, who could in turn directly engage and more thoroughly analyze problems of translating her texts into print. In hypermedia, texts are electronically stored and managed, and textual space radically reimagined. ... Readers can, therefore, compare Dickinsons holograph of a poem, letter, or letter-poem with the various typographical translations of it by Thomas Johnson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas W. ... (Since the Archive is perpetually expandable, we hope to include even representations in popular culture of this beloved poets work.) By making photographic representations of all of Dickinsons holographs available (not just of the fascicles and "Master" letters), readers can see for themselves how Dickinson integrated poetry into her prose and thus how the indentations of poems within letters in the Johnson and Wards The Letters of Emily Dickinson are editorial impositions and not part of Dickinsons technique. Readers can also decide for themselves whether or not the typographical en- or em-dash represents Dickinsons punctuation marks or is in fact another editorial imposition. And readers can decide for themselves whether dividing Dickinsons writings into two distinct genres -- poems and letters -- best represents her creative practices. ... The archive itself will call attention to problems that inhere in its representation of Dickinsons texts in electronic forms. ...
Thus the Archive will be a valuable resource for exploring theoretical implications of the structures of Dickinsons texts (both individual documents and the organization of their relationships to one another) which will contribute to textual studies in general. Even more ironic than the fact that photographic reproduction in the print medium (Manuscript Books) has revealed the importance of Dickinsons handwritten experimentations in punctuation, lineation, calligraphic orthography, and mixed media layouts is the fact that technological advancements in electronic reproduction will enable in-depth scrutiny of the impact of the following for critical understanding of her holographic production and dissemination techniques -- ideologies of generic organization of her writings into "poems" and "letters" on interpretation; characteristics determining what makes a Dickinson poem and what counts as literature in the Dickinson canon; criteria of how that literature might best be presented to her vast and varied audiences; conclusions about what counts as a page in her scene of writing.
Approximate Word count = 3169
Approximate Pages = 12.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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