Author as Editor and Editor as Author

The 15th International Conference for the European Society for Textual Scholarship, to be held in Prague on 15th–17th November 2018, will address the topic of “Author as Editor, Editor as Author”.

This year᾽s twofold theme follows up on the agenda of ESTS 2017 (“Editorial Degrees of Intervention”): firstly, by taking the idea of editorial interventions down the imaginary cline towards its far end where editors become authors, and secondly, to strike a thematic balance, by proposing to look into various aspects of a contrastive configuration – of texts edited by their authors. What conditions – such as pressures of ideology, historical-cultural context, urge to interpret or requirements of authenticity – turn editors into authors? And how do we tell the editors – with their complex duties of a scribe, a compiler, a commentator – from the authors? How does this “crossover” bear on these newly-born authors᾽ editorial practices? What circumstances bring authors to start editing their own texts? What are the principal features of this type of editorial process and its final product?

More specifically, papers to be delivered will address a range of topics including:

the author᾽s voice and the editor᾽s voice: authenticity, interpretation and identity; editors trespassing on authorial land: textual variants and degrees of intervention; authors as editors: challenges and caveats; editors as authors versus facts of language and philology; authors᾽ associates as editors; fluid text and open text in the hands of editors and authors; aesthetics of variance; tradition and the individual talent revisited: cultural, social and historical meanings and contexts of the figure of the author; readersʼ and community perceptions and constructions of the author-editor continuum; digital re-editing: digitization of published edited text; textology and Prague functional-structural tradition.

Other topics – of a related or more general nature with which ESTS conferences traditionally engage – will feature:

medieval manuscript culture (scribal alterations as editorial/authorial, typologies of interventions, communities of interpretation, etc.),
digital versus printed editions, the target audience, selection of texts worth editing, scholarly editions, and others.
Keynotes:

Jonas Wellendorf (University of California): Editing and Authoring Medieval Scandinavian Poetry

Igor Pilshchikov (Talinn University): Russian Formalist and Post-Formalist Approaches to Textual Scholarship

Michael van Dussen (McGill University): Authoritative Reading in Late Medieval Oxford

Marjorie Burghart (Université Lyon): The Preacher’s Kaleidoscope: a Digital Approach to Authorship, Invention and Reuse in /Materia Praedicabilis/ (13th-15th c.)