Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution du numéro 1 de Transatlantica consacré à la notion de fluidité textuelle en poésie américaine, dirigé par Juliette Utard, Aurore Clavier et Gwen Le Cor :
Textual Fluidity, or Why We Need to Acknowledge Poetry Books in Multiple Versions
-
Edited by Juliette Utard, Gwen Le Cor, and Aurore Clavier
-
All poetry collections exist in multiple, often strikingly different, versions. Leaves of Grass, whose cover illustrates the present issue, is a case in point: apart from its title, the author’s name, and a portion of lines and phrases, very little has been left unchanged from the first print edition of 1855 (a thin quarto containing only twelve untitled poems lavishly punctured by ellipses) to the dramatically expanded “deathbed” edition of 1891-1892 (almost four hundred poems long) often viewed as the definitive, if not final, authorial version—not to mention the five separate versions in between. So, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about Leaves of Grass? Given the extraordinary extent of the author’s interventions, it is truly a wonder that we should even think of these radically distinct versions as just one book. The truth is that the title now serves as an umbrella term for so many different volumes of poetry that placing them side by side—the slim and the hefty, the oversized alongside the portable, the paperbound and the hardcover, the UK- and US-produced, print and screen, green and brown, abundantly annotated and scribble-free—one must altogether relinquish the myth of a “definitive,” “final” or “authoritative” edition and embrace the textual fluidity of those ever-shifting leaves. […]
-
Juliette Utard
-
Heather Cass White
-
Michelle Alexis Taylor
-
Diane Drouin
-
Bart Eeckhout
-
Isabelle Alfandary
-
Julie Blake
-
Chloé Thomas
-
John K. Young
-
