About the workshop
The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic in manuscript cultures is variance in almost any aspect of a text, spanning from language and orthography to structure and content, as well as production and reception processes. Both in historically oriented disciplines (new philology) and in literary studies (genetic criticism), these insights have led to a reevaluation of the manuscript as a fluid text. Cognitive theory, on the other hand, reminds us that the mind is embedded, embodied, enactive and extended (4E cognition), giving us conceptual tools to link the materiality of a manuscript to the creative minds of the agents engaging in various types of writing and reading processes. In this workshop, we invite speakers to discuss textual and material variations in manuscripts, in connection to creativity and cognition.
Invited speakers
- Olga Anokhina, Researcher at l'Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes-ITEM, CNRS
- Dirk van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp
Speakers
- Alexandra Effe, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, UiO
- Stefka G. Eriksen, Research Professor at Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, NIKU
- Alpo Honkapohja, Postdoctoral Fellow in British-American at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, UiO
- Karin Kukkonen, Professor in Comparative literature, UiO
- Hugo Lundhaug, Professor of Biblical Reception and Early Christian Literature, UiO
- Mikael Males, Professor in Medieval Studies, UiO
- Stijn Vervaet, Associate Professor in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies, UiO
- Michelle Waldispühl, Associate Professor in German linguistics and language acquisition at the University of Gothenburg
Programme
9.15–11.00: I – Affordances and Constraints of Materiality
- Dirk van Hulle – "Manuscripts and the Mind: Creativity across Versions and the Pentimenti Principle"
- Karin Kukkonen – "Narrative Proportions: Size and Scale in Manuscripts"
- Michelle Waldispühl – "Creativity in the usage of lists in medieval Libri vitae"
11.00–11.30: Break
11.30–12.30: II – Function and Form
- Hugo Lundhaug – "Adapting the Biblical Storyworld: The Role of Apocrypha in Coptic Egypt"
- Mikael Males – "The Lexemic Theory versus Scribal Creativity: Is There a Middle Ground?"
12.30–13.30: Lunch
13.30–15.30: III – Intra and Interlingual Translations
13.30–14.15
- Olga Anokhina – "Creativity in multiple languages: the study of multilingual writers’ and translators’ drafts"
14.15–14.30: Break
14.30–15.30
- Stijn Vervaet – "Between Invention and Intention: The Poetic Visions and Revisions of Miloš Crnjanski"
- Stefka G. Eriksen – "Creativity on the Oral-Written Continuum: A Survey of Old Norse manuscripts"
15.30–16.00: Break
16.00–17.00: IV – Creativity and Crisis
- Alpo Honkapohja – "Plague on the Page: Variance in Copies of the John of Burgundy Plague Tract in England from the 14th to the 17th Century"
- Alexandra Effe - "Creative Writing as End-of-Life Therapy: Manuscript Revisions for Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End of (2006)"