It hasn’t been all big balls of twine and water lilies and orchestra performances* around here lately, although it would be easy to get that impression. I’ve been teaching two nights per week, rummaging around in the diss research in the mornings, and I was at SHARP last week to talk about my new research on Chambers. I’m glad to have gone, since it gave me chance to discuss one of the central arguments of my dissertation: that the Encyclopedic Author is a distinct construct from the more typically-discussed Poetic Author. Generally, when we talk about authorship studies we’re talking about the Author who writes novels or poems. We spend quite a bit of time thinking about sources of inspiration for these genres, whether they’re the Hellenic notion of external, spiritual sources, or the Romantic idea of inspiration from internal, personal genius. When we talk about what an author is and if they’re dead, we usually mean this sort of author.

My argument is that the Encyclopedic Author deserves consideration because of his function as a textual curator. What does it mean when your central mode of composition is to collect a bunch of other texts, determine their quality, splice the best information from them together with the latest data, and transform it into a new text? What does this say about authorial agency and authority? Where does it leave inspiration? Additionally, we have to deal with the question of whether or not human knowledge is beyond ownership and the idea of the encyclopedist as someone who both draws from and contributes to an intellectual commons.

I was more nervous than usual beforehand, since my audience was primarily 18c lit specialists and I’m not one of those. It was a little odd to be back among the conventions of Lit culture — everyone was dressed more formally than folks would be at a Rhetoric conference, and everyone was introduced as Dr. or Prof. rather than by their first names. They were a good time, though: pleasant and supportive, particularly during the Q&A session. I got a tentative offer of publication for the piece, which has me rather excited. And it means that I can’t slack off on writing for the rest of the summer, which is helpful because I’m a girl who needs an impetus. Finishing is a good one, of course, but an article seems so much more immediate.

*I never got around to writing about that last one, but the short version is this: if you ever get a chance to see Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June performed live, don’t turn it down. It’s one incredibly eerie cello surrounded by four percussionists, each playing at least six instruments. I counted two xylophones, a full set of chimes, gongs, bells, a full timpani array, bongos, snares, and athletic whistles. And paper to be torn, and other things I’m forgetting. It sounds all messy and pomo, but it’s actually very measured and beautiful.