디킨슨의 원전(原典)과 시각성

Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts and Visuality

My essay is a reassessment of current critical debates on Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts. Manuscript critics have argued for the visual aspect of the poet’s autographs, seeking to domesticate her within modernist paradigm of graphic innovation. While forgrounding the optical over the metrical, they criticize the first generation of editors who sought to regularize Dickinson within nineteenth-century cultural modalities of grammar, meter, and sound. However, most of her forms appear to have been sound related rather than visual: she wrote very often in hymn forms, and both meter and rhyme were primary structural elements in her process of composition. In addition, her original texts are not fully deliberate, depending on various accidental circumstances and procedures external to the text. Therefore, I promote an extensive study on the material indications of the drafts, her writing practices, her contemporary literary convention and readership as well as manuscript design to find out a reliable and sufficiently authoritative editorial version for critical and pedagogical purposes.