To register, please contact by 7 April 2025 Thomas Mohnike (tmohnike[at]unistra.fr) & Marie-Sophie Winter (marie-sophie.winter[at]u-picardie.fr)
Worshop in english
In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes four eras from the perspective of mediality: the tribal age marked by oral, non-literate culture; the manuscript age; the age of print; finally the electronic age. From the point of view of textuality, the notion of instability is a constant in tradition and transmission throughout all these eras, albeit in different forms. The culture of the manuscript in the medieval period is marked as much by the ‘mouvance’ (Paul Zumthor) induced by the interaction between orality and scripturality, as by the ‘variance’ (Bernard Cerquiglini) inseparable from manuscript transmission: textuality is shaped by a constant process known as ‘rewriting’ or ‘rewording’. While the advent of printing from movable type seems to have fixed the text, in reality it remains subject to the variations brought about not only by authors, but also by publishers, printers, proofreaders and censors: Roger Chartier has clearly shown this for the Early Modern Age, while emphasising that in addition to the variation in the text itself, there is also the instability brought about by the physical devices used to present the book, its format, layout and illustrations. The introduction of copyright, first in England with the Statute of Anne of 1710, not only established the authorship of texts, but also protected them against unauthorised re-appropriations and variations. But, far from freezing the text, it must rather protect it in its different authorised versions, its different states – printed states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then other states resulting from transmedial transformations. Finally, according to Robert Darnton, “textual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.” So what is the situation in the digital era? By freeing the text from its material support, from the straitjacket of the page and the book, and by reopening the question of copyright in the context of collaborative productions, doesn't the latter reveal the fundamental instability of the text? The digital medium also reveals its lability when we think of the question of the obsolescence/durability of the digital medium. But it makes it possible to visualise the text in all its diversity and variation and opens up the possibility of infinite change...
The idea of the workshop is to show from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective, based on the work of doctoral students, to what extent the notion of textual instability is relevant and productive in their field of research.
Selective bibliography:
Adam, Jean-Michel. 2020. "Variantes, versions, variance et variation: quatre désignations d’une propriété constitutive des textes littéraires". In: Littérature 197: 81 –98.
Bucher, André, Sabel, Barbara (eds.). 2001. "Der unfeste Text: Perspektiven auf einen literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Leitbegriff"(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann).
Bumke, Joachim. 1996. "Der unfeste Text. Überlegungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte und Textkritik der höfischen Epik im 13. Jahrhundert". In: Jan-Dirk Müller (ed.), >Aufführung< und >Schrift< in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Germanistische Symposien. Berichtsbände 17 (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzger): 118–129.
Cerquiglini, Bernard. 1989. Éloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil).
Chartier, Roger. 2021. Éditer et traduire. Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle). Hautes études (Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, Seuil).
Darnton, Robert. 2008. "The Research Library in the Digital Age". In: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 61: 9–15.
Glauser, Jürg, Sabel, Barbara (eds.). 2004. Text und Zeit. Wiederholung, Variante und Serie als Konstituenten literarischer Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann).
Mahrer, Rudolf, Zufferey, Joël. 2021. "Variance de l’œuvre moderne. De la variante à l’édition numérique". The Balzac Review / Revue Balzac 4: 141–172.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Most, Glenn W. 2024. Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures. Errors, Innovations, Proliferation, Reception? (Berlin: de Gruyter).
Müller, Jan-Dirk. 2023. Varianz – die Nibelungenfragmente. Überlieferung und Poetik des Nibelungenliedes im Übergang von Mündlichkeit zu Schriftlichkeit (Deutsche Literatur. Studien und Quellen 47) (Berlin: de Gruyter).
Pérez Ben, Lorena, Millet, Victor und Fernández Riva, Gustavo. 2024. Textvarianten in der Überlieferung des Iwein Hartmanns von Aue: Analytische Tabelle (Heidelberg: heiBOOKS). https://doi.org/10.11588/heibooks.1401.
Rabot, Cécile, Chartier, Roger. 2020. "De l’imprimé au numérique : une révolution de l’ordre des discours". In: Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods [Online], 7 | 2020, Online since 20 November 2020, connection on 22 February 2025. URL: journals.openedition.org/bssg/478; DOI: doi.org/10.4000/bssg.478.
Zumthor, Paul. 1972. "Anonymat et >mouvance<". In: Essai de poétique médiévale. Poétique (Paris: Seuil).
