Department of English

• Monday, April 22, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We will be welcoming Michael Suarez for a talk entitled: “Annotation, Editing, and the Material Text: The Case of Alexander Pope and His Contemporaries.” Michael writes:

 When is contemporary annotation part of the material text? And when is this type of textual intervention best considered as a form of extra-textual scholium? Alexander Pope's Dunciad Variorum (1729) marvelously complicates the relationship between text and annotation, as do the catena of manuscript annotations and published 'keys' that ensue from the 1728 Dunciad and its sequent editions. How is the modern scholarly editor to account for the richness and complexity of such textual histories, in this and other Popean productions, such as his 1735 Works? Working as a General Editor of the Collected Writings of Alexander Pope now in progress in 24 quarto volumes from OUP, and co-editor of the Dunciad volumes in this edition, I will consider these and related questions, drawing examples from manuscripts, printed texts, annotated printed books, and proof copies. How do questions of the evolving material text materially affect the histories that authors and editors construct of textual production and reception? And how might we best account for those instances when authors introduce the material evidences of reading and reception into later productions of the material text (which, in turn, generate new occasions of reception)?  

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is University Professor and Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. 

All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.