Historic! ~ ‘Hits’ and ‘Lits’ to Meet in Chicago—and ADE Will Be There

This year, for the first time, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association are meeting simultaneously in Chicago for their annual inter/national conferences. If you’ll be in the warm city of Chicago the first weekend of January, please attend the ADE-sponsored panel that is part of MLA each year. Our session, “Editing for Non-Editors,” addresses the questions, “Why should non-editors understand scholarly editing, what should they know, and how can they learn it?” It is offered in conjunction with MLA’s 2019 Presidential Theme, “Textual Transactions.”

Both organizations will allow mutual recognition of registration badges for sessions and the book exhibits. So we welcome anyone, whether a “hit” or “lit,” editor or non-editor, to join our session. Specifics of time and location will be announced in early September.

Our presenters are:

Rebecca Olson of Oregon State University, on “‘Our toil shall strive to mend’: What Student Editors Teach Us About Scholarly Editing.” She will discuss what undergraduate students learned about editing by putting together their own edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from available texts.

Heidi Gabrielle Nobles of Texas Christian University, on “Where Texts Come From: Recovering Editorial Theory and Praxis to Enrich Literary and Textual Scholarship.” She will examine the three major strands of editorial praxis—critical, process (developmental/substantive/copy), and revisionist—and put them into a context that enriches contemporary editorial activity.

Clayton McCarl of the University of North Florida, on “Destroying the World through Reading: Dangers of Editorial Practice.” He will highlight aspects of editorial work largely invisible to readers but that may undermine our assumptions about truth, textual or otherwise: G. Thomas Tanselle’s concept of “errors of external fact,” source criticism, and semantic markup. The idea is to make visible to non-editors the complexity and relevance of editorial practice, particularly in today’s digital world.

— Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, ADE Liaison to Modern Language Association and American Literature Association