ADE has organized a session,  “Editing the I /First-Person Narrative,” for the international Modern Language Association convention in Seattle this week. See below for extended abstracts and presenters’ bios for session 588 at 3:30 p.m. Saturday [January 11th] in the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, WA. If you’re in town, please join us!

Jaime Cleland, MLA Acquisitions Editor

“Then She Took Parts Out”: Settling the Score Between Jade Snow Wong and her Editors”

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiographical Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) was one of the first Asian American literary works to reach a broad audience. When in the 1970s and 1980s Asian American writers and critics looked back to establish a literary heritage, some judged Wong lacking as a suitable ancestor. Their criticisms were based in part on her description of working with her editor at Harper & Bros., Elizabeth Lawrence; in an interview, she stated that Lawrence “went through [the manuscript] and said, ‘ten, twenty, thirty pages, this may be necessary for the writer to write, but it’s not necessary for the reader to read.’ So then she took parts out.” While Wong presented these edits matter-of-factly, as a question of craft, critics such as Frank Chin and Elaine Kim interpreted them to mean that Wong was too willing to submit her own life story for shaping by a white editor who preferred stereotypes to reality.

However, the interview (quoted at length in Chin’s 1974 Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers) never specifies precisely what was cut from Wong’s manuscript at Lawrence’s request, leaving a gap to be filled by speculation. The Jade Snow Wong Collection at the Library of Congress has allowed me to begin to fill in this gap. The archive contains several drafts of Fifth Chinese Daughter, with comments and changes by Wong and several editors, as well as Wong’s correspondence about the book. These materials lead to several conclusions. First, Wong was given typical writing advice – never explicitly asked (at least in the print record) to add exoticism or eliminate critique of the United States. In this sense there is no “smoking gun.” Yet these generic writing tips at times may have had additional, perhaps unintended, consequences when applied to Wong as a Chinese American writer. They arguably downplayed the extent to which she was Americanized and presented a more upbeat story. Finally, Wong was likely not manipulated by her editor, as critics have implied; decades of correspondence show a friendly relationship between Wong and Lawrence, while also portraying an author who was able to make uncompromising demands.

Jaime Cleland earned her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work on Jade Snow Wong’s writing process began as a visiting assistant professor at Ohio University and recipient of the Florence Tan Moeson fellowship at the Library of Congress, and she has published related work in the journal MELUS. Currently an acquisitions editor at the Modern Language Association, she is pleased to be speaking about book editing today.

Michael Humphrey, Colorado State University

“Editing the Digital ‘I’”

As digital texts become resources of historical documentation, key questions arise for editors who edit the ‘I’ of their subjects. What constitutes a coherent online documentation of a life? In media where the texts are meant to interact, what are the parameters for determining the central texts and their paratexts? What to make of the shifting personae that form in dynamic digital “life-in-interaction” (Georgakopoulou)?

Such questions cannot be answered flippantly. What constitutes any digital text, based on these questions, may not simply be defined by the mode of publication. When Luciano Florida refers to the “onlife,” a nearly seamless blending of online and offline interactions that make up human reality, the complications become more clear. Such interactions often produce texts, with varying degrees of intentionality, permanence, and authenticity. Nearly all of these texts are mutable based on a number of “pressures” created by digitality, rendering the assumption that digital life allows for hyper-crafting, and refining, of the self too simplistic. Algorithmic and social pressures to edit toward the norm are immense, and potential audiences range from gullible to cynical in receiving, and revising, the personae that result. Texts pile upon texts, revising the meaning of original posts. To complicate this more, each platform calls for its own set of edits, leading to a multiplicity of selves across the Internet, much like life, but without an easily understood center of gravity for coherence.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate some of these complications through the lens of a YouTube family, and the vicissitudes of its digital life narrative. These texts help examine how digitality atomizes the self and creates both opportunities and challenges for digital communion and future curation.

Michael Humphrey is Assistant Professor of digital storytelling and journalism innovation at the Colorado State University, and a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. His work focuses on the ways life narratives emerge in digital spaces, especially social media. His scholarly work has appeared in Persona Studies, Life Writing, and Interactions and he is currently completing his first book about YouTube family vlogging. His journalism about memoir and memory has appeared in Forbes.com, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker.

Susan L. Greenberg, University of Roehampton

“Testing the First Person Against the World”

In A Poetics of Editing, I argue that every edition of a text is a performance of that text, and the act of editing is an inevitable part of the performance. People use their agency to make decisions, with the motive of making sense of the text and aiding its survival. And so the text changes with every company of players, and every audience.

For this panel, my aim is to compare two sets of players, who are usually considered in distinct and separate contexts and ask –  what can scholarly editors learn from practical editors? What potential exists for shared insights, about the editing role overall and about their specific response to texts that use the first person?

To illustrate some relevant practical editing interventions  I draw on my experience in the classroom, teaching courses in publishing and in nonfiction writing. Creative writing as a discipline asks students to develop skills in self-editing and analyse their practice self-reflexively. Nonfiction narratives pose additional demands on writers to gain distance from their first-person self and test their experience against the world.  The feedback provided by a tutor or supervisor provides an additional level of editorial intervention and advice about strategies to manage the “I” on the page.

Together, the writing class provides a ‘practicum’, a learning space that mirrors the real world, but with added time for reflection. Such a space can demonstrate how editorial problems arise in real time when editing one’s own work – something that the authors of all texts have surely done, documentary or practical, before any editor comes near. And it reminds us of the potential for judgement to serve not as a set of rules, but as a way of connecting different subjectivities.

Susan L. Greenberg is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton and author of A Poetics of Editing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), with a PhD in Publishing from University College London. Previously, she worked as a reporter, writer and editor, and her teaching and research spans both publishing studies and nonfiction writing practice. Greenberg is commissioning editor for a new list on ‘Editors and Editing’ at the CUP, part of a series of short monographs on Publishing and Book Culture.

 — Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, ADE Liaison to MLA