An unexpected recurrence across my classes this semester has been a continuous discussion about how things come to be. Whether this is material or metaphorical, it bears surprising relevance when thinking about (you guessed it) context. In one of my classes, the content of a text is distinguished between the \u201cverbal work\u201d and the \u201cmaterial work\u201d; the verbal work being the concept and existence of a body of work inside its creator\u2019s mind, and the material work being every step of the physical production of said text.<\/p>\n
What is so significant about the material work is that every step along the way to produce a physical copy is influenced by the possibility of error, human or otherwise. Even in modern book production there is a margin for error, and book printing in the past was subject to even more so. The manuscript passed through so many hands just to print words on paper, not to mention the work of binding those pages together. Perhaps there is a typo somewhere \u2013 or perhaps where the text is being produced is undergoing the unfortunate influence of censorship, muddling the \u201cintent\u201d of the author. I use quotes around intent here to acknowledge that there is no way of knowing, when considering texts, the specific intent behind content.<\/p>\n
Toni Morrison touches upon this in Playing in the Dark<\/em>, where she delves into an in-depth and heart-wrenchingly philosophical analysis of author biases. Whether subconscious or conscious, the \u201cverbal work\u201d is influenced by the sociocultural environment of the time. Whether this is through racialized language or other hierarchical values, these influences present, along with the fluctuating content of the material work, a greater contextual insight into broader contexts beyond the pages of the text itself.<\/p>\n Consider Ulysses<\/em>: the process Joyce went through to transcribe the \u201cverbal work\u201d into the meticulously edited and revised versions of the \u201cmaterial work\u201d was Herculean (don\u2019t let Joyce know I think that). Part of the trials Joyce went through for Ulysses<\/em> was due to censorship laws; others due to his physical health (which can in part be considered a \u201chuman error\u201d influencing the material work). Take into account more ancient works like The Odyssey <\/em>or The Iliad<\/em>, which were originally entirely verbal performances. Although the time and quantity of recitations could have deviated the material from its original \u201cverbal work\u201d, transcribing these epics into versions of their \u201cmaterial works\u201d surely subjected to them to all manner of errors; additionally, every translated edition contains slight variations that can impact the way a text is consumed. The ways that things are made, and specifically the context the making of things offers when trying to understand a work to the fullest, fascinates me thoroughly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An unexpected recurrence across my classes this semester has been a continuous discussion about how things come to be. Whether this is material or metaphorical, it bears surprising relevance when thinking about (you guessed it) context. In one of my classes, the content of a text is distinguished between the \u201cverbal work\u201d and the \u201cmaterial … Continue reading The Making of Things<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5320"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}