Revising the Self: textual composition and reformulations of the subject within the Modernist era.

朱莉娅·克里斯特娃写于1992年，根据她的说法，我们仍然没有一门“写作科学”。写作往往是一种私人行为，其痕迹很容易被根除。此外，任何这类科学都会受到“观察者悖论”的损害，在这种悖论中，观察的行为改变了观察到的事物；写作主体本身对写作的任何描述都是值得怀疑的，因为描述的行为将影响整个过程。在文学文本的生产中尤其如此，因为除了极少数例外，它们不像复制的法律文件或通过口述产生的文本那样机械地生产。这并不妨碍作家使用引人入胜和极端的隐喻来描述写作过程。但是，这种描述虽然在许多方面揭示了情况，但很少清楚或全面地描述所涉及的实际过程/无论是在详细的微观层面(即在文字和字母的改变方面)还是在一般的“宏观”层面(即与出版商谈判合同的层面)。对这些过程的任何重建都需要仔细检查材料本身，以限定和增强我们对某人写文学文本时发生的事情的感觉。现代文学手稿档案的不断增长使写作科学的可能性，或者至少它的一个分支的发展，变得更有可能，这些档案被更广泛地提供，无论是抄本、照相还是数字化。文学手稿一直是学术研究的素材，但主要是作为一种手段，使新的或被遗忘的文本可用，或对现有文本的权威进行资格认证。也就是说，它们很少本身就是研究的对象，或者被解读为某些写作行为的见证者，这些行为可以结合在一起，并被描述为一个过程。对这一过程的描述在一定程度上是最近一个学派的研究成果，该学派被称为“基因批评”。这一学派特别关注现代主义时代，因为修改后的手稿过多。这些手稿仍在等待一系列方法，以推进对其意义的分析。一种遗传学批评是在考察自传体作品的写作和修改时运用精神分析理论。这有助于--字面上--处理自我及其表征的“构造本质”的感觉。我的工作在一定程度上就是从这个发展而来的。有人认为，自我受到了写作行为的质疑(福楼拜、佩特、乔伊斯、艾略特、叶芝、伍尔夫和巴特等自我反省的作家都有不同的说法)。如果是这样的话，我认为，写作的特殊过程很可能会影响自我被质疑的特殊方式，并被其反映出来。假说和争论都将被检验。因此，这项研究将为一个更广泛的问题提供一个特殊的角度：形成在多大程度上与内容有关。我还看到我的研究为其他两个学术领域搭建了桥梁。首先，在最近的《书史》著作中，文学形式的历史往往与促成它形成的物质环境有关。我的作品研究了写作瞬间的细节，询问这种方法中的决定论是否可以延伸到写作层面，或者对字母的控制是否恰恰是产生自主感/或其幻觉的地方。其次，我的工作旨在与最近关于现代主义历史的作品联系起来，既有物质的，也有知识的，展示了现代主义领域研究的新可能性。总的来说，我的工作旨在产生一套新的方法论，并将当代批评和学术的各种线索结合在一起，以新的方式将一套令人兴奋的资源带入生活，这些资源刚刚开始受到理所当然的更广泛的关注。

According to Julia Kristeva, writing in 1992, we still do not have a 'science of writing'. Writing is often a private act, its traces easily eradicated. Moreover any such science is compromised by the 'observer's paradox', where the act of observation transforms the thing observed; any account of writing by the writing subject themselves is doubtful since the act of describing will affect the very process. This is especially true in the production of literary texts because they are, with rare exceptions, not produced as mechanically as, say, copied legal documents or texts produced by dictation. This does not prevent writers from describing the process of composition with recourse to fascinating and extreme metaphors. But such descriptions, though revealing in many ways, rarely give a clear or full picture of the actual processes involved / whether at a detailed microscopic level (i.e. in the alteration of words and letters) or a general 'macroscopic' one (i.e. where contracts with publishers are negotiated). Any reconstruction of these processes needs to examine the materials themselves carefully to qualify and enhance our sense of what is happening when someone is writing a literary text.The possibility of a science of writing, or at least the development of a branch of it, is made a little more likely by the growing archives of modern literary manuscripts and these archives being made more widely available, whether transcribed, photostated or digitized. Literary manuscripts have always been material for scholarly research but mostly as a means for making a new or forgotten text available, or for qualifying the authority of an existing text. That is, they are rarely objects of study in their own right or read as witnesses of certain acts of writing that can be joined together and described as a process. Descriptions of this process partly form the work of a recent school of scholarship called 'genetic criticism'. This school looks in particular at the Modernist era because of the plethora of revised manuscripts. These manuscripts still await a range of methodologies for advancing analyses of their significance. One kind of genetic criticism deploys psychoanalytic theory when it examines the composition and revision of, in particular, autobiographical work. This helps deal - literally - with the sense of the 'constructed nature' of the self and its representations. My work grows partly out of this. It has been argued that the self is put into question by the acts of writing (said differently by such self-reflective writers as Flaubert, Pater, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Woolf and Barthes). If this is so then, I contend, the particular processes of writing are likely to affect and be reflected by the particular ways in which the self is questioned. Both the hypothesis and contention will be examined. The study will thus provide a particular angle on a broader issue: how far formation relates to content. I also see my research building bridges towards two other fields of scholarship. Firstly, in recent work on the History of the Book, the history of literary form is often related to the material circumstances that helped form it. My work, examining the minutiae of writing moments, asks whether the determinism in this approach can be extended down to the level of composition or whether the control over letters is precisely where a sense of autonomy / or its illusion - is engendered. Secondly, my work aims to connect with recent work on histories of modernism, both 'material' and 'intellectual', showing new possibilities for research in the field of Modernism. In general, my work aims to generate a new set of methodologies and bring together various strands in contemporary criticism and scholarship that will bring to life in new ways an exciting set of resources that are just beginning to come to a deservedly more widespread attention.