Just another WordPress.com weblog

‘Through contemporary artists’ practice, this conference examines the role and influence of the peripheral and the marginal on art production and the framework in which it’s received. Speakers include writer, lecturer and researcher Maeve Connolly, writer Brian Dillon [see Ruins, MIT press, In the Dark Room 2005],  Sean Dockray, artist, writer, curator Richard Grayson, Caleb Kelly and Jennifer Thatcher.’ Ref: Whitechapel Art Gallery

Marginalia fall under the wider category of ancient practice of scholia; extra notes, scribbles and comments made by readers in the margin of a book. Categories of marginalia include Emendation (correction), Transcription, Glosses or Annotation – the formal method of embellishing a literary work with critical commentary i.e to gloss a text, Rubrics (like Scholia & glosses these are ‘structural marginalia’, meant to be read),  Footnotes & Citation, references Dead Media Archive. They represent the active negotiation of a text by a Reader, the meaning lying somewhere between the producer and the receiver in ‘the margin of understanding’. (I have appropriated this term from the Cultural Theorist Stuart Hall, a leading exponent of Reception theory). Stanley Fish, key theorist of Reader Response theory emphasised, among other things, the transaction between the control of the reader by the text and how the reader re/creates a text. This marginal space lies somewhere between the public & the private and can be regarded as a social phenomenon. Marginalia exist both as the conception of serious works in their own right or preparatory drafts for major works including Voltaire’s marginalia on Rousseau, Edgar Allen Poe’s  ‘fragmentary manuscript material’ entitled Marginalia 1845 – 1948 volumes of marginalia by  Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Alsdo relevant, although it constitutes more of a critical commentary, is the famous edit of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland by Ezra Pound which currently forms part of my research on fragmentary writing, artifice and in/direct quotation/citation. For further rumination on the idea of waste in art please visit http://narratingwaste.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/t-s-eliot-and-the-writing-of-waste/.

For all those interested in ancillary operations and the codex please also refer to the narratologist’s Gerard Gennette [Palimpsests, The Work of Art, Intertextuality] Paratexts – Thresholds of Interpretation including Titles, Prefaces, Intertitles, Epigraphs [which is also a form relevant to the fragmentary a la Derrida] etc. This ‘encyclopeadic survey’ analyses their ‘illocutionary force’ [inside cover]. In that respect all of these activities amount to a performativity within/on/to the text. For a contemporary example see Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature, and his marginalia within The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot, whose work had a profound influence on Post Structuralist theory.

Image reproduced from http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/marginalia-ebooks-digital.html