1The four contributions gathered in the present Volume 19 of Variants are part of the contributions that made the Genesis conference, convened in 2023 in Taipei, possible. It is perhaps not unimportant (and hopefully significant and relevant) to dwell briefly on the contexts that both speak to the general theme of the conference and some of the motifs of the papers.
2Braving faults of selectiveness and seeing a constellation where there are little more than scattered dots, I wish to insert a personal note into what follows. In retrospect, what started in the 2010s as a pressing need to unravel the manuscript materials of a modern Taiwanese author led me, in stages and via detours, to my first encounters with genetic criticism and ultimately to the Genesis conference in Oxford that was originally planned for 2021. Of course, Genesis needed to be postponed by a year, and when it did take place I was only able to attend virtually due to domestic COVID-19 restrictions. As it turns out, physical circumstances, historical junctures, and virtuality did come to play a part in the years to come, particularly in connection with the Genesis conferences. For example, in their introduction to Issues 17-18 of Variants, Dirk Van Hulle and Olga Beloborodova elaborated on how marginalia, situated between endogenetic operations and exogenetic or epigenetic activities, can serve as a test case for a further examination of genetic criticism and its linkage with textual scholarship (Beloborodova and Van Hulle 2024, viii). Due to this consideration, 2022 saw the back-to-back conference of Genesis and ESTS. To a degree, the need to retrace, revise, and rethink has always been a key issue in the study of the creative process, and this applies to the 2022 Genesis conference in Oxford, especially with its aim of extending while contemplating connections. With this in mind, Genesis 2023 in Taipei seems to be taking part in that inflexion, planned and unplanned: the Covid crisis, which forced a pause of the conference in 2021, created a warp in the usual biannual rhythm from its inaugural Helsinki conference, and this pause and warp have allowed the possibility of inserting an additional conference that would convene in Asia for the first time no less.
3Looking back and looking from the vantage point of recent publications such as A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe, edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle, to name just one, the choice of the conference theme, “The Draft and Its Environs”, is part of the trend or the evolution of the study of the creative process felt by ever wider circles. In its initial formulation, I have tried to maximize participation by making the theme as inclusive as possible, and, therefore, the subtitle of “From the Writer’s Desk to the Desktop” reflects that practical intention and acute awareness of the emergent phenomenon of technology; in addition to the material environ in which the creative event finds itself, historical and technological environments should also be considered. In this broader environmental and historical sense, Vagata’s contribution to the present volume, “On a Sketch of the Gulf of Naples. Considerations on the Mythological System of Ugo Foscolo's Inni alle Grazie”, situates the author’s incomplete work-in-progress in relation to its epigenetic, archival, as well as mythological, if not art-historical and archaeological, surroundings or “synchronicities”. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how in situ creative events are in constant dialogue and debate with their legacy, as well as the historical context, and all this testifies to the persistent importance of history, or comparative history, as defined in the above-mentioned edited volume.
- 1 See, for example, Ferrer’s “Memories of the Context: The Clementis Effect (or Hat-Trick)” where he (...)
4Using the environment or semiosphere as a point of departure for the conference, issues such as theoretical, historical, and intermedia contexts in which specific creative events occur can all be explored. In this sense, Daniel Ferrer’s “Elusive Environments: De-Contextualization and Re-Contextualization” addresses the general theme by emphasising the enabling, yet unexpected, potentiality of context and reminding us, through architectural examples, that its indelible traces remain, despite textualization. Ferrer’s piece takes us on an art-historical journey back into the Romanesque and Gothic architecture works to remind us viscerally and visually how contextual and exogenetic perturbations have a way of diffusing themselves throughout the creative process and become infused within the fabric (and more manifestly on the walls and spires) of the end-product. At the same time, and more importantly, traces of the contextual-to-textual transformations remain, which can best be understood as “memories of context”, a concept Ferrer has dwelt upon both in this piece and other places in greater detail.1 Similarly, in their introductions to Variants 17–18 and A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe, Beloborodova and Van Hulle have laid out how a comparative and historical approach to the study of creative materials would accompany the next steps of genetic criticism in such fields as non-textual creative events, the editorial and the revision interventions, and, finally, the born-digital era’s creative production, to name just a few (Beloborodova and Van Hulle 2024, ix; Van Hulle 2024b, 4–9).
5Indeed, the next challenge for the study of manuscripts is both retrospective and forward-looking. As pointed out by Beloborodova and Van Hulle, digital and internet production, distribution, and recording conditions remind us to reflect on the changing trope of the author and its genetic, historical, historiographical, and comparative significance. In this context, Vagata’s “On a Sketch of the Gulf of Naples” is not only a piece that focuses on the quintessential avant-texte but also clarifies the past and future ramifications of the editorial intervention in the making (or unmaking) of the work. Interestingly, the changing role of the author as an editor of their own drafts relates to Franz Johannson’s “Ventures Towards an Authorial Avant-Texte: From Print to Digital Environment”, which deals with drafts in a born-digital era and their historical precedents. The genre of “authorial avant-texte” proposed by Johannson is used to shed light on the intentional dissemination and curation of the author’s own creative traces, in contrast to the earlier conceptualisation of avant-texte as a product of critical a posteriori intervention.
6What happens in the object of genetic criticism, i.e., the relationship between the author and their creative material and virtual legacy, as examined by Vagata and Johannson, reflects the persistent theoretical issue of modeling or remodeling. Beloborodova and Van Hulle’s edited volume (or volumes, if we include Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative across Versions; Van Hulle 2024a) is one of the key examples. Van Hulle’s contribution to the present issue continues the vision and provides specific cases of marginalia and personal libraries, allowing the sole focus on “author-as-writer” to be rethought and the perspective of “author-as-reader” to be considered. The exogenesis vs. endogenesis distinction is invoked and challenged, just as it was extended in Ferrer’s article, in terms of external influence, context, and the memory of context more generally. By taking a further look at the writer’s marginalia, Van Hulle hopes to think beyond the “definitional limits” of the founding concepts of genetic criticism.
- 2 In his seminal essay “Does ‘Text’ Exist?”, Hay encourages us to “consider the text as a necessary p (...)
7Finally, the questions of the historical context and comparative perspective, the two most recent reflections within the general inventiveness and self-reflexivity of genetic criticism, take us back to my personal note on the combination of historical and material circumstances that give rise to Genesis 2023. In the introduction to A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe, the editors remind the reader that although North American and postcolonial works are included, the book nevertheless focuses on European languages (Beloborodova and Van Hulle 2024, ix). I cannot help but wonder whether the historical impossibility of 2021 may have provided an unintentionally timely “necessary possibility”, to stretch Louis Hay’s phrase somewhat.2 A conference in Asia, held a year after Oxford, has given rise to the call for further genetic study, especially one that is inspired by a comparative historical perspective of creative events beyond the limits of European languages.