Jurgen Pieters

Information on Speaker

Jurgen Pieters is a professor of literary theory at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Moments of Negotiation: the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam University Press, 2001) and Speaking with the dead: explorations in literature and history (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He is currently supervising a research project on Constantijn Huygens' Ooghentroost, the subject of the present proposal. He is the director of GEMS (Ghent Early Modern Studies).

Abstract

In this paper I would like to explicate the theoretical principles that underlie the electronic hyper-text edition of Constantijn Huygens' Ooghentroost. The governing idea behind the project is the hypothesis, formulated by Jerome McGann, that new technologies of textual presentation may enable us to derive a clearer understanding of traditional, early-modern notions and practices of textuality. Huygens' text presents itself as a true mosaic of citations, to borrow Kristeva's famous phrase.

Kristeva's metaphor, however, fails to appreciate the text's continued potential to develop and transform itself, 'auto-poetically' as McGann would have it. At first sight, the marginal citations that accompany some of the main text's lines, seem to function as unidirectional markers of intertextuality, which direct the reader from the main text to the margin and appeal for a reading gesture that construes a relationship of straightforward illustration between any two passages in question, the one in Dutch and the other not in Dutch. As I hope to illustrate on the basis of a closer reading of a specific passage of this text, the diverse building-blocks of Huygens' poem connect in more complex ways, generating not only multidirectional relationships between body-text and margin, but also within and between the citations in margine. The hypertext edition of the text that we are currently preparing is meant, primarily, to lay bare this complex network of intertextualities. The final goal of this specific edition is not to stabilize the text into a final shape (as traditional historical-critical editions are wont to), but to make clear that the poem's structural build-up entails the possibility that it produces an ever-growing number of versions of itself. It thus transforms itself from a consolation for the specific blind friend for whom it was originally meant into a consolatory reading machine for many generations to come.

Part of this Conference or Workshop: SHARP 2008