Intimate Editing: Toward a Relational Philological Poetics

According to the etymology of “philo-logy,” poets—the most ardent lovers of words—ought to be considered first among philologists. However, philology’s reputation as a dusty, pedantic science has seen it relegated to the back shelf of literary studies. “Intimate Editing” reveals a counterintuitive but symbiotic relationship between innovative poetry and philology: if philology engages with words' material incarnations in documents, manuscripts, and books, a philological poetics calls attention to and intervenes in that process. The contemporary, North American women writers I consider in this dissertation—Marta Werner, Jen Bervin, Susan Howe, and M. NourbeSe Philip— revel in an intimate, tactile relationship with documents and archives, constructing unique, cross-genre compositions by cutting, sewing, breaking, and arranging textual matter. “Intimate Editing” thus carves out a space under the broader category of experimental poetics to read these writers as poet-editors who exploit and enlarge the imaginative, relational aspects of philological practices, particularly editing. While my project revises reductive accounts of the motivations behind “innovative” or “experimental” poetic techniques, I also argue that these women push the boundaries of editorial principles and critique the assumptions of institutionally authorized textual scholars, thus modeling alternative modes of textual criticism.