Volume 27, Issue 1

The operations and ways of thinking which occur during the critical editing of a text can often contribute to a more precise understanding of the concepts which are used in the field of literary criticism. Similarly, the concepts originating from analytical bibliography can contribute to a more exact grasping of the concepts of literary criticism. Using this assumption as its point of departure, the article investigates the key concepts ‘text’ and ‘work’, which in literary criticism are often used as synonyms, and tries to define them in relation to each other - with ‘copy’, ‘variant’, and ‘version’ as intermediate terms. With regard to the term ‘text’, the concept is separated into the ‘ideal text’, the ‘real text’, and the ‘material text’ - which are again distinguished from the ‘document’. Once these concepts are thus more sharply defined, much of the theory that is held in esteem within literary criticism can be critically judged according to its merits. In the course of the analysis, there are discussions with Joseph Grigely, Peter Shillingsburg, Gunter Martens, and Roland Reus, along with the essential views of Nelson Goodman, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

The article refers to the term ‘original’ of a film, a term that has been lively discussed among film scholars and editors since the 1990s. This term is, however, still important for any practical film restoration work in order to (re-)present the film in an (audio-)visual form as closely as possible to its premiere version. Some thoughts about the actual demands and chances the hypertextual media can offer to a methodological reflected practice of historical-critical film edition (that may show and make comparable different versions of a film in an interactive layout) lead to a scenario for a historical-critical edition of Martin Berger’s silent film Kreuzzug des Weibes (D 1926) whose worldwide archival saving gives a good example to demonstrate the possibilities of hypertextual devices for the presentation of time-based media.

Concerning the editorial punctuation of mediaeval German texts in modern editions, it has been a point of discussion whether this punctuation should follow the procedure established by former editors or the modern rules (Duden). The article explains that 19th century editors like Karl Lachmann explicitly tried to use contemporary punctuation, which enforces the adoption of modern rules. Syntactical peculiarities of mediaeval German and the use of different punctuation marks are discussed.

OPERA, established in 2009, seeks a new approach to editing musical stage works, different from the traditional complete works or musical monumental series, which were often centred on the composer as the sole creator of the musical stage work in all its aspects. Following recent developments in musical and textual criticism, in particular with regard to the author and the work-concept as well as to the discussion of musical genres and their historical context, OPERA emphasizes the notion of multiple authorship, e.g., of text and music. At the same time, OPERA argues for a collective view of musical, literary, and other sources, which are considered of equal value and treated with the same depth of textual criticism. The musical stage works of the European tradition to be edited, 21 in total, are grouped by OPERA into six modules according to the specific editorial issues they are connected with. They include traditional through-composed operas, but also genres such as ,Singspiel‘, operetta, drama with incidental music, melodrama, and ballet. OPERA editions are presented in the form of hybrid editions: The scores are published in printed volumes, while the text editions and critical reports are presented in an electronic format, which enables visualizing the sources, the Music Edition and the Text Edition, and establishing a comprehensive interlinking of the editions with the sources and the critical apparatus. For this purpose, OPERA uses the Edirom software tools, developed by the Edirom project at the University of Paderborn, which was modified according to the requirements of OPERA, especially for the incorporation of text editions. Among the features described here is a navigation tool which allows the user to call up and display synchronously any corresponding textual and musical units or objects. Likewise, one common critical apparatus comments on both the Text and Music Edition, and is accessible from either of the two directions. Case studies of two forthcoming editions demonstrate the handling of specific issues of textual criticism as well as practical programming and encoding strategies. The ‹come’die en vaudevilles› Annette et Lubin (Paris 1762) by Justine Favart and Adolphe Blaise illustrates the inseparability of musical and literary sources against the backdrop of the peculiarities of the genre. Ferdinando Pae‥r’s Italian opera Leonora (1804/09) serves as an example of variants applied by the author on different occasions, which, as a result, overturn the concept of a single definite version

In the 18th century Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) held lessons at Koenigsberg University in Prussia (now Kaliningrad/Russia) over a period of 40 years. The philosophical discipline of Metaphysics was one of his major topics, based on a textbook of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Metaphysica, Halle 11739). Since the middle of the 19th century it has been known, that the Kantian copy of the 4th edition (1757) still exists at the university library in Dorpat (Tartu/Estonia). It became one of the main sources for the third part „Handschriftlicher Nachlas“ in the edition auf Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin 1900ff.) of the former Prussian Academy of Sciences. Later on (autumn 2000) it was figured out, that another Kantian copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica is held in the Gdan’sk library of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Polska Academia Nauk Biblioteka Gdan’ska). - A description of this formerly unknown copy is also given as a short discussion on topics arising from the embedded handwritten notes of Immanuel Kant.

The article provides the first reflections on the new annotated historical critical edition of the correspondence between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer. The plan for the project is to appear in both printed and digital form and will include a full-text edition of all preserved letters with supplements, as well as some unpublished and until now unknown documents referring to the history of Goethe’s literary works

This article is a report from the edition of Schleiermacher’s correspondence within the critical Schleiermacher edition (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, KGA) and puts forth a surprising revision which was discovered during work on vol. 10 (1808-1810): with the exception of one letter the letters from Schleiermacher’s sister-in-law and friend of Ernst-Moritz Arndt, Charlotte von Kathen (1778-1850), to Friedrich Schleiermacher, should be attributed to a different Charlotte, Schleiermachers’s friend Charlotte Cummerow. The correspondence between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Charlotte Cummerow was assumed until now not to have been handed down. The article shows with a look at the transmission history how this false attribution came about through Dilthey and which indications led to this revision. The delineated description here of the two correspondences is completed by a tabular overview of the revised correspondences of Schleiermacher with Charlotte von Kathen and Charlotte Cummerow.

The article discusses the difference between a ‘notebook’-edition and an edition of ‘notebook- notations’ and presents the project ‘Genetic-critical and annotated hybrid-edition of Theodor Fontane’s notebooks’ as a ‘notebook’-edition. The edition of Fontane’s 67 notebooks is being realized by the Theodor Fontane Research Centre at the University of Gottingen in cooperation with the Gottingen State University Library. The genetic-critical hybrid edition will for the first time collect, transcribe, mark up, comment and publish all Fontane notebook writings. Whereas previous part-publications mainly followed content criteria, the conceptual focus of this edition is on the entire compass of the transmission in all its material and medial complexity. The notebook-edition consists of two complementary parts that by gradation visualize the materiality and enable document-oriented, chronological and teleological access, as well as establish readable and referenceable text and commentary: as an open-access digital edition, where every notebook entry is presented synoptically as a digital image and diplomatic transcription, as well as an historically-critically edited text with apparatus and commentary, and in the book edition, to be published with De Gruyter, which will consist of the historically-critically edited text version with apparatus and commentary. The philological working processes towards the edition are significantly supported by digital methods and the deployment of the TextGrid virtual research environment, whose services and tools are adapted and modified to meet the complex demands of the notebook edition.

Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is still one of the most influential works on aesthetics in the 20th century. But at present, there is only one student edition, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann and published by Suhrkamp in 1970. This posthumous edition aimed to offer a clean and consistent text. With respect to the surviving typescripts of the Aesthetic Theory that represent Adorno’s last period of work before he died in 1969, we propose a model for a critical edition of the Aesthetic Theory that reflects the complex textuality of the typescripts and presents them as facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions. In this way, the critical edition uncovers the revisions and interventions by Adorno during the writing process as well as all deletions, amendments and supplements which also expose the aesthetic mode of Adorno’s thinking. Furthermore the article shows that such an edition forces a ‘philological’ reading of the Aesthetic Theory that breaks with the kinds of interpretations that routinely obscure what is ‘literally’ written.

The project documents and describes the most important sources on the genesis of Peter Handke’s literary works and presents its results on an electronic platform as part of the website of the Austrian National Library. Its point of departure is the extensive collection of materials which Handke has already given to the Literary Archives at the Austrian National Library in Vienna as a pre-mortem bequest. This is the largest Handke collection in the world, and provides detailed documentation of his literary endeavours including working notes, numerous draft versions, typescripts, manuscripts and accompanying materials (photographs of locations that appear in the works, annotated hiking maps, etc.). Original documents and documentary materials on the author’s entire oeuvre - often the cause of controversial debates - are also held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach as well as in numerous other public and private collections. All the sources relevant to the genesis of Handke’s works will be studied, put in relation to one another, and presented in an appropriate form (in data tables, work and source histories and with the use of facsimiles). In this way, a new, source-based foundation will be laid for further and more profound readings of one of Austria’s most significant living authors - both for Handke specialists, who over recent years have increasingly turned to questions of text genesis, and for an interested general public. The research platform aims to be an open project, supervised by an international scientific board, and offering possibilities for the publication and discussion of individual studies on the genesis of Handke’s works.