Post Illa Verba: https://postillaverba.wordpress.com/

My final project attempts to recontextualize marginalia by transposing them (via Photoshop) onto other, unrelated texts. Part I juxtaposes commentary on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience with a mathematical treatise on analytical methods. Part III juxtaposes the notes from a student’s copy of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room with pages from Woolf’s collected letters, specifically the letters written immediately prior to her suicide. (Part II, when it is completed, is going to be a juxtaposition of a graduate student’s — not my — notes on a critical essay transposed onto a piece of poetry.)

I’m concerned here with the conditions of display and with the issue of context: should I tell the stories? Should I cite the source text? Part III stands better alone; Part I doesn’t.

Some brief larger thoughts this is intended to raise:
1. Do marginalia have to be authentic to carry some sort of affective value? The Photoshopping is sometimes, unfortunately, still clear — how does this affect the way it is noticed?
2. Marginalia as “co-reading”: how aware are we of the effects of marginalia/commentary on our reading of a text? Does this change if it is our own vs. others’? Does the quality of the marginalia change that? Does having our attention drawn to it change that?
3. Marginalia as anything other than individual, temporary, & intentional — i.e. the scholar’s research into their subject’s personal library, the annoyance at other people’s notes in a used/course book — are a function of the current market for books: cheap, often resold/circulated, paper texts.