It was not the year we anticipated, hoped for, or a year we would want to repeat. The first rumblings of the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, escalated in February, and eventually erupted in our community in March when the Center closed its doors to in-person visits and staff began working remotely. What happened next was a natural shift to expanding the Center’s online presence throughout the year. [Read more…] about Highlights from an unprecedented year
Archives for 2020
Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes
by VANESSA GUIGNERY
In the fall of 2001, I was in Normandy with author Julian Barnes to take part in an event around his most successful novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), when he told me with a wry smile that I would soon be going to Austin, Texas. As I looked at him quizzically, he explained that he had decided to place his archive at the Harry Ransom Center. At that time, I had completed my doctoral thesis on “Postmodernism and modes of blurring in Julian Barnes’s fiction” at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris and published books and articles of literary analysis of Barnes’s work, but I had never examined a writer’s archive and I had never been to the United States. [Read more…] about Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes
EXCERPT: Julian Barnes From the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives
by VANESSA GUIGNERY
The following is excerpted from the book, Julian Barnes From the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archive (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), by author Vanessa Guignery.
The archives for each of Barnes’s novels reveal a composition pattern that starts with various notes about what to include, followed by several drafts containing longhand revisions and deletions, until a complete draft is sent to Barnes’s friend Dame Hermione Lee for comments, which leads to more revisions. In 2000, Barnes told an interviewer: “Normally I type on an IBM 196c, then hand correct again and again until it’s virtually illegible, then clean type it, then hand correct again and again. And so on.” The novelist firmly believes that writing is in the rewriting. Therefore, “Writing the first draft is usually a great illusion. The first draft makes you think that the telling of this story, whatever it is, is a fairly blithe and easy business. Then you realize you’ve fooled yourself yet again. Then the work, the real writing starts.” The numerous corrections on Barnes’s manuscripts and typescripts attest to how carefully and relentlessly he hones his style and concurs with Flaubert for whom “prose is like hair—it shines with combing.” Therefore, as he points out, “quite substantial things can be changed … even quite late in the day”—be it the name of the characters, the use of tenses or even part of the structure—and “the book can always be improved.” [Read more…] about EXCERPT: Julian Barnes From the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives