The goal for the summer was to address the remaining small edits of the first chapter and to complete a readable draft of the second chapter by August 31. I managed to make that goal, though a few days late.

I was able to repurpose most of my seminar paper on Dorian Gray, about 15 pages or so, into this chapter. They formed the background discussion of the manuscript and the analysis of the revisions in the first chapter. Then came a period of heavy writing, about two weeks, where I created new sections on "Queer Historiography," "TEI," an introduction and conclusion.

The paper explores how to use TEI to mark up the homoerotic elements that Wilde revised and obscured in the first chapter of the Dorian Gray manuscript. I first examine the question of perservation in the field of Textual Editing, drawing out a debate between the more "conservative" (favoring preservation via the discovery of authorial intention) and the more "productive" approach which fully develops with the advent of digital media (and uses digital media to explore productive permutations and presentations of textual material). Then I bring another scholarly debate for comparison, which is the debate on the proper methodology for Queer Historiography, that is, whether it is possible or desirable for critics in the present to adequately know queerness in the past. I isolate one perspective, that of Heather Love and what she calls "feeling backward," which attends to the past without trying to redeem or rescue it, as a guide toward developing my editing methodology. I then turn to the manuscript itself, to examine and analyze the changes that Wilde imposes on the homoerotic elements from the first chapter. My reading here highlights a number of "themes" that reveal what Wilde's pen worked to suppress, and include: "tension," "affection," "passion," "beauty," and "fatality." Finally, I turn to the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) language itself, pointing out its characteristics relevant to my project, such as one seeming contradiction between the potential for customization (TEI allows for researchers to create custom tags according to the needs of the project) and the constrained nature of the tags which nonetheless impose a level of legibility and fixity on the text. I conclude by demonstrating how my method marks up homoerotic elements, although not in a way that fixes them or makes them more legible to researchers. Rather, the markup serves to index moments where the tagging and labelling fails to capture how the homoerotic themes appear and function in the text. Here, the lesson from Queer Historiography comes to the fore: the act of marking up a text, which can never fully capture the queer elements of the text, really functions more as a tool for discovering those moments that elude containment.

Having submitted this draft for review, I don't think there's much to do with it now but wait for revisions. In the meantime, I will go back to the first chapter (for the third time!) to get it ready for Matt's eyes. Hopefully a couple of weeks will help get it into "readable" form.