Research project The Author’s Hand: A Literary History of Handwriting

Research Questions

In our age of instant digital communication, handwriting seems less necessary than ever before. Slow, immobile, fragile, and resistant to reproduction, handwriting is hobbled with obvious disadvantages. At the same time, the rapid growth of digital media has removed handwriting’s transparency and unmasked its false identity as a mere conduit of communication: handwriting is now visible as a medium. What is at stake here, then, is not the future of penmanship but the possibility of scrutinizing handwriting as a historical media form of outmost importance.
The purpose of the project “The author’s hand. A literary history of handwriting” is to explore literary handwriting from a media historical perspective. Through six case studies, it examines how authors during the long era of handwriting – from Horace to Strindberg –acquired the ability to write with and in their own hands, and what this technology of the hand produced. The project raises crucial questions about the materiality and functionality of writing, as well as its structural aspects. Taking its departure from the basic assumption that the material conditions of media decide their output and define their users, the project’s overarching research questions are the following: What does it mean for an author to write by hand? What is the significance of the materiality of technology, in terms of changing writing utensils and writing surfaces, for the output of writing? And how does writing produce its user or subject? Most importantly, the project raises critical questions regarding what is possible – or not possible – to write by hand.
The individual case studies are all centered upon a literary text that addresses writing or displays a “scene of writing”. Such scenes are conventionally read as the self-reflective moment of literary imagination, but the project investigates them as signs and evidence of the specific historical forms of handwriting that produced the texts in the first place. If we do not reduce handwriting to a mere ornamental function or a transparent outflow of the authors’ thoughts, manuscripts can instead be analyzed as a function of their material conditions of possibility. Texts will here be explored as products of different, historically separate “discourse networks”, i.e., networks defined as a set of technologies, cultural techniques and institutions. The examples analyzed in the project have been selected according to their representation and formulation of major historical shifts in the history of handwriting. This project, then, does not aim to construe a singular, continuous history of handwriting; on the contrary, the point is to contrast different discourse networks with each other within a monograph, and through their different characteristics make it possible to analyze how the ever changing medium of handwriting marks both texts and writers alike.
To my knowledge, there is no previous study of the media history of handwriting where literary texts are placed at the center. This study thus will be the first of its kind.

Previous Research

The research field of handwriting as a specific medium has grown considerably during the last two decades. This project will however be the first that specifically target the literary history of handwriting. The field is dominated by investigations that positions handwriting in relation to digitization. Among them are Neef’s important studies on “handwriting in the age of technology” and “handwriting and new media” (2011, 2006). A similar approach can be found in Wickberg (2020a, 2020b), although the material is defined as “post-digital handwriting”. Less theoretical, but still keeping to the digital track are Trubek (2016), Hensher (2012) och Florey (2008). Studies of a more historical kind, devoted to pre-modern material, can be found in Müller (2012), Kafka (2012) and Siegert (2003b), where manuscripts without “author function” (Foucault 2008), namely those of secretaries, are explored. In Siegert (2003a) the perspective is broadened, from bureaucratic writing to “scientific sign practices”. A different take can be found in the cultural historical or book historical research tradition, where important contributions have been made by Petrucci (1995), Chartier (1989, 2005), Thornton (1996) and Messerli & Chartier (2012). Even more descriptive and detail-oriented but still relevant is the work of paleographers; see Brandis (1997), Sirat (2006), Bischoff (2009) and Robinson (2010).

While the research in this project draws on the above studies, it differs in its insistence on a more elaborate media theoretical approach, in its archaeological perspective on history, and its detailed reading of literary texts. As for the latter, supportive analytical perspectives can be found in literary studies by Kittler (1985, 2012), whose investigations of the “scenes of writing” in relation to its contemporary writing pedagogy are exemplary. Important genealogical perspectives on the conditions of possibility are developed in Goldberg (1991), Stingelin (2004) and Lubkoll (2015), while Benne (2015) explores the historical journey of manuscripts, from the dustbin of printing shops to the autograph collections of libraries. That literary studies can make important contributions to media history is shown by Kirschenbaum’s (2016) inspiring literary history of word processing. The present project, then, addresses a highly productive and lively international field, while at the same adding new research material hitherto not explored in this way.

Theoretical and methodological perspectives

This project is affiliated with the tradition of research in which the medium, not the “message”, is at the heart of the matter. More specifically, it draws on an understanding of media as material technology, which already in its “hardware” has inherent limitations for what can be conveyed (Kittler 2003, 2012). Therefore, media are conditions of possibility for what can be said, shown or written: any mediated content is ultimately a function of its technology. Another important theoretical vantage point here is the concept of cultural techniques (Macho 2003, Krämer 2005). As Bernhard Siegert (2015) has shown, media are usually preceded by techniques, while techniques at the same time are what makes media operational. This allows for an analysis of the interface between the technological materiality of writing and historically changing writing practices. Both media “hardware” and the “software” of techniques will be considered in order to analyze the anatomy of a given discourse network.
These theoretical suppositions direct focus to the specific capacity of both writing technologies and techniques, as well as to their shifting historical conditions. Media archaeology as a method emphasizes that media history does not unfold continuously; on the contrary, it is formed through technical and technological ruptures and discontinuities (Parikka 2012, Götselius 2003). Therefore, the case studies of this investigation are all focused upon shifts in the history of handwriting. Another guiding rule of media archaeology is that discourse networks tend to mirror their technological underpinnings on the content level of literary texts (Kittler 2003). This observation lies behind the project’s methodological interest in the “writing scenes” of literature.

Project managers