The Electronic Literary Adaptation:
Feminism and Digital Editing

Elan Paulson
PhD Candidate

University of Western Ontario
300 Wharncliffe Rd. N.
London, ON
N6G1E2

epaulson@uwo.ca


Feminist scholars have recently exposed some of the ways in which male-biased discourses have permeated traditional editorial theory and practice, and proposed strategies for producing electronic editions that subvert these hegemonic conventions. Indeed, the features of the digital medium suit the feminist emphasis on the multiple, decentred, performative, and collaborative presentation and interpretation of texts.

Specifically, I am interested in examining how feminist editors produce electronic texts that foreground, rather than attempt to bury, the political ideologies that underlie editiorial decisions. Because editing is an interpretive act, a critical edition enacts the editor’s ideological assumptions that guide its production, If, as Julia Flanders asserts, each XML transformation is an adaptation, and, as Brenda Silver argues, adaptations are performative interpretations, then electronic adaptations of women’s literature may foreground interface design choices as part of the process of gendered literary criticism. Moreover, the dynamic features deployed in such adaptations offer a greater level of user interactivity, a quality valued by many feminist textual and literary scholars.

Thus this paper explores some of the ways in which electronic literary adaptations demonstrate the multiplicity and push the boundaries of the politics of the electronic form. By juxtaposing electronic adaptations with texts that are transcribed to match their print versions, for example, feminist editors of digital archives could create a decentred and polyvocal database that encourages a wider range of interpretative possibilities. In understanding the interpretive potential of editorial practices, we may begin to recognize that editors concerned with communicating women’s writing might benefit from a more serious consideration of current literary and feminist theory. This paper proposes to address some of these issues with specific reference to a few literary electronic adaptations of women’s literature, including Aya Karpinska adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Arrival of the beeBox.”