Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant's 1984 Reading of "Grippes and Poche"

Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant's 1984 Reading of "Grippes and Poche" Kate Moffatt (bio), Kandice Sharren (bio), and Michelle Levy (bio) At lunchtime on 14 February 1984, Mavis Gallant read her 1982 New Yorker short story "Grippes and Poche" at Simon Fraser University in a lecture hall of faculty and students. In May 2019, the authors of this article discovered that a recording of this event existed in the sfu Archives and requested its digitization. Two years later, in March and June 2021, we presented the archival audio as an "audio edition" in two episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. In the first episode, we presented the reading with some contextual and biographical material; in the second, we attempted to reconstruct the event through the evidence provided by the contents of the recording, interviews with its organizers, additional archival information we uncovered, and even the tape itself. Framing these episodes as an audio edition required that we respond to Jason Camlot's claim that, "To think critically about sound recordings as literary works, we need to explore the historically specific convergences between audio-recording technologies, media formats, and the institutions and practices of the literary context" (4). In print, critical editions of literary works imbue them with institutional value; approaching a sound recording through the lens of scholarly editing practices both appropriated that institutional value and raised questions about the print-based assumptions embedded in those practices. [End Page 141] Thinking about this sound recording as a literary work forced us to interrogate whether and how book historical methods and concepts can be meaningfully adapted for use in the realm of literary audio. We were confronted by questions about how audio features relate to the familiar conventions of print, including how to incorporate an introduction; how to annotate a spoken text; how to define spoken asides that in print might take the form of footnotes but during a reading inevitably become part of the story itself; and how to highlight features of the object on which the recording was preserved (in this case, a cassette tape). In textual theory, scholars have devised a range of models for grappling with—or sometimes ignoring—the thorny problems posed by written texts and the material forms they occupy, including manuscripts, periodicals, and books. In this article, we explore the practice of what Jason Camlot and Christine Mitchell term "audiotextual criticism," or, "the necessary principles of bibliographical and textual scholarship in relation to a corpus of audio recordings that documents a reading series," by considering three of the most prominent models for editing literary texts: copy-text, versioning, and the facsimile or documentary edition—the latter of which has become particularly important in digital media. As book historians, we found ourselves considering the production of both the event and the recording, including the human hands that shaped them and preserved the surviving material artifacts. In thinking through the various editorial models theorized for print, we realized these questions of production and preservation were central to our understanding of Gallant's reading rather than supplemental to it, which raised further questions about what, exactly, we sought to capture with our "audio edition." In attempting what Al Filreis terms "a consideration of the phonotext as valid 'edition,'" we were influenced by Jerome McGann's insistence that linguistic and bibliographical codes are entwined. We also internalized Robert Darnton's model of the "communications circuit," which acknowledges the many actors and social networks involved in the creation of any literary work (68). In this case, the archival recording of Mavis Gallant's story, as read on 14 February 1984, was the result of social, professional, and technical interventions. From her New Yorker editors who shaped the story, to friend and colleague Grazia Merler who invited Gallant to sfu, to Kurt Vanel who set up the recording equipment and mastered the production of the cassette, to the archivist who digitized it, we wished to account for this entire chain of production, transmission, and reception. At the same time, sound recordings pose different practical and theoretical problems than written texts, and we grappled with these issues in [End Page 142] our episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. We...

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