Three guest lectures by Hans Walter Gabler

Hans Walter Gabler from the University of Munich visits the Wittgenstein Archives in the period 20-24 September, 2005. In this context, three guest lectures are organized:

• Wednesday, 21 September, 12.15-14.00, Seksjon for allmenn litteraturvitenskap, Sydneshaugen, Aud. E: "From Memory to Fiction: Processes of Writing and Telling in Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse'"


It has always been held that experience – autobiography – memory feed into the writing of narratives and the imagining of their fictions. Commonly, the links have been investigated with reference to external sources (letters, diaries, private reminiscences by the author or by others, public reports, records, or documents, etc.). A basis for critical investigation of a different order is offered by the compositional drafts for the fictions themselves. In my talk, I wish to show what the writing processes observable in the draft manuscript for "To the Lighthouse" reveal about how the text of the novel gradually took shape as a writing of autonomous fiction from mosaic chips of memory, successively revised and artfully laid together.


• Wednesday, 21 September, 14.30-16.00, Seksjon for humanistisk informatikk, Room 264, HF-bygget (together with Alois Pichler): "The Hyper-Learning initiative"


The overall objective of the Hyper-Learning initiative, created by Paolo D'Iorio, is to build an advanced e-learning system for the Humanities. Hyper-Learning consists of four integrated components: 1) Research on functional programming for complex interactive web sites; 2) Development of a distributed web platform; 3) Establishment of Virtual Collaborative Learning Communities based around representative European authors and 4) Creation of an appropriate pedagogical and legal framework.


• Thursday, 22 September, 14.15-16.00, Avdeling for kultur, språk og informasjonsteknologi (AKSIS (since 2009 "Uni Digital") ), Lunch room, 1st floor: "Editing and Interpretation"


It is a reigning opinion in editorial scholarship that textual editing must rule out interpretation. But just how valid, even how tenable is such a position? I intend to set the question in a perspective of Anglo-American as well as German principles of textual criticism and practices of scholarly editing; and I propose to discuss its problematics in the light of the special tasks posed by attempts to edit authors' draft manuscript writing. This will involve reflecting on electronic editing and electronic editions.

Hans Walter Gabler recently retired as Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich, Germany, where, from 1996 to 2002, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate programme on "Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines". He was editor-in-chief of the critical editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1984/1986), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners (both 1993).