Digital Edition "Kofler Aural"

Genetic Edition “At the Desk”

The primary aim of this digital genetic edition is to establish the analysis of auditory phenomena within the study of writing processes. “Kofler aural” makes the trajectories of sonic and listening traces within literature intelligible. The work of the writer Werner Kofler, one of the major satirists of Austrian literature, is particularly well suited for analysing the integration of tones, noises, and sounds into literary production. In the prose text “At the Desk”, Kofler narrates in overlapping voices; each section stages a new voice. The author proceeds according to a dialogic principle in which spoken language – even in monologues – continually reverberates.

The edition offers a text–image synopsis of all extant textual witnesses, which are transcribed and encoded in TEI-XML. Using eleven case studies (text passages), the auditory traces of voices, noises, and music can be followed through the layers of archival material, from notes to typescript prepared for print. To demonstrate how intensively and with what thematic breadth Kofler, already in his earliest drafts, worked on the linguistic articulation of “hearing” and “speaking,” fifty-four individual examples ( “Categorisation/Auditory Traces” ) are provided, grouped into five categories and juxtaposed with the final version of the fair copy.

The titular concept of aurality is grounded in the notion of writing as a mode of perceptual production. Aurality addresses the “inner ear,” subvocalisation, and presupposes a predisposition for (non-acoustic) sound perceptions or sound imaginings within the writing process. Included in this are the media of listening, vocality, the proximity to music and composition, and the implicit modulations of volume involved in writing. For (writerly and readerly) hearing also encompasses silence. The final (struck-through) sentence of the draft typescript of “At the Desk” shows the extent to which Kofler thinks from an auditory perspective: “a[nd] it becomes quiet within me.”

The digital genetic edition “Kofler aural” was created within the framework of an FWF project at the Robert Musil Institute for Literary Research / Carinthian Literature Archive (University of Klagenfurt), in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. It is an edition of all textual witnesses preserved in the archive that document the genesis of a single prose work. At its core lies the analysis of auditory and aural phenomena in the writing process.