The Work of Revision

by Hannah Sullivan

Revision might seem to be an intrinsic part of good writing. But Hannah Sullivan argues that we inherit our faith in the virtues of redrafting from early-twentieth-century modernism. Closely examining changes made in manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others, she shows how modernist approaches to rewriting shaped literary style, and how the impulse to touch up, alter, and correct can sometimes go too far.

In the nineteenth century, revision was thought to mar a composition s originality a prejudice cultivated especially by the Romantics, who believed writing should be spontaneous and organic, and that rewriting indicated a failure of inspiration. Rejecting such views, avant-garde writers of the twentieth century devoted themselves to laborious acts of rewriting, both before and after publishing their work. The great pains undertaken in revision became a badge of honor for writers anxious to justify the value and difficulty of their work. In turn, many of the distinctive effects of modernist style ellipsis, fragmentation, parataxis were produced by zealous, experimental acts of excision and addition.

The early twentieth century also saw the advent of the typewriter. It proved the ideal tool for extensive, multi-stage revisions superior even to the word processor in fostering self-scrutiny and rereading across multiple drafts. Tracing how master stylists from Henry James to Allen Ginsberg have approached their craft, "The Work of Revision" reveals how techniques developed in the service of avant-garde experiment have become compositional orthodoxy."

Genres: Writing

360 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

About the author

Hannah Sullivan lives in London with her husband and two sons and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. She is currently associate professor of English at New College, Oxford. Her study of modernist writing, The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy. Her debut poetry collection, Three Poems, was published by Faber in 2018 and was awarded the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

The primary limitation of this book is that it is a book on artistic revision written by a researcher. Granted, studies of revision by fellow writers can (and has) led to romanticized speculation that ultimately has little basis in the revision work actually studied. Sullivan's perspective limits itself to a literary critical view with little insight into artistic process outside of scratches on a page, which is sometimes all that's needed, but other times only the surface of the interior process at play, which seems to be the factor this book doesn't consider in its drive to look at technology as a factor in the genetic revision of a text. The speculation by the end of the book, that technological advances in writing tools may estrange writers from deep revision because of the lack of clear history of a text, seems misguided and ultimately cheapens the progress of the book, which otherwise makes an interesting correlation between attitudes on revision and the means available to revise and publish. While the boom of self-publishers would of course give some credence to Sullivan's view, as there are many self published titles that were simply too quick in production and could have used further consideration, Sullivan distinguishes her sample cases (Henry James, TS Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) as more non-commercial in their concerns, so the bulk of mass publishing seems inherently excluded from consideration. There does seem to be some concern of the academizing of writing in the references to writers and teachers being often the same people, but this again seems to smack of romantic notions of apprentice writers and the Starving Writer image.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially read this for the discussion of the editing of The Waste Land, and then wondered if having someone hack your draft in half was actual revision.
If you're interested in revision this is a good overview of the state of the theory and some detailed descriptions of work by Henry James, T.S.Eliot/Ezra Pound James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The detailed studies are revealing, but It's difficult to see what the portable lesson is.
Changes in the mechanics of book production allowed or encouraged (?some?) writers at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 2oth to change their attitude to revision of their initial work before, during and after the printing of their work.

Some writers, like Joyce added, others like Pound, working on Eliot's mss, reduced. Beyond this it's difficult to see what they have in common.

The final chapter, about digital editing, seems to miss the point that while critics may not have easy access to digital drafts, the word processor/computer has made it so much easier to save versions of a work in progress, which the writer can easily return to at any stage of the writing process.

The biggest flaws in the book, perhaps, are that the case studies are in no way typical, and the fact the book never attempts to explain the purpose of studying revision other than that revision is obviously a possible process to study in a limited number of cases. It is also, as in the case of Pound and Eliot, obviously limited by the available evidence.
After all possible variations on the expand reduce option have been itemised, and someone has annotated every change Joyce made between notebook and final version, what does a third party do with the information?

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though large portions of the close readings contained in this volume will only be accessible to those familiar with the texts Sullivan is discussing, the basic premise of this book—that the act of revision and the values that surround it are culturally constructed—is an interesting one. At times, however, this premise felt out of line with the chronological spot where Sullivan attempted to locate the emergence of a particular reverence for revision, especially given her close readings demonstrated how modernists used the act of revision to drastically different ends. Granted, I bought that these ends differed from those in the immediate past, but also wanted to know more about how their stark differences from each other necessarily resulted in what sometimes felt like blanket assessments of how revision becomes differently valued in the early twentieth century. Despite these critiques, however, I appreciated the author’s methodological hybridity and evidence-based claims. Moreover, don’t we all want to emerge from a book like this one asking more questions than we started out with?

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sullivan argues that the high value we place on revision is connected to the opposition that modernism drew between the demands of art and commerce. The willingness to revise over and over, that is, was proof of a commitment to artistic expression over the mere desire to make money. She also shows how a particular technological moment--in which writers tended to draft by hand, have a fair copy typed up, mark up that copy and have it turned into print galleys, and then edit those galleys--made the stages of revision much more visible than they had been before and have been since (when we tend to overwrite previous drafts of a document on our computers).

Interesting and useful. But this argument is slowed rather than enhanced by tediously detailed close readings of the revisions of modernist avatars like James, Joyce, and Eliot. I would have appreciated less lit-crit and more on revision as a cultural practice.