UC Berkeley

This dissertation offers a way of bridging the growing divide within contemporary literary studies and across the humanities between frameworks focusing on questions of signification, representation, and textual hermeneutics on the one hand, and those focusing on materiality, affect, and posthermeneutics on the other. I explore the phenomenon of writing as an interaction or negotiation of different materialities that implies a dispersal of the agency of textual production onto an array of participants. More specifically, "The Materialities of Writing" develops a theoretical framework with which to think about the materiality of textual production by focusing on the preserved portion of the manuscript of Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the so-called "Berner Taschenbuch." Integrating various discourses of materiality - the materiality of the signifier, the materiality of the manuscript, and the materiality of the body - and rooting them in a common new materialist framework, my central claim is that the material practices of writing were essential in the creation of the Aufzeichnungen and therefore haunt the printed text to such an extent that the only way to understand the semantic dynamics of the novel is by returning to the hand-written manuscript. However, the dissertation points beyond this single work and its manuscript history, proposing a fundamental methodology for dealing with the relationship between manuscripts and printed texts as constitutive forms of what we call "the" literary work.

Even in its "final" form (i.e. traditional print editions of the Aufzeichnungen), the novel points to the physical process of its generation. This happens most directly through annotations indicating that certain passages are "written in the margin of the manuscript." Drawing extensively on art historical scholarship and theory, I show how the visuality of the manuscript becomes figured in the novel, how, for example, the blotched, crossed-through and stitched-together appearance of the manuscript pages are transformed into the excessive descriptions of fragmented architecture and wounded bodies in Paris. The corporeality of these descriptions, pointing to the physical process of writing by hand, transgresses the boundary between reader and text, allowing the materialities of writing to cross the threshold of the page and to surge forth into the reader's affective, bodily experience during reading. In various ways, the manuscript and materialities of writing continue to haunt the printed work, like a specter. Ultimately, I respond to the question of autobiography in the Aufzeichnungen, avoiding a simple enumeration of the biographical connections between Rilke and Malte, and instead rooting the notion of autobiography in the physical activity of writing. In doing so, my exploration traverses the fluid boundary between corps and corpus, between the body of the writer and the body of the text.

Reconsidering the work through the materiality of its production illuminates a dialectic circulation between materiality and signification. This circulation is largely severed in the printed work, yet haunts it like a phantom limb. By attending to the ways in which the materiality of the manuscript and of handwriting remain present in the printed text of the Aufzeichnungen, I show how returning to the manuscript enables us to trace the circulation between the materialities of writing and the "immaterial" space of representation.