Abstract
In producing an online ‘edition’ of Michael Field’s poem ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian’ from their 1892 collection of poetic ‘translations’ of paintings, Sight and Song, this project aims to suggest how digital tools might enable us to ‘edit’ and present literature in new ways — ways that, in this case, are meant to gesture not just at the process of composition, but also at the extent to which the poetic effects achieved depend on optical, spatial, and kinaesthetic metaphors of transparency and opacity. The project is also meant as a reflection on the terms upon which we encounter nineteenth-century authors and texts on the Web, whether in official electronic archives or the kinds of personal and crowd-curated digital collections being assembled on online mass platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr.
Highlights
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The following information was omitted from the published article: ‘Rob’s participation was made possible by Ego-Media, a European Research Council-funded project based at King’s College London, which addresses the impact of new media on autobiographical narratives and practices of self-presentation.’
Summary
Having suggested that Michael Field’s approach to Renaissance culture in Sight and Song provides some interesting pointers for the digital humanities, and having drawn particular attention to their treatment of the figure of Saint Sebastian, this article wants to consider how Bradley and Cooper themselves figure as objects of identification and desire in online collections — and, to use their representation on blogging and social networking platforms like Tumblr as a way into contemporary debates over, on the one hand, how scholars should engage with the queer literary past, and, on the other, how social media shape our relationship with culture and history — debates that are subject to an intriguing degree of isomorphism and overlap. Less interested in understanding the past than in shoring up their status as ‘cool’ cultural magpies — a thesis that echoes Liu’s description of online cool as the ‘techno-informatic vanishing point of contemporary aesthetics, psychology, morality, politics, spirituality and everything’, a networked sensibility that rejects theorization and reduces engagement with culture to a matter of the intuitive judgement ‘cool or not cool’.33 Whether it is a matter of queer history or online image aggregation, we encounter a similar opposition, whereby the rigour and objectivity supposedly characteristic of ‘proper’ academic, artistic, curatorial, and archival practice is affirmed via critiques of subjective, intuitive, superficial, and self-aggrandizing approaches which fail to show due respect for the past, approaches disparagingly associated with juvenility, narcissism, and methodological sloppiness. As Dinshaw confesses, ostensibly objective academic studies are often underwritten by ‘too-close, anythingbut-disinterested [...] connections to [...] [historical] texts’, while identifications are necessarily partial and projective, as capable of disrupting as they are of affirming familiar models of history (p. 33)
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