I wish to continue working from my mid-term paper since I chose an object that I believe will help my essay. I plan to do an analytical paper on the margins of the Latin Rhetoric book since its margins can serve as a segway/guidance into the importance of its existence and how it can help me craft other arguments.
What I would like to try and discuss are the significance of margins and how those margins showed the life/identity of a book. The reasons for markings or no markings can be dependent on many factors, and I wish to work on something along those lines. Marginalia are something that has gained my interest overtime since it was introduced in class and it is something I wish to further do more work on.
I would greatly appreciate any feedback, thank you!
I’m glad that you’re focusing on margin– it is certainly an exciting and generative topic. You will certainly need to narrow your focus, even to the marginal in a specific book, so that you can develop an argument about why you’re focusing here.
From our class, return to Bonnie Mak’s _How the Page Matters_ to think of the page as interface for interaction between author/book and reader.
Also,
The most prominent scholarship on marginalia is older but great:
HL Jackson’ s _Marginalia : readers writing in books _ (1992)
But there are also lots of scholars and writers who write about marginalia as an important space and process of interfacing between author, book, and reader.
See this piece on Edgar Allen Poe’s marginalia: https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/17/edgar-allan-poe-marginalia/
Or, this one on marginalia as part of active reading:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/14/how-to-read-a-book-marginalia/
He might also return to the beginning of the semester and rethink the role of Mark Marino’s “Marginalia in the LIbrary in of Babel” and what it does it teach us about updated, remediated marginalia.
Other novels created nearly completely from marginalia:
Vladimir Nabokov’s _Pale Fire_ 1961
_S._ by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst (2013)