Between 1905 and 1953, Cordelia Stanwood composed almost daily observations of the birds and landscape of Ellsworth, Maine. These observations are preserved in fifty-six notebooks Stanwood originally carried with her into the field. For the naturalist, the significance of Stanwood’s notebooks lies most evidently in the contribution they make to the larger ornithological record of the Northeastern United States; for the textuist, conversely, their value inheres in the “chaotic account” of data collection they offer and the questions they raise about authorship, intentionality, and the poetics of writing. In the process of tracing Stanwood’s peripatetic movements across a remote area of Maine as they are recorded in the still more out-of-the-way space of her unpublished notebooks, this essay engages a series of interrelated questions: What kind of textual home did they offer Stanwood? How did they both shelter her and enable her departure from them? Do the notebooks, in which the writing “I” appears only to mark the empty space in the text where the world—i.e., the manifold flow of bird notes, sky colors, and other data—speaks, constitute an alternative form of autobiography, or point to autobiography’s end in a post-lyrical écriture d’oiseaux? How do they express the “sound” of the enjambment of the 19th and 20th centuries?

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Indiana University Pressis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Textual Cultures This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, AbstractIn his essay "The Style of Autobiography", Jean Starobinski remarks, "One would hardly have sufficient motive to write an autobiography had not some radical change occurred [. . .] conversion, entry into a new life, the operations of Grace". From the beginning, the traumatic events of Keller's childhood -her loss of sight and hearing around age two -marked her not only as "outsider" and "other" but also as "autobiographer" even before she acquired language. "I can show so little visible proof of living", Keller confessed. Perhaps for this reason she filled the "white darkness" she lived in with writing -first with finger spelling traced in the hand, then with Braille, and finally with type. While each medium seemed to bring her closer to the dream -her own and her century's -of transparent communication, so each text she produced threatened to turn into a "black box", an instrument designed to collect and preserve data for analysis following a catastrophic event, but one that inevitably fails to illumine the inner world of Keller's deaf-blindness. This essay explores Keller's dreaming within the black box of writing, following her impossible desire for an "instrument which will show what takes place in the mind when we think".

This essay examines an important subset of Dickinson's writings, the fragments composed by her in the final decade of her life and found among her papers after her death. Never prepared for publication, perhaps never even meant to be read by anyone other than the writer herself, they appear to belong more to the space of creation than communication. As such, they offer scholars and students a rare opportunity to study the genesis (and, in many cases, the deconstruction or "de-creation") of her texts. This analysis of Dickinson's fragments focuses on the editing of these "limit" texts a century after their discovery as well as at a crucial juncture when experiments in the electronic medium are catalyzing new models of textual representation. Through an exploration of the play of autonomy and intertextuality in Dickinson's fragments, this essay raises fundamental questions about the nature and boundaries of poems, letters, and fragments and posits that the complex relations between and among these late writings are best expressed in electronic format. At the same time, the essay bears witness to the constant collaboration between literary scholarship, history, and technology.