Remediation Qualms & A Transmission History of Robert Frost’s Public Talks
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Abstract
In anticipation of an online audio edition that I am in the final stages of preparing, this article offers a transmission history of Robert Frost’s public talks, analyzing possible reasons why these talks the poet delivered between 1915 and 1962 have largely receded from public memory in the last sixty years. Specifically, the article examines how Frost’s conflated definition of ‘written prose’ has stifled both Frost and his editors, and how it subsequently rendered talk transcripts, or ‘written records of spoken prose’, as a subpar form of expression that calls for an extensive revision to be read as more formal essays, i.e., ‘prose composed directly in writing’. Instead of being stifled by what I call ‘remediation qualms’ — misgivings about a shift in media formats from aural to written text, as well as misplaced desires to uphold a particular image of the poet through remedial editorial interventions — this article calls for recognizing and citing Frost’s public talks as a genre of their own.
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