Creating Suspense Across Versions: Genetic Narratology and Stephen King's IT.

How does a novelist create and enhance suspense? How is suspense fine-tuned across multiple drafts and proofs, and what is the role of editors and proofreaders in such an undertaking? In this project proposal, the University of Antwerp has the unique opportunity to look over the shoulder of one of the masters of suspense, Stephen King, and to study the material evidence of the writing and publication process of his 1986 masterpiece IT. In doing so, the project will extend the range of genetic narratology by zooming in on the changes made across versions to the text's narrative pace, characterization and focalization so as to maximize suspense. Both the author's solitary work on his drafts and the subsequent collaboration with editors will be examined. The research group "Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism" (ACDC) has recently established contact with Stephen King about his personal archive, and has obtained digital facsimiles of all prepublication documents relating to IT. This corpus of about 10.000 images forms the primary research material; the documents consist of King's 3 drafts, his copy-edited submission typescript, proofs and galleys, and correspondence with his editor. In On Writing King stated that "to write is human, to edit is divine", and that "the editor is always right". The project has the opportunity to analyze this author/editor relationship and ascertain if, in the case of IT, the editor was indeed "always right".

Keywords:LITERARY THEORY, LITERATURE-ENGLISH

Disciplines:Contemporary literature, Literatures in English, Narratology, Literary theory, Sociology of literary texts

Project type:Collaboration project