"A Woe Of Ecstasy": On the Electronic Editing of Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments

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.