Dr Mark Byron

PhD Camb, BA MPhil
ARC Discovery Postdoctoral Research Fellow

+61 2 9351 2276

I teach and research in twentieth-century literature (drama, prose, poetry) with an emphasis on the various denominations of modernism. My research interests focus upon difficult modernist texts - often with unruly manuscript archives - and the methods required to produce comprehensive and coherent scholarly editions of such texts. In July 2006 I began an ARC Discovery Postdoctoral Fellowship: my project aims to develop a suitable electronic editorial apparatus and corresponding methodology to account for Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel Watt and its 980-page manuscript, and to produce a full electronic edition.
In the course of this research, I held a visiting research fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in January-February 2006, and I will hold a visiting research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin in October-December 2006.

Research areas

• Samuel Beckett; Ezra Pound; Gertrude Stein; twentieth-century poetry and prose; modernism and editorial theory; textual criticism; history of the book; manuscript studies; modern drama; literature and music; literature and the visual arts; the discourse of the paragone; philosophy and literature, particularly nineteenth- and twentieth-century; hermeneutics

Current projects

• Textual Ontogeny and the Understanding of Modernist Texts, a monograph-length study of modernist textual and archival complexity, in the contexts of editorial theory and cutting edge editorial methods (especially electronic editing)
• Samuel Beckett's Watt: An Ontogenetic Electronic Edition, with parallel manuscript transcription and photographic reproduction, critical apparatus and editorial introduction
• Ezra Pound's Cantos: An Electronic Variorum Edition, co-edited with Emeritus Professor Richard Taylor, University of Bayreuth, Germany
• an edition of Samuel Beckett's unpublished prose work, The Long Observation of the Ray (1966-1972), with critical apparatus and editorial introduction

Selected publications

Books

• Samuel Beckett's Endgame (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2006)

Book chapters

• “Musical Scores and Literary Form in Modernism Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and Samuel Beckett's Watt” Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa and Robert Samuels (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), pp. 87-98
• “Beckett's 'tenth rate xenium': The Conundra of Writing and Editing Watt” Literature and the Writer, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 1-19
• “'This thing that has a code + not a core': The Texts of Pound's Pisan Cantos” Pound and Referentiality, ed. Hélène Aji (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 2003), pp. 225-238
• “A Defining Moment in Ezra Pound's Cantos: Musical Scores and Literary Texts” Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 157-182

Articles

• “Crossing the Borders of the Self in the Fiction of David Malouf” Sydney Studies in English 31 (2005): 76-93
• “'Stein Did That!' And Did That Until It Was Done” How 2 2.2 (2004)
• “Beckett's Ecstasy in Writing and Editing Watt” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 14 (2004): 495-506
• “The Question of Aesthetics in George Eliot's Middlemarch: 'A Study in Provincial Life'” Literature and Aesthetics 12 (2002): 83-91

Entries

An Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2005):

• “Arabic History”
• “History: European Enlightenment”
• “Philosophy: Ancient European”
• “Philosophy: Medieval and Renaissance European”
• “Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century to the Present European”