Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant's 1984 Reading of "Grippes and Poche"

Abstract

At lunchtime on 14 February 1984, Mavis Gallant read her 1982 New Yorker short story “Grippes and Poche” at Simon Fraser University in a lecture hall of faculty and students. In May 2019, the authors of this article discovered that a recording of this event existed in the SFu Archives and requested its digitization. Two years later, in March and June 2021, we presented the archival audio as an “audio edition” in two episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. In the first episode, we presented the reading with some contextual and biographical material; in the second, we attempted to reconstruct the event through the evidence provided by the contents of the recording, interviews with its organizers, additional archival information we uncovered, and even the tape itself. Framing these episodes as an audio edition required that we respond to Jason Camlot’s claim that, “To think critically about sound recordings as literary works, we need to explore the historically specific convergences between audio-recording technologies, media formats, and the institutions and practices of the literary context” (4). In print, critical editions of literary works imbue them with institutional value; approaching a sound recording through the lens of scholarly editing practices both appropriated that institutional value and raised questions about the print-based assumptions embedded in those practices. Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant’s 1984 Reading of “Grippes and Poche”