Justin Halverson and Dr. Steven Sondrup, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature

During the week of 4–8 October 1999, the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University in cooperation with the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies hosted a small conference dedicated to comparative concepts of self, especially with regard to the various firstperson narrative approaches to those concepts. The conference was attended by scholars from all parts of the globe: from the United States, Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University), Janet Walker (Rutgers University), Eugene Eoyang (Indiana University), J. Scott Miller (BYU), and Steven P. Sondrup (BYU); from the Netherlands, Mineke Schipper (Leiden University); from India, Amiya Dev (Vidyasagar University); from Brazil, Tania Franco-Carvalhal (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul); from Israel, Ziva Ben-Porat (University of Tel Aviv); and from Mexico by way of Canada, Mario J. Valdés (University of Toronto).

My proposed project was to compile, edit, and prepare for publication the several papers presented at the conference. Their topics were as varied as their authors. Among the more general treatments of the topic were papers ranging from the Western modernist novel’s approach to the self to African forms of autobiography to the hybrid self that developed in Japan during the Meiji-period confrontation with Europe. More specific approaches to the intercultural challenges of defining the self included in-depth looks at Octavio Paz’s appropriation of Nahuatl concepts; the self as a narrator in contemporary Bengali literature, autobiography in the oeuvre of three important Brazilian authors, and Japanese and Ainu oral storytelling traditions.

The process of preparing a compilation of scholarly articles for publication includes several steps, each of which was (interestingly) complicated by the wide variety of paper topics cited above. The first task in the process is to verify all the sources cited in each paper. When dealing with a paper on a Western topic using English (or even common European language) sources, this is usually not a problem. However, when the texts cited range from Japan to Israel to Brazil to India, challenges arise. I became very familiar with the workings of the commendable BYU interlibrary loan office, as well as with several international internet resources, throughout the course of my searches.

Once source checking and an initial proof-reading is completed, the papers are ready to be laid out. I used Adobe’s new layout software, InDesign, for its capability to handle the two-bit fonts required to print many East Asian languages. After many struggles with the software, and learning that despite its advertising, it could not, after all, deal with these special fonts, I decided to postpone the insertion of textual citations in problematic alphabets (such as Hebrew, Chinese, and Bengali) until a better method could be found.

The laid out articles were then printed on the Docutech copier at the BYU Press’s Copy Center, and perfect-bound as proofs. The managing editors of the project, Steven P. Sondrup and J. Scott Miller (both on the BYU faculty) then took several copies of the bound proofs to the annual conference of the International Comparative Literature Association in early August 2000, where the book-in-progress was displayed before a very impressed Executive Committee. Also at the conference, contributors to the book received page proofs of their articles, upon which they will indicate any necessary corrections and/or emendations before resubmitting them to me for final publication at the BYU Press. I am currently waiting to receive the last of these corrected proofs, and hope to go to press with the final product no later than June 2001.

I very much enjoyed my project. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated, but it was far more interesting, too. I have benefited personally from solving the challenges mentioned above as well as from the opportunities I have had to interact personally with the authors in preparing their manuscripts. My project has also been beneficial for BYU by demonstrating to an international body of scholars the high professional quality of the work emerging from its students and faculty.