Emily Dickinson Online Archive

Adam C.
The Emily Dickinson Online Archive officially opens on Wednesday. The Archive offers the chance to examine the Belle of Amherst's every poem in her own handwriting from the comfort of your computer. A cooperative effort of several institutions, the Archive may serve as a model for similar endeavors in the future. Enigmatic Dickinson Revealed Online<\a>
From The New York Times, October 22, 2013
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. inaugurate
    commence officially
    The online Emily Dickinson Archive, to be inaugurated on Wednesday, promises to change all that by bringing together on a single open-access Web site thousands of manuscripts held by Harvard University, Amherst College, the Boston Public Library and five other institutions.
  2. intrigue
    a crafty and involved plot to achieve your ends
    But the project, organized and financed by Harvard, has also generated enough behind-the-scenes intrigue to fill an imaginary Journal of Emily Dickinson Studies Studies, as one board member jokingly put it.
  3. faction
    a dissenting clique
    “The scholarship with any major figure produces factions and divisions,” said Christopher Benfey, a Dickinson scholar at Mount Holyoke College, who is not involved with the project.
  4. quarrel
    an angry dispute
    “But with Dickinson, the truly bizarre thing is the quarrel has been handed to generation after generation after generation.”
  5. enigmatic
    not clear to the understanding
    The trouble began when Dickinson died, in 1886, leaving behind just 10 published poems and a vast and enigmatic handwritten paper trail, ranging from finished-seeming poems assembled into hand-sewn books to fragments inscribed on advertising fliers, envelope flaps, brown household paper, even a chocolate wrapper.
  6. inscribe
    carve, cut, or etch into a material or surface
    The trouble began when Dickinson died, in 1886, leaving behind just 10 published poems and a vast and enigmatic handwritten paper trail, ranging from finished-seeming poems assembled into hand-sewn books to fragments inscribed on advertising fliers, envelope flaps, brown household paper, even a chocolate wrapper.
  7. cache
    a secret store of valuables or money
    After finding a cache of writings in a locked chest, Dickinson’s sister Lavinia gave them first to Susan Dickinson, the wife of their brother, Austin, to organize and publish.
  8. curator
    the custodian of a collection, as a museum or library
    “I’m disappointed to be pulled back to a situation from the past, where ownership is the most important thing,” said Leslie M. Morris, the curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard and the project’s general editor.
  9. arcane
    requiring secret or mysterious knowledge
    Dickinson scholars have long hotly argued over questions like her sexuality and her reasons for not publishing, along with issues that might strike ordinary readers as bafflingly arcane, from the precise angle and length of her dashes to the significance of the way she stacked the pages of her handmade books before sewing them together.
  10. reaffirm
    assert once again
    “What this site does is reaffirm that Franklin’s text is the ultimate authority, instead of opening it up,” Mr. Kelly said.
  11. genre
    a kind of literary or artistic work
    “She was continually challenging the boundaries of genre,” said Marta Werner, a professor at D’Youville College in Buffalo and the creator of “Radical Scatters,” a 1999 digital project based on the scraps, which are mostly held by Amherst.
  12. sheer
    complete and without restriction
    Such matters may seem irrelevant to people who come to the Web site for the sheer pleasure of looking at Dickinson’s often startlingly beautiful manuscripts (some festooned with dried flowers or doodles), or comparing the poems as they appeared in her handwriting to printed versions in six published editions, including Mr. Franklin’s.
  13. avant-garde
    radically new or original
    Meanwhile, the arty, avant-garde Dickinson is getting her due elsewhere.
  14. arresting
    commanding attention
    To some scholars, however, focusing on Dickinson’s more visually arresting fragments exaggerates her isolation from the literary conventions of her time.
  15. idiosyncratic
    peculiar to the individual
    Of course, Ms. Miller added with a laugh, the unprecedented visibility of the manuscripts may just lead to more scholarship focused on the idiosyncratic, handwritten Dickinson.
  16. aura
    distinctive but intangible quality around a person or thing
    There’s an aura to these things.”
Created on Tue Oct 22 23:52:57 EDT 2013 (updated Wed Oct 23 00:14:02 EDT 2013)

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