coagulation

Between workplans, notes, and scenarios, initially hypothetical, which facilitate the study of the project’s birth, and the finishing touches to a text all but complete and only grooming its appearance by fiddling with a few minor details in the definitive manuscript and at a proof stage, the rough drafts constitute the very universe of composition. They constitute the moment when the project passes form the state of hypothetical schema to the state of textualized verbal material and becomes involved in a succession of metamorphoses that, at a certain stage in the process, will produce the decisive watershed, turning possibility to necessity, probability to integrity. This could be termed the moment of the work’s coagulation.

(Biasi 1996, 30)

Contributed by Wout. View changelog.