GHASSAN ALSERAYHI
MSc. Arch, M. Arch, B. Arch, Assoc. SCE
ARCHITECT + EDUCATOR + RESEARCHER
Echoes in the Margin: Ruskin’s Lamps as Threshold, Liminality, Admission
Abstract:
Scholarship on marginalia treats side notes and page margins as ancillary evidence of reception, useful for the reader studies but external to the "piece" or "work" proper (e.g., Genette's paratext). What these studies undermine is how margins actively govern passage between text, image, and world(s). The gap, therefore, concerns the following. First, the margin is rarely theorized as a "threshold" that produces (rather than merely borders) authorship, interpretation, and canonicity. Second, the field underestimates how editorial practices across editions reweigh a text's center over time. Taking John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) as a case study, the paper traces both the role of the margin under Ruskin's own authorship and the evolution of para-textual elements across nineteenth-century editions. It argues that marginalia functions as a threshold device that transforms mono-logic texts into dialogic fields of possibilities and potentials beyond the original work (Bakhtin). This device simultaneously redistributes the author’s role through editorial intervention (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1977) and effects micro-paradigm shifts as notes migrate from the periphery to the apparatus to the canon. A brief nineteenth-century editorial parallel to Emily Dickinson's handwritten dashes and their translation into printed em- and en-dashes clarifies how editorial intervention can "author" aspects of a work's meaning.
Framed through Janus’s bi-facing admission (Ovid, 2000), van Gennep’s tripartite rites of separation–limen–incorporation (van Gennep, 1960), Turner’s liminality and communitas (Turner, 1969), and Derrida’s Glas on margins and typographic framing, the paper examines how margins perform. It argues that margins stage admissibility, lateness, and incorporation, where reading becomes writing in the “limen.” It also shows that editorial practices intermittently harden marginalia into structure through typographic uptake in successive editions. In analyzing the book as an architectural treatise, the paper read marginal aphorisms, bolded passages, the author's preface, and appendices. It reads the plates as visual marginalia (detail-focused images with blurred borders) to demonstrate how edge/frame practices shape authorship and authority. Where documented in early drafts or notes, shifts in terminology (e.g., the initial naming of the "lamps" as "spirits") in the case of Ruskin register re-authoring at the margins. The discussion also highlights the political implications of what is centered and what is relegated to the margin.
Methodologically, the argument proceeds through direct comparative analysis of documented editions (1849, 1855, 1880), tracing how certain emphases evolve from Ruskin's own marginal glosses on proof sheets into running heads and footnotes. It then applies Sherman’s maniculess and Grafton’s footnote regimes to specific pages of the 1849 and 1880 editions and concludes with a Dickinson parallel anchored in the transformation of her manuscript dashes into printed em/en-dashes. This study is also grounded in textual and visual analysis. First, close comparative reading of Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) with later/collector editions and documented drafts, tracing how aphorisms, bolding, prefaces, appendices, and typographic emphasis move between margin, body, and apparatus; (2) plate-based image analysis of the treatise's detail-focused illustrations and their blurred borders, situated within contemporaneous media (daguerreotype, watercolor). Third, the discussion is clarified through established accounts of readerly and editorial devices, including maniculess (Sherman, 2008), footnote regimes and (Grafton, 1997), print variability. The paper recasts "marginalia" as an admission technology that governs access to the textual sanctum rather than a neutral or merely facilitative threshold.
Scholarship on marginalia treats side notes and page margins as ancillary evidence of reception, useful for the reader studies but external to the "piece" or "work" proper (e.g., Genette's paratext). What these studies undermine is how margins actively govern passage between text, image, and world(s). The gap, therefore, concerns the following. First, the margin is rarely theorized as a "threshold" that produces (rather than merely borders) authorship, interpretation, and canonicity. Second, the field underestimates how editorial practices across editions reweigh a text's center over time. Taking John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) as a case study, the paper traces both the role of the margin under Ruskin's own authorship and the evolution of para-textual elements across nineteenth-century editions. It argues that marginalia functions as a threshold device that transforms mono-logic texts into dialogic fields of possibilities and potentials beyond the original work (Bakhtin). This device simultaneously redistributes the author’s role through editorial intervention (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1977) and effects micro-paradigm shifts as notes migrate from the periphery to the apparatus to the canon. A brief nineteenth-century editorial parallel to Emily Dickinson's handwritten dashes and their translation into printed em- and en-dashes clarifies how editorial intervention can "author" aspects of a work's meaning.
Framed through Janus’s bi-facing admission (Ovid, 2000), van Gennep’s tripartite rites of separation–limen–incorporation (van Gennep, 1960), Turner’s liminality and communitas (Turner, 1969), and Derrida’s Glas on margins and typographic framing, the paper examines how margins perform. It argues that margins stage admissibility, lateness, and incorporation, where reading becomes writing in the “limen.” It also shows that editorial practices intermittently harden marginalia into structure through typographic uptake in successive editions. In analyzing the book as an architectural treatise, the paper read marginal aphorisms, bolded passages, the author's preface, and appendices. It reads the plates as visual marginalia (detail-focused images with blurred borders) to demonstrate how edge/frame practices shape authorship and authority. Where documented in early drafts or notes, shifts in terminology (e.g., the initial naming of the "lamps" as "spirits") in the case of Ruskin register re-authoring at the margins. The discussion also highlights the political implications of what is centered and what is relegated to the margin.
Methodologically, the argument proceeds through direct comparative analysis of documented editions (1849, 1855, 1880), tracing how certain emphases evolve from Ruskin's own marginal glosses on proof sheets into running heads and footnotes. It then applies Sherman’s maniculess and Grafton’s footnote regimes to specific pages of the 1849 and 1880 editions and concludes with a Dickinson parallel anchored in the transformation of her manuscript dashes into printed em/en-dashes. This study is also grounded in textual and visual analysis. First, close comparative reading of Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) with later/collector editions and documented drafts, tracing how aphorisms, bolding, prefaces, appendices, and typographic emphasis move between margin, body, and apparatus; (2) plate-based image analysis of the treatise's detail-focused illustrations and their blurred borders, situated within contemporaneous media (daguerreotype, watercolor). Third, the discussion is clarified through established accounts of readerly and editorial devices, including maniculess (Sherman, 2008), footnote regimes and (Grafton, 1997), print variability. The paper recasts "marginalia" as an admission technology that governs access to the textual sanctum rather than a neutral or merely facilitative threshold.
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