Amanda Golden
Since 2001, I have been studying Sylvia Plath's reading, teaching, and the annotated books in her personal library. My book Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2017) addresses the history of modernism in academic institutions, analyzing writers’ reading and teaching strategies during and after the first half of the twentieth century. Following an introduction examining modernist writers’ responses to and redefinitions of annotation practices (including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound), the chapters devoted to Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton consider their underlining and marginalia throughout their personal libraries alongside such materials as their course notebooks, teaching notes, and students’ accounts of their courses. In its treatment of midcentury poets’ sustained engagement with modernism, Annotating Modernism demonstrates that modernism is not a discrete literary period but a discourse that is the result of institutionally situated processes.