Introduction

In an age of ubiquitous computing, the act of writing nearly always involves some form of processing. We no longer compose: we cut and paste; we arrange and hyperlink; we track changes. While the act of piecing together and assembling text is now commonplace, from the field of the digital humanities to the commands of today’s word processors, it is still seen as worlds apart from high literature and its aesthetic preoccupations. The introduction upsets this narrative by revealing where some of the twentieth century’s best-known novelists, from Marcel Proust to Samuel Beckett, conducted early text processing techniques as they generated their manuscripts. In so doing, they performed what the introduction defines as paper processing: an analog antecedent to the word processing and text analysis conducted today with computers. Instead of looking to computers as sources of inspiration, these authors turned to twentieth-century media as they devised their experimental writing methods, from simple cut-and-paste operations to more baroque innovations. Rethinking common divisions between literary creation and technical experimentation, the introduction recovers a pre-history of humanities computing in the material manuscripts used to innovate the twentieth-century novel.