(Re)creating Lili Elbe: Man into Woman

  • February 22, 2017
  • 12:30 PM - 1:30 CST
  • CTSDH, 3rd Floor, Loyola Hall
  • Dr. Kyle Roberts, kroberts2@luc.edu
  • Not open to the public.
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    CTSDH, 3rd Floor, Loyola HallIn 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries to become Lili Elvenes, commonly known as ¿Lili Elbe.¿ Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man into Woman) is the first full-length narrative of a subject who undergoes a surgical change in sex. The re-edited German edition, entitled Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht (a man or person changes his sex), was published in 1932. In 1933 two English-language translations of the German edition (published nearly simultaneously in Britain and the U.S.) restored the Danish title, adding a lengthy subtitle: Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). The Man Into Woman Project is producing the first comparative scholarly edition of this work, to be published in Bloomsbury Publishing¿s Modernist Archives series, with a digital component hosted by Loyola University Chicago Libraries. For textual scholars, this work poses particular challenges. Its distributed authorship, its subject who changes sex during the narrative, and its existence in three languages and four variant versions make it especially rich for textual analysis, and especially challenging for digital encoding and indexing. This Wednesday, February 22nd, a group of Loyola Chicago's CTSDH all-stars, Pamela Caughie, Maria Palacio, Elizabeth Hopwood, and Emily Datskou, will discuss these challenges and the work they are doing to prepare the digital component.