A West Virginia University doctoral student in English has had an essay accepted for publication in the distinguished British journal Culture, Theory and Critique.

Eddie Christies essay,”The Image of the Letter: From the Anglo-Saxons to the Electronic Beowulf,”analyzes digital technology that restored a 1,000-year-old manuscript containing the Old English poem”Beowulf.”

Culture, Theory and Critique, a journal that emphasizes the study of literary and cultural theory, is publishing a special issue about image and text. Christie submitted his essay in a response to a call for articles on this topic last summer.

Christies essay focuses on the digital imaging technology that is used to recover letters effaced by the erosion of the manuscript and low-tech binding techniques used in the past. His article argues that the use of such technology illustrates how society values archives, manuscripts and ultimately history.

“My article is a synopsis of my dissertation, which is concerned with the symbolic powers imputed to the alphabetical letter,”Christie said.”My work is concerned with the ideology of a modern culture invested in the capacity of technology to find reality.”

In February 2000, a group of professors from the University of Kentucky began a project titled”Digital Atheneum.”They reunited science and the humanities through their work to develop a digital library of previously damaged manuscripts that were unreadable. Using fiberoptic light to illuminate letters covered by the paper binding frames, they worked to digitize damaged manuscripts from the famous Cottonian collection in the British Library.

“I am interested by the idea of reading poetry in a version of English so old that you have to learn it like a foreign language,”Christie said.

A native of New Zealand, Christie came to WVU in the summer of 1997 to begin working on his Ph.D. He has his doctoral dissertation nearly completed and is currently working on the final revisions before defending it at the end of the semester. After graduation he plans to search for a position in academia.

“I was originally interested in British modernism and postmodern fiction, but I had always liked medieval literature,”Christie said.”After taking Patrick Conners class in Old English, I became fascinated by the many theoretical and practical challenges of studying early medieval literature.”