The magnificent response from the teachers has made it possible for 24 articles to be printed and distributed to the participants in June 1999. After the course, a book entitled Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition will be edited on the basis of the Preprints and published probably by the Finnish Literature Society. The idea behind the Preprint project was to lower the threshold for fruitful discussion at the plenary sessions. English to a totally unprepared audience coming from a score of different academic traditions with limited knowledge of the subject at hand. Prepublication makes the performer and the audience more equal.
Questions begin to take shape in the mind of the reader well before the actual performance.
Prepublication goes hand in hand with the sharper performative focus and limitation of time. It is relatively useless to read out a text already consumed by the audience. Instead, it becomes important to delineate the key problems and draw attention to the main results, perhaps with some schematic illustration of the argument. There is more time for additional information provoked by questions from the floor or spontaneously offered by the speaker. Discussion will continue the process started by the paper.