A Retrospective
On Dec. 7, 2012, during the holiday
(i.e., Christmas) party for the English Department at Loyola University
Chicago, ill-advised and well-intentioned friends, in view of my impending
retirement, honored me with a retrospective of my four-and-a-half years as the
Martin J. Svaglic Chair of Textual Studies.
It was a pleasant, if mildly embarrassing, event that got me thinking
about what, if anything, I had done in my professional career that had
"made a difference" or "was worth remembering." Here are some candidates.
In textual studies I've published a lot of articles and three books. I've also created and presided over the creation of a 10-volume scholarly edition of W. M. Thackeray's works. And I've written two books on Thackeray and edited a third. There are other things possibly worth revisiting--not sure.
In textual studies, perhaps one or two
things in each book were important--judged in part by what people seem to have
taken from them.
In Scholarly
Editing in the Computer Age, already mentioned in this blog, perhaps the
most quoted chapter is the one on "Forms" which presents the
"orientations to text." The
idea that an editor's principles for choice of text as the basis for a new
edition and the principles for emending (or not emending) that text are
determined by one of various more or less incompatible views of the nature of
literary works and the material evidence of a work's various or unstable
existence. And there is one sentence in
the book which, although it was essentially written by my neighbor, Price
Caldwell, over a beer and barbecue in his back yard one day when I was trying
to explain what I was doing, is nevertheless one of the most important
sentences in the book: "From the
receiver's perspective a work is the imagined whole implied by all differing
forms of a text that we conceive as representing a single literary
creation---James's Roderick Hudson,
for example, in all its variant forms." At the time I did not realize that this view
is compatible with all the orientations to text, or that it would be in line
with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). No single item is a full representation of a
work; nor is a work the sum of all its expressions and manifestations; but it
is the whole that is implied by each item and by all items that belong to the
category "work." No wonder
there is so much controversy in textual and literary study--the center of our
mutual interest is variable and unstable and always will be.
In Resisting
Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning I believe the
most substantial contribution is in the chapter called "Work as Matter,
Concept, and Action." I was accused
both by a much admired friend and by well-known person whom I do not
particularly admire of having tried in that essay to define a work, to nail
down exactly what a work is, to lay down a grid that would capture and hold a
work in place, strapped, so to speak, to a gurney for dissection and
inspection. These thoughts struck me a
completely alien to what I was trying to do and from what I thought I had
explicitly set out to do. What I saw in
the arguments about textual criticism and scholarly editing and the
recriminations that flew back and forth in the literature and especially the
reviews of new editions was linguistically chaotic. Combatants used the words "work,"
"text," and "document" in different senses, such that the
fencing jousters appeared of occupy different stages, and what seemed to be
needed was a survey of all the definitions that were being used. I suppose the result looks like a grid, but
if so, it is a grid of usage in the profession.
I thought it would help the argument if whatever definition was being
used could be agreed upon before an argument proceeded. The observation about a "work" in
the previous paragraph, above, perhaps suggested that a survey of definitions
would be helpful, not in nailing down an unstable "object" but in
clarifying which concepts of "work" or "text" were being argued about.
In From
Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts the two
observations above weighed heavily in the idea that access to a digital
representation of a single form of a work was not an adequate representation of
a work. It seems to be an almost
universal notion that a work has been digitized if one copy has been transcribed or photographed.
This notion seems even more pernicious among users of internet
"works" than among librarians who think that if they have one copy of
Moby-Dick on the shelves they do not need a second or among literary critics who
conduct their study of a work with a cheap paperback in their study but then
check all their quotations against a scholarly edition which they cite,
apparently believing that if the bits they quote are from the scholarly
edition, then the fact that the rest of the book might have significant
variants in it does not matter.
I think the two most important chapters
of From G2G are the third, on script
act theory, and the fourth , on aspirations for electronic knowledge
sites. Although script act theory was
first introduced in Resisting Texts
it was much more fully articulated in From
G2G; nevertheless, it has not taken off in the sense of being picked up and
used by other scholars in understanding the multiple layers of meaning that
have been attached to the writers, producers, and readers through time and in
various places which nuance the contexts in which meaning is constructed. The
chapter on electronic knowledge sites has developed into HRIT (HumanitiesResearch Infrastructure and Tools) as a set of principles for the construction
of environments (CMSs), tools (software for manipulating and displaying texts),
and content (texts, images, and commentary).
The ideas fly in the face of certain practices now current for developing
digital archives and editions that settle for solutions requiring compromise of scholarly goals (e.g., nesting requirements in XML) or that
prevent open collaboration on digital surrogates for primary materials that
should be common property (e.g., the practice of embedding code in texts, thus
appropriating primary material at the git-go for one person's notion of its uses).
I might continue this later.
