Notes on Teaching Textual Studies

Notes on Teaching Textual Studies

 (a session at the Shakespeare Studies Assoc. New Orleans, March 2016) 

I think that one reason for this session is to prove wrong the general notion that textual study us deadly boring to students.  Our own counter myth is that the monolithic marble monument which is the one true text of Shakespeare is itself boring and off-putting, not to say frequently wrong.  Neither of these narratives strikes me as wholly true, but our focus is on the question, can textual studies energize students' understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays.   The papers presented in this seminar show that it does.  It does so by several different paths. 

1. Examining the range of variant historical texts gives students permission to question the text by showing the tenuousness of the supposedly finished text and the vulnerability of the developing text in the hands of both genius and incompetent text handlers.  Permission to question is an essential element of learning.

2.  It gives students the individual responsibility of determining the significance of the play by asking them to choose among various texts.  This aspect is enhanced by the more familiar notion that performances fill in a great deal that is not explicit in the text.  The things that went without saying must have been well understood by Shakespeare's contemporaries and therefore went without saying.  They no longer go without saying and yet must now be acted out, performed in accordance with our best informed guesses about how to make the text live.  There may be wrong answers but there may not be a single one right answer either.  The explanations one reads in the footnotes ain't necessarily so.  And yet, some erudite reasoning on recondite information found in the seminar papers prepared for this session suggests that textual variation is not just a smorgasbord of choices to be made willy nilly according to uninformed guesstimate.   Research leads to better guesses.

3.  Confronting original material texts, even if only through images on a screen, gives students a clearer sense of the passage of time and of their own precarious temporal position on the shifting sands of the English language.  Our today, like Shakespeare's, soon becomes the murky past; modernized texts don't stay modern.   Like other doses of reality, this realization could be enervating or invigorating, but it is clear from the seminar papers that the realities of textual and verbal instability are not things we need to protect our students against.  (It might be worth pointing out that instability of text preceded any of our destabilizing moves.  The illusion of textual stability is just a mark of the textual ignorance with which many students and some of our colleagues approach what they call literature and we call a text.)

4.  Awareness of textual complexities gives students a clearer sense of the relationship between the written text and the spoken word.  Particularly this struck me in the examination of 15th and 16th century printers' symbols used to mean a variety of things that, at the time, were perfectly ordinary but which now seem strange to the untrained eye.  Spelling and punctuation carry similar lessons for us.  Learning to read is a never ending but liberating process.  Dismissing material evidence that we do not understand is a stupid way to study Shakespeare--literally.  It is not the case that textual criticism is the art of detecting that which we do not understand and replacing it with something we do.  That would reflect a love of ignorance.

5.  I asked myself why it is that the students described in these papers as well as my experience of forty years dragging alternative texts into classrooms--why do students always glom onto variants in texts.   I recall one of my classes cursed by the bookstore having substituted a cheap inferior text for the one I ordered. Upon comparing a passage in his text to the one in mine, a student in the back threw his text on the floor, pointed at my copy and said, "I want that one."   Students are interested, not only for the four reasons already given, I think, but for a more profound resonance that students have with the functions of variant texts in processing and understanding words.   It is what I tried to express at excruciating length in chapter three of From Gutenberg to Google and which I called rather grandiosely Script Act Theory.   It is that in understanding any text, whether written or spoken, the words of a sentence are understood in a particular way NOT because of what they are intrinsically but by how they contrast with what they are not but could have been, given the surroundings in which they are found.  Touchdown and Spinach are both nouns and can be grammatically correctly substituted in a sample sentence, but spinach is not something that can be shouted at a football game.  Context is old hat in interpretation.  Either we use the context we know to be the operative context of the text's origination or, in literature, if we don't know that context, we sometimes make one up.  That is how John Keats's  "Oh, Attic shape" in "Ode to the Grecian Urn" can remind us of the big vase in grandma's attic.  If we get context wrong, all sorts of wonderful adventitious things can happen.  But textual studies gives us the other important contrast--that between what is said or written and that which, in the given context, could have been said or written.  If you live in a green house I know it is not white or yellow or blue.  That is how I understand green house.  I am not confused about green houses for raising plants--that is not a viable alternative for the house you live in.  If you have sullied flesh I know it is not clean or soiled or solid or sallied.  That is how I understand sullied.   Textual variants give us some of the unspoken words at least as they were understood or misunderstood by someone close to the text's origin.   And since in Shakespeare's case we frequently do not know if the original word or the replacement was correct or if the  alternative was newly intended or if it was just a new mistake, the student gets to react to the variants in a very sophisticated way, because they have, from the beginning of their language use as babies, been testing every spoken and written word against its appropriate alternatives in the contexts in which the words are encountered.  That is how they are used to finding appropriate meanings.  We almost don't have to teach this thing.  The most tricky thing to get them to acknowledge is that experiencing two or more texts of a passage side by side, holding them in comparative and contrasting contemplation, is often more satisfyingly rich than rejecting one and sticking with the single monumentally marble one.   That might not be a perform-able richness, but it does play well in the mind.

6.  The consideration of variants in Shakespeare's text does not have to be restricted to those found in early Quartos and the Folio.  Once you get on a roll with this thing, the editorial speculative conjectures through the years becomes fair game, both for joy and disdain.   But it is worth pointing out again two important matters to be considered.  First, is it okay to approach textual variation with ignorance about their origins and contexts?  If so, then perhaps it does not matter what mashup students make of the text as long as they think it is fun, like a game.  My experience makes me think students soon tire of that game because there are no consequences; there is no standard against which to measure their success or failure.  Textual awareness, I have found, involves more than the realization that there are variants.  It involves the full range of what we call textual criticism.  A little knowledge is a dangerous things, so drink deep from the fonts of information available to us, including that often neglected fact that in some cases we just cannot know.  The editors our predecessors in the production of new texts for classroom use have been limited by two factors over which they had no control.  The first is the limitation placed upon them by the print media and publishers whose eye was on the bottom line.  They had to be brief.  The second is the editor's own ignorance and misunderstandings.  Misunderstanding feels exactly like understanding until it is properly acknowledged.  Often that acknowledgement comes after publication.  So treat your classroom edition with care.  But also treat previous editor's emendations as a resource of variants that extend those in the early record.

7.   Some minor recommendations: 

a. Assigning students "tasks" might be less conducive to good work than asking them to help you explore possibilities.  Doing tasks always bored me.  The assumption is that the only thing one will find is what the teacher already knew.  Why not save time and just tell me.  But exploring and helping--who knows what we will come up with.  However, giving students free rein to make stuff up might be less interesting than giving them free rein within the strict parameters of  logic and the rules of evidence. 

b. Extrapolating from a few  examples in one area of editorial ignorance to a blanket condemnation of eclectic editing I did not find to be very convincing.  Lost and unachieved texts, created out of the surviving textual record by critical analysis does not produce correct texts, but they do create contrasts to the surviving records.  It is good to remember that the variants among historical texts resulted from speculative emendation on the part of their editors, also.   

c. We probably do not need reminding that textual studies of original texts cannot be conducted on reprints or modern editions without recourse to original texts or at least to facsimiles of them.  Every edition claiming to reproduce the text of an original edition is itself a new completely re-contextualized material object reflecting our own time.  Unfortunately, that is true of digital facsimiles as well, though I have no idea how to avoid that.  We just have a lot of explaining to do.

Global Textual Scholarship

Global Textual Scholarship: An American View 

On March 18, 2015, at a symposium on textual studies in Japan, organized by Kiyoko Myojo and sponsored by Saitama University and Keio University, I gave the following talk.  The slides add nothing to the reading text.

                                           

            Textual scholars everywhere have some common objectives and some common obstacles.  SLIDE 2 Our objectives are to understand literature and represent it understandably to interested readers.   This means we write introductions and commentary and notes, which we think will increase another person's understanding and appreciation for the beauty or wisdom of literature.   It also means that we promote the creation of new copies of the texts of literary works.  Anyone who has compared in detail any copy of anything with its original can make a list of differences.  There are always differences.  Sometimes the differences are important.  And so we have two goals for our newly copied texts:  first, that they be accurate copies, and second, that we account for the important differences in copies before ours.  

            Common obstacles to our goals are ignorance, error, and poor judgment.  It takes uncommon skills to overcome these obstacles.   Sometimes we can only minimize the ill-effects of ignorance, error and poor judgment.  We have, however, tools that will help us.   We have investigative skills, proofreading skills, and analytical skills.   Our objectives and the skills needed to achieve them are shared by textual scholars globally.  Unfortunately, the obstacles of ignorance, error and poor judgment are also global.   

            The good side of textual studies, the side that investigates and exercises care, is not the same everywhere.  Textual scholars do not all agree about how to combat ignorance, error, and poor judgment.  They do not always agree about how to copy or edit or prepare texts for republication.  The methodsof textual scholarship have sometimes been culturally determined, such that textual scholarship, editorial principles, and interpretive criticism seem to have acquired national tendencies.   We may therefore think that there is a German way, a French way, and an Anglo-American way to conduct textual criticism.  If that is so, why should there not also be a Japanese method?

            My aim here is to suggest that the different tendencies associated with different countries are available to us all.   That is, I no longer believe that there is a method of textual criticism that is right for German literature and a different method that is right for American literature.  I do not think that there is a Western way and an Eastern way or that one is better than the other.  They may be different, but there are different things that a new edition can do.  We have choices.  Instead of associating one goal and method with a country, we can identify a number of different goals for textual scholarship, and associate with each goal a methodology that is suitable to its goal.  For that reason, I will be referring to a range of editorial goals, rather than to a range of countries in which one or another method is dominant.SUMMARY 1

            First, let me try to dissect textual scholarship in a series of steps.    SLIDE 3

1.  All textual evidence is documentary.  About literature,if one asks, "Where did that come from?" the ultimate answer is ALWAYS, "It came from a document, which may have been copied from another document."   When one has reached the earliest surviving document, one has reached the final shred of extant textual evidence.  We do not have time machines with which to ask authors in the past questions about what they are writing.   The bedrock of our work is facts.  SLIDE 4 Our facts are documentary.  Our documents are material.  Our texts are symbolic.  Textual meaning is interpretive.  Reading is interpretive.  Reading depends on skills for analyzing symbols recorded on material documents.   We are in a circle from which we cannot escape.  Most readers operate with minimal textual information; textual scholars require all the information.  SLIDE 5

2.   Therefore, the first task of textual scholarship is to find all the documents and understand the order of their descent from earliest times to now.    We begin with ignorance; we use our investigative skills, we collect documents on which are written the texts we wish to examine and edit.  We arrive at knowledge of documentary facts. Our enemies are error, fatigue, poor judgment (oh, and lack of money).   SUMMARY 2

3.  When a textual scholar has found and collected all the surviving documentary evidence, what is to be done with it?   We have reached the first point of difference among the world's textual scholars.  Instead of asking, "Which is the correct next step?"  SLIDE 6 Let us ask, "What are the possibilities?"  I think all of the possibilities I am about to list will be attractive to you, but the order of their attractiveness may vary from one person to the next.  Probably no editor will want to accomplish all of them--too much work.  SLIDE 7

a. Digitize images of all the documents.   That will make it possible, from anywhere in the world, to see any document side-by-side with any other document without traveling from Tokyo to Marburg and New York.  SLIDE 8

b.  Prepare a table of variants to show how all the documentary texts differ from one another.  SLIDE 9

c.  Write a textual history that explains the relationships among the variant documents and explains why we should care--why it is important to know.  SLIDE 10

d.  Transcribe at least one of the documents so that the variants list can be more easily used.  Or transcribe all the documents so that readers can select and read any one.  Transcribing all the documents will also make machine collation possible. SLIDE 11

e.  Edit one of the transcriptions to correct obvious errors.  This will preserve the text as a historical documentary text but will help readers avoid the distractions caused by scribal or compositorial errors.

So far no controversies.  SLIDE 12  I have described what Historical/Critical editions accomplish.  It is also what Anglo-American editors do before they start editing the work.  Some editors think that this is the point at which Anglo-American editors start ruining their work.   We will discuss that in a minute.  What we have so far: digital images, transcriptions, lists of variants, and the textual scholar's explanation of the textual history, the relationships among the documents, and an indication of why all of that is important.   That is basic work.  Every textual scholar should do it. SUMMARY 3

            But there are more possibilities. SLIDE 13  The truth is that what we have done so far replicates and explains the past.  It does not do anything about it.  Our scholarship shows who did well and who did poorly, but so far we have worked only with documents.  We have not addressed the question, how do  literary documents become literary works.  Most readers who love literature, who love to read, who are very good readers, do not care about documents.  They care about works.  Documents are not works.  They are the evidence for works.  A literary document becomes a work when a reader reads it, performs it.  A document is a material object; a work is a mind object--like mathematical abstractions, or unicorns, or thoughts.   Readers create mind objects from the evidence found in documents.  When the whole history of documents is flawed in the normal ways that copies are flawed, the editor replicates the flaws and the reader has to read through them or around them.  Perhaps the editor can do something to make a new document that is better evidence of the literary work than are any of the historical documents.  That idea is the basis for Anglo-American editing.  SLIDE 14  This gives textual scholars a new additional possible task: Do something with the facts. 

f.  Use analytical skills to identify the author's work and the work of those whose help was compatible with the author's purposes.  Then, edit an eclectic text that reflects those selected aspects of texts found in various documents.   For example, eliminate the homogenizing work of standardization and or eliminate censorship and compositors' mis-readings that marred the historical documentary texts.  Always provide a list of your emendations.  SLIDE 15

g.  Avoid editing altogether and, instead, write analytical essays about the creative development of texts from the way author's used their source and the way they revised from the earliest drafts though the most revised printed text.  And write about the interpretive consequences of variant texts in process.

SUMMARY 4

I have tried to list these possibilities in a progressive order.  SLIDE 16  With the exception of A (digitization of images),goals B, C, and D (variants lists, textual histories, and transcriptions)  seem necessary to finish before the other goals can be attempted.   The reason I put A (digitization) first is that, now in the digital age, it seems to me that it SHOULD be first.  (If you ask me, I'll tell you why later.)  In this progressive list of possibilities, I have avoided the question, "Which is the right way to conduct textual scholarship?"   Instead, the list supports a wish: "Yes, if there were time and money, we would like to see all of them."   There are two reason why there IS in fact both time and money.  That has not always been the case.  Editors have had to choose among these goals because editors have not had the time or the money to accomplish all of them,and because the print medium has placed upon editors certain requirements and limitation. One resulting tendency is that editors have often defended their own choice of goals and methods as the best solution for all editors. SUMMARY 5

            The result has been that Historical/Critical editing, often associated with Germany, but seen often in other European textual traditions, has focused on B, C, and E--making B (a textual apparatus of variants), C (textual histories), and D or E(a transcribed text, possibly with errors corrected) the end-point for scholarly editing.  There are many reasons to stop there, though most of these reasons have to do with print technology and no longer hold true in the digital age.  For many Historical/Critical editors, the scholarly edition produces a one-stop, printed source of historical information that can be used as the basis for other purposes, such as editing student editions or conducting genetic studies.

            Anglo-American editorial traditions, on the other hand, tended to focus attention on F (extracting an eclectic text that reflects the author's purposes better than did any historical text).   Anglo-American editors did all the work of B, C, and E, but they never thought they had the money to print and publish these steps in the process.  What the American granting agencies tended to fund were editions that fulfilled, as best that scholarly analytical skill could determine, the full fruition of Anglo-American authorship.  That required eclectic texts.

            Neither of these objectives of textual scholarship exhaust what students of literature want to know about documents and texts.   Critique génétique reflects investigative urges that are not fulfilled by collections of historical documentary facts and are not content with anyone else's notion of what the text should have been.   Instead, geneticists want to investigate the processes of textual development.  These include the processes of creativity, of selection, of corruption, of intervention, and of critical consumption.    To conduct such studies items B, C, D, and E are helpful, but in themselves areincomplete.  To a geneticist, F (the eclectic edition) was too narrowly focused on one way to distinguish right from wrong texts; geneticists were interested in all texts.SUMMARY 6

            Eclectic editions flourished in America more than elsewhere.   I will argue that, when the eclectic edition has been properly understood, it will be seen to have a legitimate place in the range of textual scholarship. We might even all wish to seeeclectic editions supported.   Textual scholarship is so complex and diverse thatwe might think there is enough work to do to establish the historical record and not enough time to try to fix the errors of history.  We say we do not have enough time or money.    But that is no longer true for two reasons.  SLIDE 17

            The first reason is that in the digital age the work of one editor or small group of editors can serve as the foundation for another or many other editors.  This was not true in the print world.  Print projects had to be defined from beginning to end and completed before publication.  Once published in print, a new project that wished to build on the accomplishments of the previous project had to begin production processes from the ground up.   Not so with digital projects.  If one starts a digital project by creating digital images of all the documents, one has a resource that will serve all subsequent textual projects.  That is true even if a new textual scholar finds a reason to go see the originals themselves.  I hope there will always be reasons and means to see original documents.  As substitutes for originals, however, digital images are as close as can be produced.   The next steps--transcriptions and collations and the preparations of textual histories--focus on the documentary record.  These steps establish the facts of the material and symbolic evidence.   Of course, transcribing texts is only as good as the proofreading;  collation tables are only as good as the design of the apparatus that displays them; and textual histories are only as good as the analytical skills of the textual historian.  But in all these tasks, it is the record of facts that counts.    Placed in a virtual archive--that is, a digital archive--this part of textual scholarship offers a valuable resource for further work in the ultimate task of understanding literature and representing it understandably to readers.

            The second reason that we now have sufficient time and money do conduct all the work of textual scholarship is dependent on the first.   Whereas in the print era, a project need to be planned and completed before publication, in the digital age, a project does not need to be planned from beginning to end and completed before being "published"--or rather before being launched on the Internet.   If we start with the foundation of a virtual archive, then a generation or more of other textual scholars can use the images, transcriptions, collations, and textual histories in order to generate additional scholarship and criticism.   The last time I was in Japan I talked about HRIT (Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools) as one environment designed to host a virtual archive and to encourage and host scholarly contributions to the textual scholarship needed to transform an archive into representations of literature for interested readers.  There are other platforms that are now even more advanced than the one I envisioned.  The most interesting of them to me is AUST-ESE developed in Australia, originally for Australian Electronic Scholarly Editing, but available for use with other literatures--at least other literature using the Roman alphabet.SUMMARY 7

            Time and money need no longer be measured by how much time or money an individualeditor or a single project has available in the foreseeable future.  Time and money now extends beyond our vision for virtual archives that serve as a the basis for further editions, textual scholarship, and interpretive criticism.  Eventually, our project will become their project and may, someday be finished.  SLIDE 18

It will have images of all the historical documents.

Transcriptions of all the historical documents.

A collation of variants among the historical documents.

An explanation of the transmission of texts from document to document.

An explanation of the nature of textual variation:   who made the changes? why they made the changes?  which changes were accidental and which were on purpose? 

Commentary and notes on the text. SUMMARY 8

            I'll end with a short accountof why I believe in the value of eclectic editions.  I was trained to believe that eclectic editions could be definitive and stand on their own to represent both the history and the achievement of textual art.  They are NOT definitive.  But they can be valuable.I understand eclectic editions now as contributions to the overall achievement of textual scholarship.

            The English author, William Makepeace Thackeray, worked for ten years as a journalist and writer of travel books before his first great novel, Vanity Fair, was published in 1847-1848.  During that time he worked with many publishers and proofread his work as typeset by many compositors.  Thackeray knew the printing and publishing trades because he was friends with his publishers and familiar with the printing offices.   That is one part of Thackeray.

       Thackeray was also a smooth stylist, a perfect speller, and a rapid writer, whose punctuation is barely adequate for publication.  Anyone looking at Thackeray's manuscripts knows they cannot be published as written with any hope that readers will think well of the printer.   But Thackeray did punctuate his manuscripts according to the rules he learned in school.   These rules were rhetorical, designed to help readers by suggesting pauses of different lengths as one reads aloud.   The problem is that Thackeray did not always put all the quotation marks in, sometimes his periods look like dashes, and sometimes his ear for the sound of the sentence did not match what was conventionally expected.  Hence, his manuscript punctuation needed some fixing up.

            Compositors in England at the mid-19th-century were paid by the amount of type that they set.  They were required to correct errors for no pay at all.  And they were given Thackeray's manuscripts exactly as he wrote them.  Compositors were skilled workmen.  They worked as fast as they could.  They fixed Thackeray's punctuation by following their own rules.  Those rules were grammatical rules designed to help readers by indicating the grammatical structure of sentences.  The quotation marks and periods are in place.   But the pauses of different lengths which Thackeray had indicatedwere mostly changed to grammatical indications of sentence structure.   The result was that the printed texts have far more punctuation than was needed.    SLIDE 19

            The eclectic text I wanted had Thackeray's manuscript punctuation, cleaned up somewhat, but not to the extent imposed by compositors.   It also had the revisions that Thackeray made in proofs and which showed up only in the printed texts.    The eclectic text does not substitute for, nor replace, the historical documents.  Instead it does something that what no historical document does, which is to representThackeray's writing as it would have been had the compositors been less hurried and more in tune with Thackeray's ear for style.

            As textual scholars, we share many tasks, we share many standards.  But we do not all want to accomplish the same goal in editing.  And no matter how you edit, there is always something your edition cannot do.  So, define your goal and explain your method.  If your work is accurate and your method is clear, then you have a right to do what you did.  But please do not pretend that you have had the last word.  All the editions that went before you, and all the editions that will come after you, have some appeal that yours does not have.  And yours will have an appeal that the others do not have--if you are accurate and clear.SUMMARY 9

            

A Retrospective

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.

Inflexibility of Social Editing

   The inflexibility of the social editorial agenda, mentioned in the previous post, perhaps needs a word or two of explanation. Social editing was developed in opposition to critical editing that pursued strategies to establish a single reading text that best reflected the author's wishes for the work. Critical editing is a very sophisticated and self-conscious set of principles supporting a range of procedures, but it is easily reduced to an absurd caricature of itself. Two developing trends made it almost necessary to caricature critical editing as an idealist, absolutist, positivist, unsophisticated attempt to grasp and nail down the impossible. These trends were literary theory's rejection of formalist criticism (including New Criticism) and a Marxist critical elevation of the means of production as the most important aspect of literary history.  The first undermines the notion of the author as the controlling genius of the work; the second undermines the notion of any individual having final say in what is a social endeavor. The results have been a loss of interest in the so-called Romantic genius myth of authorship and a focus on the multiple industrial processes of book production. From an editorial perspective, these results require that critical editing and its "history defying" practice of creating "new texts that never before existed as fish flesh or fowl" be rejected in favor of social editing strategies that find each version of a work as interesting and important as any other version because it is social history and not imaginative genius that is the object of scholarship. Critical editing is replaced, not only by a newly defined investigation of the history of the text, but by a rigid anti-emendation approach to the texts designed to respect the work of all who participated in the production process regardless of their skill, motives, or agendas.  The relative skills and agendas of the production personnel could be investigated but the editor is interdicted from adjudicating value when editing (or rather not-editing) the text.

   I suppose that my potted history and description of social editing is just as oversimplified and caricatured as those that one encounters frequently now about the "copy-text school of editing," the "eclectic method," or the "discredited practices of Bowers and Tanselle". But my point is not to discredit "social editing" nor do I use "literary theory" or "Marxist criticism" in any pejorative way whatsoever. These have been hugely useful in helping to identify blind spots and weaknesses in scholarly editing, but their oversimplified and inflexible application to scholarly editing is now to be deplored just as strongly as the oversimplified strategies of critical editing were deplored by Jerry McGann in the 1980s and 90s. Speed Hill's approving quotation of McGann's remark that copy-text editing was dead as a dodo is nothing more than an indication of how a trend in editing procedures sometimes becomes a fad followed for its rhetorical force and not for any strength of argument.

   It was a great relief to me to see D. F. McKenzie's scholarly edition of the Works of William Congreve published because it declared itself to be an eclectic edition and follows with perspicacity and delicate balance the best practices of critical editing, relegating to the introduction and notes his considerable knowledge of the sociology of the texts he was editing to conform to Congreve's best intentions for the works.   It is my opinion that McKenzie's arguments in favor of an extended sociology of text have been hijacked in favor of social editing, when in fact they simply support an extended interest in a broader field of bibliography that can be useful in support of any legitimate kind of scholarly edition.

Do We Need a New Book on Scholarly Editing?

Do we need a new book on scholarly editing?

Following up on my first blog entry about the possibility of producing a 4th revised edition of Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, I think we are at a point in the development of electronic scholarly editions to justify the idea. SECA was addressed to serious scholars who saw a need to edit a text but who had no training in scholarly editing. Some of the best textual critics (and some of the worst) come from the ranks of those untrained in bibliography and textual criticism but whose scholarly research rendered them unhappy with the existing editions of works they have investigated.

   Following the publication of the first three editions of SECA, I wrote (in part by gathering up scattered essays, revising them and adding new chapters) Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (1997), this time trying my best to answer my own remaining questions about the nature of literary texts and the consequences of a range of editorial strategies that could be adopted for scholarly editing. The best compliments I have ever gotten about my writings have been about this book from scholarly editors whose works I have respected. I have also gotten dismissive remarks from folks who think it is too hard to follow, especially its key chapter, "Text as Concept, Matter, and Action". But I was wrong about that book being the place to work out my final thoughts on scholarly editing.

   Following developments in electronic scholarly editing, and in particular going to work as a colleague of Peter Robinson at De Montfort University, revitalized my attention to the potentials for electronic editing. However, it does not take a rocket scientist to see very quickly what was wrong with all the electronic edition prototypes that had developed by 2005: they were either developed by serious textual critics with poor technical support (ugly but useful) or by ersatz textual critics with wonderful technical support (pretty but amateurish scholarship). Or they were just still stuck in the mire of decisions that had been made in the 1990s: stuck with HTML or XML's hierarchies that prevented a swathe of things scholarly editors want to do; committed to transcriptions because images were too slow; and mired also in the inflexibility of the social editorial principles espoused primarily by Jerry McGann who was, without any doubt, the most influential textual critic of the last twenty years.

   So, I wrote From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (2006), trying my best to explore what was meant by representing in a new medium the complexities of an old medium. Driving my thoughts were a respect for the illusive past--the history of particular literary works in the print era--and a deep curiosity about what could be accomplished in new digital media. What I mainly discovered is how much I did not know in areas where I thought I had known enough. The book is, in many ways, the work of an amateur in fields related to textual criticism. I despair of ever knowing enough to write a professional book on the subject. A number of people have been kind enough to say that they have learned things from me in that book, but I fear I have "shared ignorance" with them, as well. Much of From G2G looked to the future, focusing on what was wrong with the first two or three generations of electronic scholarly editing and imagining what would be better. Six years later, having spent a lot of time with computing professionals at Loyola University Chicago, working on HRIT (Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools), it might be time for a new book rather than a reprise of SECA. The research side of textual criticism has not changed; the delivery side and the tools for developing that side are still at unsatisfactory development stages.

Agency

Who did this? The Cult of Agency

    If one were to apply to everyday life the principles of interpretation of narratives implied by Foucault's and Derrida's notions of author or author function in literary criticism, one would cease to be interested in who committed the murder or who stole The Scream or who caused the fire, or who cooked the delicious omelet we had for breakfast.  There would be no giving of credit where credit was due or assigning of blame.  The burning question would be, what is the most interesting account of events that can be extracted from this body found on the steps leading into the Sydney Opera House.

     The urge to know who did some thing does not reflect a mere desire for closure--if we answer the question we can move on to the next question--as if all aspects of life were an exam paper set before us to pin down exact knowledge gained from study or to provide an argument supporting a lesson from experience.

      The desire to know the answer to the question who did this? is a need, not a just a desire, because without that answer it is impossible to understand what was meant by the narrative in question.  It is not difficult and not impossible to come up, from imagination, with scenarios that would explain the narrative.  That, in fact, is easy.  The difficulty is coming up with an explanation that corresponds to all the information that can be gleaned about the event and thereby stands a chance of grasping what meant by the speaker/writer.  And knowing who did this is an important aspect of every narrative, even if that answer is, the person who did this wishes to remain anonymous.  The real obstacle that frustrates one's search for an understanding is the inability to know who did this, or, worse, the false identification of the agent involved.

      It is, of course, true that finding out who murdered the person whose body was found on the Opera House steps will not revive the corpse.  Nor will apprehending and punishing the perpetrator restore order and assuage sorrow among those who knew the victim.  Nor will it prevent any further acts of violence by others.  At least, it never has.

      But it is true that identifying the agent of any action puts that action in relationship to a context and history that forces us to account for the action in a particular way.  Whether the action is a murder or an act of kindness, whether it was a typo or an emendation in a text, the identity of the person who did the act helps us assess the value or damage done.   For some, if the death was caused by lethal injection under the eyes of the law exacting its pound of flesh from a criminal, that circumstance makes the murder okay--for some.  For some, if that alteration in the text was made by the publisher's editor in an attempt to improve the marketability of an author's work, the change has a standing that it does not have if the change was introduced by a careless compositor who, in haste, misread the copy or tried to remember too long a phrase when setting type.

      In life and in textual studies, one cannot always tell or figure out who did this.  One might be cast back upon circumstantial evidence, which is never conclusive, or be tempted to make guesses based on past experiences or expected patterns of behavior, which is just speculation, though the speculators always say their judgments are "informed".  We must admit "I was not there" and so our attempts to determine who did this are constructions (I deliberately avoid saying REconstructions) of plausible scenarios.  For a vast majority of narratives in life, including textual studies, we know beyond doubt who did it.  We recognize the hand writing. The change was initialed.   For another tranche of actions we can narrow down the possibilities such that, while there can be doubt, there is usually no difference of opinion among those who have studied the case.  Nevertheless, doubt remains.  And for other actions we know that something happened, but we have no evidence tilting the scales of probability in favor of one actor over another.

     When we are reasonably sure of the actor, we have a door opened to us to interpret the act in the light of agency.  When we do not know, we must consider the differences that would result depending on who the actor was.

Tag Lines

Tag Lines

 9 June 2010



I'm sometimes fascinated by the role of tag phrases in our lives. I grew up in a house where a new verse of scripture was to be memorized every day. Tag lines from that experience still crop up (e.g., be sure, your sins will find you out). Country and Western music, and perhaps popular music of all kinds, provide the "words we live by" (stand by your man, or all you need is love). Poetry and novels are full of lines we remember and apply apart from their original contexts (e.g., find out what that kid wants and give it to him or Do you love me? Do I WHAT?). These things have the force of clichés--which is to say we dismiss them as soon as we think of them.

Here are some tag lines that keep cropping up for me relative to textual studies:
1. Where did that come from? It is the basic question of the sceptical academic. In textual studies, the answer is always, ultimately, some document--not a picture of one; the actual document. When there are no further answers to, where did that document come from, you've reached the end of the trail, but not the end of the questions about it.
2. What goes without saying? Usually we say "it" goes without saying, and because it does go without saying, we don't say what "it" is. For written documents, our ability to know and apply what went without saying fades and gets reinvented in new forms in new readings or by new readers.
3. That is very good--but it isn't good enough. Not specific to textual studies, this line nevertheless seems very useful in acknowledging achievements while setting the bar high. It is the obverse, with the same effect as the next--
4. A pedant is one whose standard of accuracy is higher than your own. My father had an old joke that never failed to make him laugh. There were these two old Quaker men who had been friends all their lives (pun intended, I suppose). The one said to the other: Everyone is queer but me than thee--and sometimes I wonder about thee.