Theories of the Text

560 Pages·1999·6.57 MB·English

by  D. C. Greetham

Title Pages
Theories of the Text
D. C. Greetham
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198119937
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Theories of the Text
(p.ii) (p.iii) Theories of the Text
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Title Pages
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© D. C. Greetham 1999
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Dedication
Theories of the Text
D. C. Greetham
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198119937
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) FOR EVA
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Preface
Theories of the Text
D. C. Greetham
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198119937
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.001.0001
(p.vi) (p.vii) Preface
This book confronts the very idea of boundaries for discussion in textual study,
and is therefore the product of repeated crossings and wearing down of
boundaries during the last decade and more of my professional life. It is thus
enormously indebted to those who have promoted such crossings institutionally
and intellectually, and to those who have been hospitable in the various
territories where I have found myself.
Several administrators and colleagues at the CUNY Graduate Center and
elsewhere have thus actively encouraged the experiences that have resulted in
this book. They include the late Harold M. Proshansky, former President of the
Center, and his successor Frances Degen Horowitz; Provosts Steven M. Cahn
and Geoffrey Marshall; English Ph.D. Program Executive Officers Allen
Mandelbaum, John T. Shawcross, Morton N. Cohen, Lillian Feder, Michael Timko,
Martin Stevens, Joseph Wittreich, William Kelly, and Richard McCoy—all of
whom have embodied an administration eager to question disciplinary
boundaries and to allow faculty to move freely about in various scholarly
enterprises (as well as to give them time to mount such projects), a movement
that was always promoted by the competence—and endurance—of the late Lynn
Kadison as executive assistant of the English program. I am similarly grateful to
those colleagues in other disciplines at CUNY who have, in formal classroom or
colloquium, or informal discussion, provided me with so much material
stimulation (in addition to the raw facts of reference and citation) on which this
book depends. These include Stanley Aronowitz, Allan Atlas, Barry S. Brook,
Marvin Carlson, Burton Pike, Anthony Pipolo, and Leo Treitler. Similarly, my
colleagues in an English program that encompasses all (and more) of the various
theoretical dispensations covered here have been generous with consultation
and, again, with active participation in and out of the seminar room. They
include Meena Alexander, John Brenkman, Mary Ann Caws, Edmund (p.viii)
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Preface
Epstein, Angus Fletcher, David Gordon, N. John Hall, Alfred Kazin, Norman
Kelvin, Nancy K. Miller, Joan Richardson, Neal Tolchin, Steven Urkowitz, and
Gordon Whatley. Two CUNY colleagues and friends I must single out, for both
Gerhard Joseph and W. Speed Hill, in addition to provoking and assisting much
of what follows, also read large tracts of my text, in one or other state of
disrepair, and gave valuable advice. And the basic precepts and actual
performance of this book have been tested and improved by exposure to several
generations of graduate students in seminars on bibliography and textual theory,
just as the accuracy of the book has been assisted by the assiduous checking and
suggestions of several research assistants, including Thane Doss, Page Delano,
Beth Haddrell, Jon Hartmann, Lauren Kozol, Shawn O’Toole, Miriam Rodriguez,
Chris Varga, Bonnie Walker, and Carl Whithaus. I am especially grateful to Ms
Kozol for having checked all the citations against sources and having discovered
some interesting textual (Freudian?) slips and to Mr Hartmann, Ms Haddrell, Ms
Rodriguez, Mr O’Toole, and Mr Withaus for having checked proofs and helped in
the preparation of the index. Beyond CUNY, there is an array of scholars and
friends who have advanced the text of the book, either by having read and
commented on parts of it (in formal conference panels or as editors of
publications in which earlier versions were published) or by having encouraged
my interdisciplinary and cross-cultural aims in conference, committee,
correspondence, or conversation. They include William Andrews, Terry Belanger,
Betty T. Bennett, Charles Blyth, George Bornstein, the late Fredson Bowers, Jo
Ann Boydston, Ronald Broude, John Burrow, Philip Cohen, Mario Di Cesare, A. S.
G. Edwards, Kelvin Everest, Charles B. Faulhaber, the late John L. Fennell,
Richard J. Finneran, Stanley Fish, David C. Fowler, Hans Walter Gabler, Philip
Gossett, Joseph Grigely, Michael Groden, Ralph Hanna III, John Hollander, T. H.
Howard-Hill, John Kidd, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Jerome J. McGann, D. F. McKenzie,
James McLaverty, Gerald MacLean, Steven Mailloux, Anne Middleton, J. Hillis
Miller, Ira Nadel, Barbara Oberg, Lawrence Rainey, Donald H. Reiman, Richard
Ryerson, M. C. Seymour, Peter L. Shillingsburg, Sandra Sider, Brenda R. Silver,
Mary B. Speer, Gary A. Stringer, G. Thomas Tanselle, Gary Taylor, Alan G.
Thomas, Ann Thompson, James Thorpe, David Vander Meulen, James L. W. West
III, Fredric W. Wilson, Elizabeth H. Witherell, and David Yerkes. Two (p.ix) of
these textuists are responsible for having officiated over my editorial baptism:
John Hollander, in whose graduate seminar on seventeenth-century poetics it
was a requirement that every student first produce an edition of a lyric from
manuscript; and M. C. Seymour, who gave me my first professional editorial
assignment on the Clarendon edition of Trevisa’s Properties of Things. To both I
offer my thanks for having started me on the techne of scholarly editing, on
which this study of textualities now depends. I am similarly grateful to the
contributors to two recent collections of mine, Scholarly Editing: A Guide to
Research and The Margins of the Text for having provided me with so many
exempla of textual problems in fields (ranging from Arabic to Sanskrit) with
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Preface
which I would otherwise have remained entirely innocent. Specific citations of
my plunderings occur in the text.
To all of these distinguished practitioners in text and textualisms I submit this
book as partial thanks for their encouragement, even (or perhaps especially)
when that encouragement has taken the form of criticisms that sent me back to
my text and forced me to reconsider. Whatever remains that is inaccurate,
unsubstantiated, or ill-argued is, of course, solely my responsibility.
I also thank my editor at Oxford University Press, Andrew Lockett, for his
forbearance and help at various points in the development of this project, editor,
Sophie Goldsworthy, desk editor, Helen Gray, and copy-editor, Heather Watson,
for their advice and ministrations on my text, and three anonymous readers for
the Press whose persuasive critiques made this book far better than it would
otherwise have been. For my wife, Eva Resnikova, I reserve that thanks to which
only a generous, solicitous, and loving spouse can lay claim; suffice it to say that
without her this book would not exist at all.
New York City and Lenox, Massachusetts
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List of Figures
Theories of the Text
D. C. Greetham
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198119937
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.001.0001
(p.xii) List of Figures
1. Billy Harlem/Lin Lin, Guernica/Beijing. 33
2. Jakobson’s diagram for linguistic communication. 45
3a and b. Renoir, At the Concert, after conservation and under infrared
light. 58–9
Courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, and the Trustees of Mount Holyoke College, South
Hadley, Massachusetts.
4. J. C. Penney logo since 1902. 65
Courtesy of William C. Brown Publishers.
5. Pages from Randall McLeod, ‘Information on Information’, and Avital
Ronell, The Telephone Book. 149–51
Courtesy of Randall McLeod, AMS Press Inc., Avital Ronell, and the
University of Nebraska Press.
6. Barthes’s diagram of second-order shift. 276
7. The Dunciad and a contemporary scholarly edition. 281
Courtesy of James McLaverty, Studies in Bibliography, and the Trustees
of the British Library.
8. Whitgift: the use of typography in discourse. 283
Courtesy of W. Speed Hill.
9. Dearing’s rings. 294
Courtesy of Vinton A. Dearing and the University of California Press.
10. The Norton Scores: opening measures of Tristan und Isolde 306–7
Courtesy of W. W. Norton & Co.
11. The Prelude parallel-text edition. 316–19
12. Sample radial/dispersed reading of a supplement. 330
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List of Figures
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Introduction
Theories of the Text
D. C. Greetham
Print publication date: 1999
Print ISBN-13: 9780198119937
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.001.0001
Introduction
Textual Theory and the Territorial Metaphor
D. C. Greetham
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119937.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The book aims to show that bibliography is not a safe positivist redoubt resistant
to the onslaughts of post-structuralism, culture criticism, and so on, but that the
gates are already open and the traffic two-way. It is the author's contention that
only by seeing the field whole can one begin to perceive the theory that is
embedded in practice, those generally unacknowledged principles that drive
both editorial and critical decisions. Lastly, the book decodes the symptoms
present in this cumulative history and interrogates the practices so that they
may reveal their theories. Throughout, the book maintains that all practice, even
that which asserts its empirical independence from theory, is, in fact,
empowered by a theory or theories: theories of the text.
Keywords:   theories of the text, bibliography, post-structuralism, culture criticism
The Texts of Theory/The Theories of the Text
Another book on theory? Not quite, or at least not on theory as that term is
usually understood both by those who practise it and by those who disavow it.
Theories in this text are theories of the text—and therefore of those other
entities (for example, author, reader, manuscript, scribe, printer, publisher,
editor, scholarly edition, and so on) that contribute to our perception and
experience of the text as social and cultural artefact, whether that text be
inscription, book, play, film, painting, music, dance, sculpture, performance art,
or whatever. My theories of text are thus theories of writing and of reading,
theories of intention and of reception, theories of transmission and of corruption,
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Introduction
and theories of originary conception and of social consumption and variation.
And my book is also an account of the dialogics, pluralities, and contradictions
that these multiple processes engender—not one theory but many theories of the
text.
These theories therefore encompass many of the current concerns of critical or
literary theorists (including those practising in cultural studies, feminism, gay
studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and new and old historicism), but they do so
always with a special focus on the force and meaning of text as it has been made
phenomenologically available to us through the scholarly work of a long line of
textual disseminators, from Alexandrian librarians to hypertext programmers.
My theories are not just theories of text in the (post-)structuralist sense of
network, tissue, or play of difference; they are also theories of text in which the
figure of weaving (text as textile) is given concrete embodiment through those
bibliographical artefacts that have formed and informed our cultural heritage.
I therefore hope to look at the field of ‘text’ whole, and not as divided by the
special interests and perspectives of bibliographers and scholarly editors on the
one hand and critical theorists on the other. My aim is thus to show that
bibliography is not a safe (p.2) positivist redoubt resistant to the onslaughts of
post-structuralism, culture criticism, and so on, but that the gates are already
open and the traffic two-way. And it is my contention that only by seeing the field
whole can one begin to perceive the theory that is embedded in practice, those
generally unacknowledged (because unseen) principles that drive both editorial
and critical decisions. For well over two millennia, scholarly editors have been
producing physical manifestations of various types of textuality, and their
editions have thus encoded various critical and ideological responses to the
matter of text. My purpose is to decode the symptoms present in this cumulative
history, to interrogate the practices so that they may reveal their theories, for I
will maintain throughout this book that all practice, even that which asserts its
empirical independence from theory, is, in fact, empowered by a theory or
theories: theories of the text.
Text and Territory
A particularly striking place to begin—and one emblematic of the problem of
theory in textual studies today—is an account of a session on Theories of Text
and Editing’ at the 1993 conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship. At
this session, Lawrence Rainey presented a brilliant and forcefully argued essay
(‘Cultural Authority’)1 on the current states of theory, in which he offered a
somewhat mordant view of the recent history of what he saw as the failed
‘marriage’ between literary and textual theory. Citing Jerome J. McGann’s
Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (published in 1983) as the obvious starting
place for a consideration of this unlikely match, Rainey found that, during the
intervening years, despite the efforts of such theorists as Peter Shillingsburg, G.
Thomas Tanselle, George Bornstein, and myself—together with a voluminous
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