[WRITING] "Modern Textual Criticism"

[rfmcdonald]

Livejournaler jsburbidge writes about the complexities of modern textual criticism in our 21st century technological era.

A few days ago, I became aware of Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, which I had previously been unaware of. I used to be interested in the field, and in fact did a graduate course in the theory of mediaeval textual criticism with a teacher with whom McGann had been discussing these issues at the time (Lee Paterson, credited at the beginning of the book). I gather that it has had some considerable impact.

Regardless of the fact that the only two reviews on LibraryThing are dismissive (neither of which seems to have been written by someone with prior knowledge of post-18th century bLivejournaler ibliography - one is at least written by someone with an exposure to classical stemmatics - and who are not aware of the context into which it fits) it is a well-written and cogent piece of work. The problem it addresses - how one conceives of the task of the editor as conditioned by how one views authorial composition - is refracted through various scholarly disagreements on editions of specific texts. At the time, considerable debate centred around the Kane and Donaldson Piers Plowman (referenced by McGann, despite the fact that it's not in the period he is mainly dealing with) and the Hans Gabler Ulysses (not referenced, but very relevant, and about which McGann has written elsewhere). The question of whether one is trying to recover a text reflecting "authorial intention" or something different, conditioned by either/both of a socially mediated agreement regarding a standard text (some versions become iconic, as with Auden's September 1 1939), or by a model of composition as collaborative, will not go away with modern texts. In addition, the issues are closely related to the perspective shifts associated with the New Historicism and other forms of theory which stress the social context of and contraints on the author at a different level.

I have seen it suggested that all of this is becoming less relevant now that we have entered a world in which composition, in the old sense, is dead, having been replaced by reformatting an author's electronic text so that at no time is there a process of transcription.

If anything, this is diametrically wrong. Consider the following, not entirely atypical, life of a novel by a modern author (with each stage preserved in complete texts for the future critic)[.]