Dear Peter,
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BB
On 23 Mar 2007, at 14:17, Peter Shillingsburg wrote:
> Is there an archive of this discussion to which I could direct
> interested persons who are NOT members of the ESTS list? Please
> let me
> know.
>
> Paul's question about the point of book history can be asked about
> adjacent disciplines:
> What is the point of bibliography; what is the point of textual
> scholarship?
> We each have sufficient answers or we would not be in these fields of
> inquiry.
> But the answer given by Paul about discourse and books I would put a
> slightly different way--and then I wonder if that is just verbiage or
> really says something:
> 1. Without the book there is no access to discourse (at least not to
> past discourse).
> 2. Discourse is the history of ideas, the history of developing
> values
> in concepts and notions of aesthetic appeal, and notions of
> justice, etc
> (see Paul's note).
> 3. If we whiz past or through book to discourse without attention to
> how we are getting discourse, what its material, social, production,
> economic forms and history are, won't we be likely to get discourse
> wrong, or skewed, or de-historicised?
> It is this notion number 3 that sort of sounds good but I wonder
> if it is really true? Do the results of book history bear out the
> notion that without book history we will get discourse wrong?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the
> Society for Textual Scholarship
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Germaine
> Warkentin
> Sent: 23 March 2007 13:11
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: What is the point of book history?
>
> I don't know if I am a taker, but the suggestion that Paul Eggert puts
> forward is much along the lines of the argument of the book I'm trying
> to write. Nicolas Barker (and a lot of other people) have talked about
> the book as being the most important of all human artifacts. Well, I
> think I might put dwellings first, but that being said, books would be
> at the top of my list. Though there again, one has to expand the
> definition of book beyond the usual one. (The art is in the expanding,
> of course.) How can we *not* regard the book in all its manifestations
> as central to human culture? Paul mentions Greg 1932; I go right
> back to
>
> Greg's "What is Bibliography" of 1914, which seems to me central
> even to
>
> as wide-ranging a discussion as today's. But it isn't easy to do;
> at the
>
> plenary lecture here in which I was beginning to evolve my ideas, I
> asked the audience who had read that article, and only 3 people raised
> their hands. I asked because it seems to me that bibliography and book
> history are intimately connected in every possible systematic way.
> As to
>
> the "point" of this cumbersome but essential mating, a counterfactual
> experiment in which you try to imagine human life without "the book"
> makes the point. These are big questions, I know, and they need to be
> addressed with great rigour. (Tanselle legacy) and imagination
> (McKenzie
>
> legacy). It's worth doing. Wish I'd been at that discussion at
> DMU, but
>
> that's my two cents-worth from Toronto where spring (yes, Tony
> Edwards)
> has finally arrived. cheers, Germaine.
>
> --
> **********************************************************************
> *
> Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
> VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
> 73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
> [log in to unmask] (fax number on request)
> **********************************************************************
> *
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