Here's an answer to the question I asked provocatively at the DMU
roundtable on Wednesday that has cropped up in the postings: why do
book history at all? What is the point of it? Why study books (as
material objects) when one can produce understandings much more
generally and quickly of, say, the nature of justice, the conditions
of minorities, the effects of Empire etc etc by studying the
operations of discourses instead? The last thirty years of cultural
theory is supposed to have equipped us to do this.
One answer that came out of conversation last night with Mark Bland
and Peter Shillingsburg is this: Book history is the study of the
material embodiment of discourses. Discursive analysis is only
marginally interested in the actual material embodiment of discourse
and to this extent misprepresents what it claims to analyse. Book
history can enlighten the blind spots.
(This adapts W W Greg's definition of bibliography of 1932: that it
is primarily a study of the failures of textual transmission.)
Any takers?
Paul Eggert
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Paul Eggert | Professor of English | Director, Australian
Scholarly Editions Centre Projects |
School of Humanities & Social Sciences | University of New South
Wales at ADFA | Canberra ACT 2600 | AUSTRALIA |
+61 (0)2 6268 8900 +61 (0)2 6268 8899 (fax)
http://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/ASEC
|