>Well, to answer Peter Shillingsburg's question by way of a single
>example: he asks: Do the results of book history bear out the
notion that without book history we will get discourse wrong?
I'm just about to argue this at the SHARP regional conference in Cape
Town. The argument is that the standard 1980s-90s feminist account of
why Australian women writers were edged aside in the 1890s as a
proto-canon, or really a short list of classics, was first being
nominated by reviewers and critics suffers from lack of information
about the price of books and their distribution and, as I said in my
initial posting, 'to that extent' misrepresents what happened.
Probably everyone on this list has a favourite example or a suspicion of one?
Paul Eggert
>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)
>***********************************************************************
--
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
|