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Dear Paul, I'm a taker. Which is to say I agree. Although I am not sure I want to use the word "misrepresent" with regard to discourse analysis. I am shy of this term for two reasons. 1) It suggests that material discourse does "represent" properly, as if all analysis (cultural theory and material approaches) doesn't "re-present" culture in some way; and 2) it encourages one to dismiss the ways in which cultural discourse works in its generalizing way, and I think it is good to know how a discourse reaches its conclusions. I think cultural discourse depends upon the allegorizing of texts in order to make its case. This is includes "thematics" and other generalizing interpretive tactics. I find that to be uninteresting and unconvincing, not a "misrepresentation." But what I take from Paul's comment is that bibliography and textual criticism allows for much more specific observations of how texts embody cultural ideas, and that as an interpretive tactic the analysis (say) of revision (my present focus) or of bibliographic codes provides analysts better information and closer readings (hence more convincing analyses) of culture's texts. How's that? John Bryant ___________ John Bryant, English Department, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549 >>> Paul Eggert <[log in to unmask]> 03/23/07 8:40 AM >>> 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 -- 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