Let me rob Peter to pay Paul a compliment about his and Peter's
observations: I think they are building nicely and very informatively
on each other.
One has no evidence beyond one's own mind that a text exists b/c it
exists first and ultimately in that mind. However, external evidence of
the wording of an immaterial text comes to oneself and then to others
when something derived from that mental text is actually inscribed. At
that instant of inscription comes reading; the writer becomes a reader,
and subsequent viewers of the inscription become readers.
So to respond to Paul's suggestion that immaterial and material cannot
be entirely separated, I am wondering if another way of putting it is
that a "texual process" occurs at the moment of inscription when mental
text becomes embodied as a physical text. This textual process is also
a writer-reader process. (Which, as Peter observes, is a necessarily
interpretive process.)
I would also like to suggest (and I really mean "suggest" and not
"suggest" as a euphuism for "argue") that the "revision text"--that is,
the sum total of inscriptions and immaterial wordings that can be
witnessed or deduced from an inscribed revision--gives us closer access
to the textual process. This would be because in revision sites, we
witness the kinds of vacillations and verbal oscillations that represent
the attempt of an immaterial text to find its (for the moment) most
satisfactory embodiment.
So, if this makes sense, I would argue that a very concrete "history of
reading" (to quote Peter) can be constructed not only in marginalia,
diaries, reviews, etc., but also in "revision texts." Finally, if Book
History is the study of the production and consumption of books as an
index of the evolution of culture, then there is no more concrete
evidence of production and consumption than at the revision text level.
Hence the text for the study of book history is a text that follows
revision and versions in books.
yrs,
John
___________
John Bryant, English Department, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549
>>> Peter Shillingsburg <[log in to unmask]> 03/26/07 1:36 PM >>>
When Paul, currently sitting across the room from me, writes in response
to Wim:
"Going back to Wim's observation: it still leaves unanswered the
nature of the relationship between the material and the conceptual
dimensions of text and how (if at all) text may be said to exist
'independently'.
I don't think it does."
I think it may not just be perverse to say the opposite: The only way
that text "exists" is separated from the material. It is saying two
different things. What I mean, and I think this is operationally
important, is that for text to get off the page and into our experience
is must be interpreted--signs only signify by an interpretive act. So,
the work, as experienced, is OFF the material page and it can do that
only according to skills of the person reading it off.
That is not really a contradiction of what Paul said. He is right.
The only place a set of symbols can be kept for reuse is in a material
form. Even Matt Kirschenbaum would agree to that, I dare say, given his
emphasis on the materiality of electronic texts.
But a text on the page is not a text in the mind or in a process of
being experienced.
The importance of that distinction weighs very much with me when I
try to think of the history of reading. Is it the history of the
reading experience that gets recorded in marginalia and book reviews and
diary entries, or are we looking at something else and just calling it
reading?
-----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 Paul Eggert
Sent: 26 March 2007 18:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Texts as cultural objects
Wim van Mierlo interestingly picks up for clarification the perhaps
satisfying but nevertheless baffling idea of texts as cultural
objects that Dan O'Donnell had originally put forward in this
discussion and that John Bryant reminded us G. Thomas Tanselle had
defined:
> When it comes to using the words "text" and "object," I tend
> to think in terms that Barbara's mentor Tom Tanselle offers:
> that is, a text is words or wording, and hence essentially
> conceptual; a book or document is an object on which a
> version of the text is inscribed. Generally, speaking texts
> are not objects; they are separate from the material
> documents upon which they appear, or even the ink or medium
> in which they are inscribed or printed. At least that is a
> good place to start.
Wim replied:
>
>1) Perhaps "texts" and "books" are indeed two separate things, as John
>says, the one slightly more immaterial, the other material. Yet one
>cannot have "text" without the physical object in/on which it is
>inscribed. Where "text" would exist independently, it would have to be
>in the "work" (using Tanselle's distinction between the two).
So the idea of text as a cultural 'object' runs two dimensions of
its existence together in an initially satisfying formulation that
becomes, when looked at more carefully, an obfuscation.
At least, as here, bibliographical thinking forces us to think
harder about the conceptual basis of what we study than a book
history that is not so assisted necessarily does.
An all-encompassing, inclusive book history can be a conceptually
lazy book history. Some book historians, for instance, seem unaware
of the contribution that the theory associated with scholarly editing
made in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, particularly in relation
to the documentation of textual 'process' and the 'life' of works.
This forgetting perhaps comes from the fact that work-based book
history (as opposed to methodologies of the larger sweep) is not an
especially popular approach, although I am attracted to it.
Going back to Wim's observation: it still leaves unanswered the
nature of the relationship between the material and the conceptual
dimensions of text and how (if at all) text may be said to exist
'independently'.
I don't think it does.
John B's examples in his more recent mailing (excerpted below) show
that it doesn't in the actual practice of inscription. We can (if we
wish) only conspire to believe that it does.
Paul Eggert
>Let me respond to Wim's two, well-articulated, totally sensible, and
>very useful points.
>
>1). I'm not sure how something is "slightly more immaterial." It
seems
>to me either it is or it isn't, and if it isn't immaterial then it is
>something other than text; it is a witness, or a physical
>representation, or an embodiment of text. Tanselle is good on these
>matters of the tangible and intangible, or material and immaterial, in
>discussing text, and Wim is right I think in suggesting that Tanselle
>places text along with his notion of work, in the realm of the
>conceptual, immaterial, intangible. One thought game on this is the
>following: I am thinking right now a line of words: Mickey Mouse is
>dead. I haven't written it: oops I just wrote it, but you know what I
>mean. The wording is there in my mind; it exists in thought and as
>thought. When I get around to inscribing that string of words, it
might
>actually come out differently: Mickey, he's dead. The former wording
>banging around in my brain is immaterial and the text of what I hope to
>inscribe; the latter is material and what I actually inscribed.
Another
>thought game is this. I have two material words to give you: text and
>TEXT. These are the same word but presented differently, and with
>different impact on the reader; they are coded differently. As
>differently coded witnesses, they represent something a concept of
Text,
>call it. It's an immaterial wording that has some kind of real
>existence in mind and concept that is different from those two printed
>witnesses to the concept.
--
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
