| | 1 | Author: | Edited by DAVID L. VANDER MEULEN | Add | | | Title: | Studies in Bibliography, Volume 58 (2007/2008)  | | | | Published: | 2014 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | Studies in Bibliography | | | | Description: | "The things which the textual critic has to talk about
are not things which present themselves clearly and sharply to the
mind.… Mistakes are therefore made which could not be made if the matter
under discussion were any corpo- real object, having qualities perceptible to
the senses." This remark, made nearly ninety years ago by A. E. Housman in his
well-known address "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism," suggests
the crux of many recent editorial discussions, in which some of editing's most
basic humanistic assumptions have been challenged with arguments influenced
by the movement sometimes called "postmodern" literary theory.1
1.
Housman's address to the Classical Association was made at Cambridge on 4
August 1921, and printed in the proceedings of the Association the
following year. The quotation is taken from the text as reprinted in
Housman, Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge:
Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1961), p. 136.
Many of the challengers are themselves editors, and were motivated at
least in part by a sense that textual criticism was both technically
overdeveloped as a field and falsely estranged from literary criticism. An
expressed inter- est in drawing textual and literary criticism nearer to one
another (as if they were not already interpenetrated dimensions of the same
discipline) was thus a prominent feature of many of the discussions. A second
inter- est, also of an integrating character, was in surmounting the perceived
national or linguistic isolation of Anglo-American editorial scholarship
through an engagement with editorial traditions of other countries, espe-
cially Germany and France. Movements to open intellectual horizons in this age
of overly determined specialization are to be welcomed, and this one has had
its benefits, as readers of Scholarly Editing: A Guide to
Research
can attest.2
2.
New York: Modern Language Association, 1995.
Many of the two dozen scholars whom David Greetham as- sembled for this
unusual project exhibited a felt sense of responsibility in their
contributions, which taken together provide Anglophone students with a useful
history of textual criticism across several periods of time and many
languages. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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