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An indication of the new prominence of the word "text" is offered by the announcement in the Chronicle of Higher Education (in an article by Scott Heller on 3 August 1988) that "A faculty committee at Syracuse recently approved a plan to change the name of the major to English and Textual Studies" (p. A16).

I have discussed these issues at greater length in my Rosenbach Lectures of 1987, published as A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989).

A convenient listing of other writings by four of the five authors (all but Derrida) is Wallace Martin's "Bibliography" in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (1983), pp. 203-212. Extensive lists of the literature of the subject are provided by Josué V. Harari at the end of his anthology Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (1979) and by Richard Barney in a supplement to the Reports of the Society for Critical Exchange, No. 8 (Fall 1980). Two useful introductory surveys are Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction (1982) and Vincent B. Leitch's Deconstructive Criticism (1983).

In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) he speaks only of "poems"; in A Map of Misreading (1975) he frequently uses "texts" as well.

In A Map of Misreading he says that "there are no texts, but only relationships between texts" (p. 3).

Such texts exist, that is, to the extent that we admit the existence of external objects or external simuli.

That is, what would be considered errors by the author of the work transmitted in a given document or by one or more of the producers of the document.

Bloom's first inset quotation on p. 30 contains the phrase "on a rock", the reading of the 1975 book text (p. 73, line 24); the magazine text reads "up on a rock" (Poetry, 124 [1974], 252, line 22).

Even with the extra division, the magazine text would appear to most readers to have only six verse-paragraphs, for one of the divisions in the book text, after "To get to sleep tonight, at least until late" (p. 75, line 3), coincides with a page break in the magazine (p. 253), where there is no typographic indication that a break in the poem also occurs. Does a break in fact occur there? Perhaps Ashbery decided later to make a break there—or perhaps the space in the book text is an error. And could the failure of the book text to have the earlier break (after "Its hollow perfectly") also be an error? Does the poem have six or seven sections, and, if six, where do they occur?

Bloom's quotation at the bottom of p. 35 contains the phrase "This sample"; but both the 1974 text (p. 256, line 10) and the 1975 (p. 77, line 18) read "The sample". (At several points he cites line numbers, which are not provided in 1974 or 1975 for this 552-line poem.)

Certainly the word "amazament" in 1975 (p. 74, line 10) is a typographical error (the word is "amazement" in 1974, p. 253, line 8).

And can one really call the location of paragraph breaks a trivial matter? Or consider the shift from "emerge out of" to "issue from" and the addition of "with Pierre" trivial changes in poetic lines? (In the 1975 edition, these occur, respectively, on p. 74, line 13, and p. 75, line 10; in 1974, p. 253, line 11, and p. 254, line 7.)

The wording of his note is strange, however: after citing Donald H. Reiman's Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study (1965) as his source, he says, "Together with G. M. Matthews' edition . . ., this edition is authoritative." In fact, his quotations do not correspond in every respect to the Reiman text: all the lines in his quotations are printed flush left, whereas in Reiman alternating lines are indented; no italics appear in his quotations (except at a few points where he notes "emphasis added"), whereas in Reiman

there are a number of italicized words and phrases; and the word "and" is spelled out and certain American spellings occur in de Man's quotations, whereas in Reiman the ampersand and British spellings are used. At some points de Man's quotations follow Matthews's edition or the first edition (Posthumous Poems, 1824) instead of Reiman's, but without any pattern: thus on p. 54, the capital letter in "Shape" (line 352) and the lower-case initial in "dawn" (line 353) correspond not to Reiman but to both Matthews and the first edition; the lowercase initial of "earth" (line 353) corresponds to Reiman and the first edition, not Matthews; but on p. 52 the capital letter in "Shape" (line 425) corresponds only to Matthews and not to Reiman or the first edition. (Whether or not such words are capitalized is obviously a matter of some significance.) At one point, de Man's text even follows Harry Buxton For-man's 1876-77 edition in a reading that, as Reiman points out (p. 161), "has no foundation": on p. 46, de Man's quotation of line 187 reads "the holes he vainly sought to hide" instead of "the holes it . . . ." Furthermore, there are places where de Man's quotations do not match any text cited in Reiman's notes: e.g., "the" is inserted in line 33, which is quoted (on p. 52) as "O'er the evening hills . . ."; "the" is omitted from line 353, which is quoted (on p. 54) as "Dew on earth . . ."; and "the' 'is substituted for "one" in line 367, which is quoted (on p. 72) as "As the enamoured . . . ." Whether or not one regards these differences as significant is beside the point: de Man says unequivocally, "All quotations from The Triumph of Life are from the critical edition established by Donald H. Reiman." Their presence, however, does reinforce the point that the texts of documents must always be questioned.

If he does, the sentence, lacking the word "other," is not well phrased (it could begin, "Like several other major works of the English romantics").

In good scholarly editions, much of the information necessary for assessing the editors' decisions is provided in apparatus. An accurate apparatus could be called "definitive" in regard to the information it aims to record; but no critical text based on it can be called "definitive" because no such text can embody all the responsible judgments that are possible.

I have placed "like" in brackets because the word in the printed text is "line." It seems unlikely that de Man meant to say "Is the status of a text line the status of a statue?", for a "text line" would seem to mean a unit or building block of a text and would therefore not be parallel with "statue," a whole work. The matter must remain uncertain, however—as, indeed, the constitution of all texts of works is uncertain. This typographical error, if it is that, illustrates the necessity for deciding on the makeup of the text as a part of the act of reading. It also shows how documents can be unreliable witnesses to past intentions, even though we can never know with certainty the precise extent of that unreliability.

This essay, in a translation by Wlad Godzich, was one of the pieces added to Blindness and Insight (originally published in 1971) for its second edition in 1983 (pp. 246-266). The original essay, "Les Exégèses de Hölderlin par Martin Heidegger," appeared in Critique 100/101 (septembre/octobre 1955), 800-819.

One must note, however, what he says in the foreword to the enlarged edition: "I have left all these texts exactly as they were first published and have made no attempt to update them or to make them more germane to present-day discussions about literary theory —also when, as is the case in the essay on Derrida, I am myself aware of inadequacies with which I have tried to cope elsewhere" (p. xi). I have not yet discovered a place where he revises the view of editing expressed here.

In the original French, the statement reads, "pour lui plus que pour tout autre, la correction du texte importe grandement" (p. 802).

This title in the original French, we are told on p. 82, is "Journal de bord."

He had earlier dealt with similar matters in, for example, the prefatory section of La Dissemination (1972); trans. Barbara Johnson, 1981).

At many points in "Border Lines" he calls it a "band" (e.g., pp. 77, 89, 90) and refers to it or the main essay in spatial terms: "a procession underneath the other one" (p. 78), "here, at the foot of the other text" (p. 87), "the upper band" (p. 91), "the procession above" (p. 98).

In a related passage Derrida comments on the "double narrative" of L'arrêt de mort

in terms of physical presentation. He lists "binding" as one of the conventionally enclosing features of "the framed unity of the corpus" in literature; this particular verbal work in two parts is being held together, within a physical binding, at "an invisible hinge . . . (the space between the last sentence of the first récit and the first of the second)" (p. 142). In the first of Blanchot's two versions of this work, Derrida says, there was a second blank space separating the second récit from a kind of epilogue; but in the second version there is "only one blank space in the typography of the book, between the two récits," and this space takes on "an even more remarkable singularity" (p. 144). This space occurs "at the bottom of one page and at the top of another"—so that "after the narrator has said, 'What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it,' on the next page, the facing page, the other shore, truth enters—thematically, and by name" (pp. 144-145). But if part of the meaning connecting the two récits is being expressed by the page-break that allows two particular passages to face each other on facing pages, the work is then a work of visual as well as verbal art. Derrida does not, however, proceed to examine the problem of treating spatial arrangements as an element in an intangible work, as if verbal works were in fact tangible and existed on paper. If they did, there would be nothing wrong with thinking of bindings, or page-breaks, as unifying elements of such works. Derrida does not seem to see that his questioning of "the entire conventional system of legalities that organizes, in literature, the framed unity of the corpus" (p. 142) is linked with an unquestioning acceptance of a conventional misconception about the location of verbal works.

Hartman had earlier made a statement about the value of studying revisions, in "Retrospect 1971" prefixed to the 1971 printing of his book Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (originally published in 1964): "Perhaps Wordsworth never did emerge to an assured sense of self or a decisive poetry. There is something peculiar in the way his text corrupts itself: the freshness of earlier versions is dimmed by scruples and qualifications, by revisions that usually overlay rather than deepen insight. I should have paid some attention to this problem but was more interested, I now see, in the integrity of the mind than in that of the single poem" (p. xvii). Hartman's choice of the verb "corrupts" recalls the standard jargon of textual criticism, in which a textual "corruption" is an unauthorized "reading" (a word or phrase or mark of punctuation) that occurs in a particular documentary text; but Hartman's belief that Wordsworth's "text corrupts itself" refers to something else—to a poem becoming in some ways less satisfactory, in Hartman's view, as Wordsworth revises it. In the process of analyzing revised versions to come to this conclusion, one still needs to assess the texts of those versions to try to eliminate "textual corruptions" (in the traditional sense) from them. Hartman's explanation of his previous neglect of revisions—that he was more interested "in the integrity of the mind than in that of the single poem"—seems not to recognize that revisions form a significant part of the evidence for examining "integrity" of mind, and that therefore one must ask whether the documentary texts of each revision reflect the author's intentions at that stage.

A footnote on the first page of the essay tells the reader that "the entire text of the poem" appears at the end. The text printed Americanizes the punctuation of line 31 (placing a comma within quotation marks) and modernizes the spelling of "recal" in line 43 (to "recall"), without comment. However, it accurately reproduces "Holy writ" in line 51 (and in the quotation of the passage on p. 181), without noting that in the 1958 printing of the de Selincourt and Darbishire edition (printed "from corrected sheets of the first [i.e., 1947] edition") the initial letter of "writ" is capitalized.

Hartman cites the edition as that of de Selincourt only, not mentioning Darbishire at all; but she is named on the title page as co-editor, and she signed the preface, which—as in this sentence on the editing—uses the first person singular pronoun. Her reference to "following Wordsworth's final text" is in line with the policy set forth in the first volume of the edition (1940), where de Selincourt says that he follows Wordsworth's collected edition of 1849-50, "the last to appear under his personal supervision."

Even his few references to versions—e.g., "Wordsworth's manuscript revisions" (p. 196) and the "1805 version" (p. 200)—do not serve to bring up the issue.

That is, in speaking of "the usurping memory of Milton's text" (p. 204), one is

emphasizing "memory" over "text"—or "text" as a framework of ideas, not a specific arrangement of words.

He does cite in endnotes the sources of his quotations; but inaccuracies in quoting provide unintended illustrations of the distinction between works and documents. The most striking question raised by his quotations concerns the word "uncanniest" in his quotation (p. 227) from the Kluback-Wilde translation (1958) of Heidegger's The Question of Being—a word that he proceeds to use several times in his discussion following the quotation. In the original printing of this bilingual edition, published in New York by Twayne Publishers, the word at this point is "strangest" (p. 37); and the translators comment on this translation of "unheimlichste" in brackets in the previous sentence (where the word also occurs): "the word unheimlich here signifies not having a home." Miller cites a later printing of this edition ("New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1958" [the "1958" presumably occurring in the copyright notice]); but, since the currently available printing (with the same imprint that Miller cites) also has the reading "strangest", it seems unlikely that the copy Miller used had a different reading. Perhaps, instead, the change from "strangest" to "uncanniest" in Miller's quotation somehow springs from his knowing the association of "uncanny" and "unheimlich" in translations of and commentaries on Freud. (Cf. Miller's later citation of Freud's "The Uncanny" in his chapter "Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the 'Uncanny'" in Fiction and Repetition [1982], p. 69 and note 6 on pp. 236-237.) For a discussion of Freud's essay on "The Uncanny" and translations of "unheimlich," see Karl Kroeber, Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction (1988), p. 90 (and the references on pp. 176-177, note 13).

Three of the five essays discuss this poem, reflecting (as Hartman explains in the preface) "an earlier scheme" to concentrate on Shelley (and presumably on this poem).

Another instance of this phrase in Miller's writing occurs in the chapter on Wuthering Heights in Fiction and Repetition (1982): "Words no different from those we use in everyday life . . . may . . . go on functioning as the creators of the fictive world repeated into existence, . . . whenever the act of reading those words is performed. The words themselves, there on the page, both presuppose the deaths of that long line of personages and at the same time keep them from dying wholly, as long as a single copy of Wuthering Heights survives to be reread" (p. 72). Such a reference to words "there on the page" also presupposes that the literary work exists on the page; but what happens to be present in a given copy (such as the "single copy" that might be the sole surviving copy) may not in every respect perpetuate the "fictive world" that was in the author's mind. A somewhat more sophisticated reference to words on a page appears in Miller's The Linguistic Moment (1985): the linguistic moment in Wallace Stevens, we are told, is "when language almost emerges as surd, not sign, becomes almost a material substance, almost sounds or marks on a page, almost blanched, drenched, drained of meaning" (p. 14). When words on a page take on this status, they are being approached as visual art; but the issue of what words (or "marks") ought to be there, and what standard should be employed in answering that question, is still completely avoided.

In The Ethics of Reading (1987), he says, "Deconstruction is nothing more or less than good reading as such" (p. 10).