Editing a Discourse, Not a Text: Meta-Methodological Remarks on an Editorial Endeavour

Abstract

AbstractWhereas in literary studies poststructuralist theory (e. g. deconstruction, discourse analysis, broad concepts of intertextuality, ›Death of the Author‹-claims and several versions of anti-intentionalism) has had – and still has – a massive impact on practices ofHowever, within my contribution I will outline an entirely different approach by asking the question: If we actually decided to give up on author-centricity in scholarly editing and radically rejected authors’ intentions as well as authors’ single or collected works as objects of textual scholarship, could the yet unrealized project of ›editing a discourse‹ or ›discourse edition‹ work as a complement, an extension, or a replacement of traditional editions?To make this clear: So far there is no such thing as a discourse edition, so I cannot give aOne of the underlying ideas of this article is to confront contemporary edition philology (textual scholarship) – which is oriented towards categories like author, work, or text – with a ›foil‹ for contrast specifically invented for the purpose to show quite plainly that those leading categories scholarly editorial work is based on are anything but self-evident and without any alternatives but in the end rather contingent (namely uponI designed a meta-philological thought experiment to exemplify exactly this and I will thereby reveal a discipline-specific methodological ›blindness‹, irritate seemingly unproblematic habitual ways of thinking and thus uncover a deficit of reasoning and self-reflection in the field. Basically, I will clarify some implicit (categorial and methodological) presuppositions of scholarly editing and thereby uncover some aspects of the (invisible) normative framework underlying editorial practices.Firstly, I will clarifySecondly, I will askWhen I will have shown that a discourse edition can actually beFinally, I will briefly consider the question of