Identifying Text and Postmodernist Editorial Projects

Abstract

Summing the state of 'current textual criticism', D. C. Greetham has recently suggested that although 'in the past, textual critics have felt that they somehow needed to up with their critical colleagues', 'in these poststructuralist and postmodernist days it is the critics who need to keep with us'.[1] The context of Greetham's comment is, of course, the perception, widely held by certain literary theorists, that text-editing is a largely pragmatic, unsophisticated activity. In attempting to rebut this prejudice, Greetham reminds us that literary criticism and textual criticism have always been closely interrelated. So the editorial practices of the founding fathers of text-editing (of figures such as W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers) were explicitly based on a then current theory of literature: as Greetham puts it, the conjunction of the 'cultural semiotics of clear-text editing and New Critical synthetic analysis were not accidental' (pp. 12-13). At the same time, however, developments in literary and textual theory have not always kept pace with each other, in that the demise of a particular theory of literature has not always brought about the passing away of the particular editorial practices associated with it. So, Greetham notes, the hegemony of clear-text editing continued long after the decline of 'New Critical' notions of literariness which accompanied it. Indeed, the effect on text-editing of most of the new ways of theorizing literariness produced during the past thirty years or so (by Marxism, structuralism, feminism, and so on) has been relatively insignificant. These theories have, of course, had some rather varied consequences for annotation; but annotation, like those theories themselves, is concerned principally with the interpretation of text and not with the condition of textuality itself. For example, feminism might have changed decisions about which works are worth editing and which aspects of works are worth annotating, but it has done little to change attitudes towards the basic practices of editing: the choice and justification of copy-text, the identification of variants, and so forth. This situation was certainly caused in part by the habits of theorists themselves, by the fact that most were happy to do their radical critical work on the texts already established in received editions.[2] In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that text-editors working on several of the big editions which were produced during the 1980s, for example, the Cambridge Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare, were able to insulate themselves from the most controversial claims of literary theorists.[3] To the extent, then, that the theoretical foundations of textual studies have sometimes appeared rather dated, there is some justification for the perception that editorial work is relatively 'untheorized'. Greetham's argument, though, is that this tendency to be 'behindhand' has finally been overcome. Indeed, it is alleged that textual criticism has caught so much that it is now textual critics, rather than literary critics, who are at the forefront of the discipline, in the theoretical 'vanguard', as it were.[4] As Ralph G. Williams has enthusiastically put it, 'textual studies are at present one of the most self-conscious and experimental branches of the humanities'. [5] What lies behind this new self-confidence is, of course, postmodernism, or, more precisely, a sense among textual critics (such as Greetham and Williams) that, in embracing what advertises itself as the very newest development in literary theory, they have finally rebutted the accusation that they were always the last guests to arrive at theory's feast. Jerome J. McGann has made a similar (if characteristically more modest) claim about the pre-eminence of textual studies when he talks about the 'poverty of criticism'.[6] More precisely, McGann has been critical of the influence in the discipline of what he terms 'romantic hermeneutics': the habit, that is, promulgated by theorists (such as Paul de Man) of viewing texts as purely linguistic artefacts. …