Introduction: Popular Textualities

Abstract

I.This special focus section considers intriguing interconnections that exist between popular culture and allied disciplines of textual criticism and bibliographical studies. In particular, it addresses many ways in which we are only just beginning to formulate a critical vocabulary for describing-much less comprehending-the increasingly fluid nature of textuality. How, indeed, do textual theory and bibliographical scholarship inform our understanding of cultural artifacts, their popularization, and their reception into cultural and critical main-especially in a rapidly shifting marketplace in which text, more often than not, does not find its materiality in pages of a book? As cultural studies continues to challenge our conceptions of borders of literary and textual studies, issues regarding nature of what constitutes a text have become increasingly significant in our post-print culture. In addition to involving such controversial subjects as interrelationships between high and low culture and component differences between material and nonmaterial texts, essays in this special focus section explore manner in which we receive and interpret a wide variety of texts-from works of popular serial fiction and transhistorical literary imagination through film adaptation and popular music.1How do textual theory and bibliographical analysis account for textuality of such a wide array of authorial (and, in some cases, nonauthorial) forms, particularly in terms of Byzantine nature of their construction, production, and dissemination? Perhaps even more significantly, how do we approach act of teaching this important aspect of textual theory to new generations of students for whom textuality has become an increasingly diffuse and convoluted concept-a generation for whom textual stability is becoming progressively more irrelevant? For many contemporary readers, concept of narrative-driven works of art, whether they be artifacts of high or low culture, concerns nature and rapidity of its systems of distribution, its value determined almost entirely by end-user's capacity for negotiating its acquisition, its storage, and ease of its consumption. A century ago, textuality of narrative was delivered to users almost universally via physical properties of traditional book, magazine, and newspaper forms. Within a scant few decades, books were joined by radio airwaves as principal means of textual distribution, to be followed, in short order, by cinema and television. The advent of computer technology transformed, in rapid and radical fashion, existing forms of distribution while acting as catalyst for new eras of textuality as witnessed by evolution of digital storage media that have irrevocably altered ways in which we consume not only books, but all manner of music and video in process.This incredible shift in production, distribution, and consumption of our cultural artifacts-our popular textualities, if you will-necessitates an ongoing interrogation of text and its multiplicities of variation. The ideology of text, in and of itself, is deceptively simple. Mikhail M. Bakhtin's working definition of text includes coherent complex of signs (1986,103). For Roland Barthes, text exists as a locus of meaning, as a form of discourse rather than as a concrete object. The text is experienced only as an activity, a production he writes (1977,157).Texts ask readers to participate in act of meaning-making, while books take up physical space on a shelf. In this way, readers actively participate in processes associated with textual production. Yet our post-print theories of textuality must be increasingly enabled to account for nonphysicality and nonmateriality of digitallyinscribed texts. In Scholarly Editing in Computer Age: Theory and Practice, Peter L. Shillingsburg defines text as the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form, such as a manuscript, proof or book. …