The "New Scholarship": Textual Evidence and Its Implications for Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics

Abstract

THE "NEW SCHOLARSHIP": TEXTUAL EVIDENCE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR CRITICISM, LITERARY THEORY, AND AESTHETICS Hershel Parker* Early in 1981, between the writing and the revising of this essay, the New York Times made much of two of my examples;1 so we've had a flurry of national attention but still no tidy name for an approach to American fiction which employs bibliographical, biographical, textual , and historical research and which raises questions properly discussed by literary theorists and aestheticians. In the "Melville" chapter of American Literary Scholarship and, more insistently, in an essay with Rrian Higgins, I have tried out "the New Scholarship."2 The advantage of this term is that it frankly (if bumptiously) challenges both the old 1930s scholarship, which was limited by lack of money and by primitive technology, and the old New Criticism, which had rejected out of hand precisely the kinds of information which most interest us. The disadvantage of the term is that it seems to exclude literary criticism, even though we think of ourselves as critics, maybe not gallicized but capable of a lot of textual deconstruction, once we get going. "Textual criticism" sounds like the natural term, since it ought to mean literary criticism which arises from study of the growth and subsequent adventures of the text, but it cannot serve: everyone from Fredson Rowers to William Rysshe Stein to J. Hillis Miller seems to think textual criticism is what he writes. So for the moment I'll stretch "New Scholarship" to cover the interpretive implications of textual scholarship and also to cover the implications that scholarship can have for the practice of literary criticism and for our understanding of literary theory; and I'll try to stretch it to cover also the implications that textual scholarship can have for aesthetics in general. What people using this literary approach do, besides editing, is write a kind of literary criticism which reveals the aesthetic implications of biographical and textual evidence, which shows how facts "Hershel Parker is H. Fletcher Brown Professor of American Romanticism at the University of Delaware. His books and articles are widely known in American Literature, and he is the leading proponent of the "New Scholarship." He is currently working on a book exploring the relationships between Textual Scholarship and Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics. 182Hershel Parker about composition, revision, and publication can affect interpretation. We tend to start, therefore, earlier than other critics do, not with a printed text (whether a Signet paperback or a CEAA hardbound) but with whatever early documents survive: manuscripts, variant editions, contracts, other publishing records. We often find new facts (surprisingly often—even when we work on American classics) and old facts tend to tell a new story every time they are laid out for fresh scrutiny. One result of this reexamination of what is usually taken for granted is that we interpret familiar works differently than anyone has done before. Another is that we raise questions (at least by implication) about the validity of previous literary criticism on particular texts and about the underpinnings of such criticism in literary theory (dead as the New Criticism is supposed to be, it still provides critics with most of their assumptions about literature). If anything warrants my being spokesman for the group, it is that I have deliberately and polemically tried to interest non-textualist critics in our kind of evidence and that I have begun trying to lure literary theorists and aestheticians onto the ambiguous terrain where notions of "built-in intentionality," "unity," "completeness," and "closure" hover over the rubble of false starts, discarded endings, drafts, revisions, and sober second thoughts. Recause we work so often with material unfamiliar to most people (the original Sanctuary and the original Sister Carrie, to name the two recently celebrated in the New York Times, or the manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, the magazine version of An American Dream),3 we are capable of making startling judgments about previous criticism on the works we study (although we have rarely done so in print). We could point out, for instance , all criticism written on Red Badge before 1978 is flawed because...