Textual Condition Research Articles

Editor's Introduction: Image-Based Humanities Computing

Image-based humanities computing is an established practice located at the intersection of a set of intellectual convictions regarding knowledge representation on the one hand, and the dramatically accelerating pace of technical research in digital imaging technologies on the other. In the broadest sense, it brings advanced visual and visualization tools to bear on the objects and artifacts of cultural heritage. More specifically, at least within the literary studies community, image-based humanities computing may be said to descend from the so-called social or materialist theories of textual production advanced by such scholars as D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann in the early eighties, coupled with the means to create (relatively) highquality and (relatively) low-cost digital facsimiles of documents; and the practical means to disseminate those facsimiles through various electronic media. Generally speaking, materialist theories of text privilege the physical primacy of the manuscript, document, or codex, lending semantic weight to paper, cover, binding, typeface, page layout, illustrations, marginalia, and other extra-linguistic features of the "text itself." McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts and McGann's Critique of Modern Textual Criticism and The Textual Condition are among the works that provide the theoretical foundations for such an approach; Kevin Kiernan's Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript and Joseph Viscomi's Blake and the Idea of the Book are both exemplary materialist studies devoted to a single work or author.1 Since the early nineties, a number of ambitious humanities computing projects, some of them under the direction of these same figures in the literary studies community, have begun to build editions, collections, or selfidentified "archives" that place digital images at the functional center of their interface (and database). In several cases, this work has lead to important new image acquisition and display techniques, and it has sometimes even formed the basis for publishable computer science research. Moreover, more recent projects are now in a position to benefit from these early advances. This special issue of Computers and the Humanities has been prepared at a time when a majority of first generation image-based humanities computing projects have reached at least an initial plateau of completion, in the form of a substantial body of published and/or publicly accessible material.2

The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the House of Macmillan by Robert M. Seiler (review)

her work and a concept which throws an interestinglight on the supposedlyweak concluding episode in 'Goblin Market'. The seven years opened by these letters lend greater substance to Rossetti, as a character who was filled with religious conviction but was unable to embrace the exclusively religious life; as one who was filled with a sense of righteousness, but righteousness held within the strongly restraining limits of a Victorian sense of sexual decorum; as one who easily fell into a melancholy mood, but who was sympathetic, tender, and sensitive not only to those close to her but to sufferersof whom she knew only by repute. This second volume of the letters, like the first,is edited with a scholarlyscrupulousnessby Anthony Harrison.The tone of the letters is circumspect,careful,low-keyed, and Harrisonhas succeeded in supplyingtactful and appropriate annotation where it is required. The difficulty of identifying Rossetti's correspondentsis increased by her habit of destroying incoming letters. Perhapswhat ismore remarkableisthatwe have herebeforeus nearlyone thousand letters from Christina Rossetti, letters which were not destroyed even when their contents are nugatory.This saysmuch of the love and admirationin which she was held by so many. UNIVERSITY OF READING J. B. BULLEN TheBookBeautiful: WalterPaterandtheHouseofMacmillan. Ed. by ROBERTM. SEILER. London and New Brunswick,NJ:Athlone. I999. xii + 206 pp. ?4o. 'I have the feel of it still in my fingers.' So Arthur Symons recalled the lingering, tactile thrill of handling the first edition of Walter Pater's TheRenaissance, with its chocolate end papers,roughlyribbedpages, and darkblue-green cloth binding. Robert Seiler's collection of the Macmillan Archive correspondence between Pater, that most guarded of Victorian men of letters, and his sole book publisher, offersan intriguingcase studyof the textual condition duringthe last quarterof the nineteenth century. Pater'sliterarycareer, much like his hypnotic prose, was often characterized by a perverse rhythm of hesitancy, delay, and revision. As Seiler points out, Pater was a critic, journalist, novelist, and classics don whose work existed 'atthe marginsof many genres' and 'contestedthe rulesof orthodox literary production' (p. 55). One constant in this eclectic body of work is Pater's concern not only for the content (he often made the most fastidiousrevisions),but also for the physicalform of hisbook production. Indeed, it is this sense of the bibliographic crafting of each edition, that almost excessive care to shape paper, binding, and type into an aesthetically perfect whole, which Seiler fleshes out with dense introductory sections on Victorian bookmaking, the history of Macmillan & Co., and the troubledtrajectoryof Pater'scareer. The letters,with the exception of some informativeannotations, arewisely left to speak for themselves as they document the material difficultiesfaced by Pater in realizinghisaestheticvision. Time aftertime, histentativerequestsforbetterquality materialsand more favourableterms are skilfullymanipulatedby a publisherkeen to steer a sensible course between economic prudence and aesthetic achievement. We often hearAlexanderMacmillanventriloquizingPater'slanguage, arguingwith him for a 'higherliterature'thatmustbe embodied in a 'dainty'book, whilstvetoing his more extravagantchoices in paper and binding. More difficultto interpretare Pater'smoments of extreme preciousness, which can strikeour modern sensibility as examples of high camp. 'Alas!'he laments over an irregularityin the folding of a sheet, 'for the hands of bookbinders, which are apt to tarnish a little title-page' (p. 81). It is tempting to read such delicate posturing in the light of recent critical her work and a concept which throws an interestinglight on the supposedlyweak concluding episode in 'Goblin Market'. The seven years opened by these letters lend greater substance to Rossetti, as a character who was filled with religious conviction but was unable to embrace the exclusively religious life; as one who was filled with a sense of righteousness, but righteousness held within the strongly restraining limits of a Victorian sense of sexual decorum; as one who easily fell into a melancholy mood, but who was sympathetic, tender, and sensitive not only to those close to her but to sufferersof whom she knew only by repute. This second volume of the letters, like the first,is edited with a scholarlyscrupulousnessby Anthony Harrison.The tone of the letters is circumspect,careful,low-keyed, and Harrisonhas succeeded in supplyingtactful and appropriate annotation where it is required. The difficulty of identifying Rossetti's correspondentsis increased by her habit of destroying incoming letters...

"Tristram Shandy": A Book for Free Spirits (review)

114 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 by Locke, Vaughan, Dryden, and Marvell, but in no instance is he able to say with certainty that the texts he adumbrates are actually present as pre-texts refunctioned by Swift for parodie purposes. The Argument against Abolishing Christianity is given two contradictory readings, as an orthodox expression of Anglicanism and as a Shaftesburian shaft of deistical and libertine wit. If it can be read as an expression of two contradictory ideological tendencies in the period, in what sense can it be a parody? He treats Mr. Collins' Discourse ofFree-Thinking as if it were a parody of Collins, but it is more accurately described as a digest of Collins's Discourse made by a scribe whose incompetence in truncation takes a form that inadvertently exposes Collins's breathtaking impiety. It is as if a secretary, in minuting a meeting, had laid bare all the Realpolitik by means of which the boss intended to manipulate the workforce. Again, this is not precisely parody. We can relate this to a broader paradox in Phiddian's enterprise. He uses Barthes's view of textuality as a "muzak" of intertextual citation, which is a general theory , to try to characterize the specific nature of Swift's textuality. We agree that there is something determinate about the textual conditions of Swift's early prose works that demands analysis; and we go on to analyse them with a Barthesian tool uiat reduces this determinacy to a space systematically exempted of meaning, a tangled thread of quotation , allusion, and suggestion. Phiddian cannot altogether square this circle, but his attempt to do so is elegant, inventive, and well informed. He will perhaps enjoy the indeterminacy of my saying that this is one of die most convincing, and also one of the least convincing books I have read on Swift in recent years. Brean S. Hammond University of Wales, Aberystwyth Melvyn New. "Tristram Shandy": A Bookfor Free Spirits. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Twayne Masterwork Studies, xi + 152pp. US$22.95 (cloth); US$12.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8057-8358-X. This provocative volume purports to introduce Tristram Shandy to first-time readers, and while it does so in apparently traditional ways (setting the historical context and reviewing critical approaches), Melvyn New's achievement far surpasses his original intent. He produces perceptive readings of Shandean life and opinions, alongside rich delvings into Sterne's philosophies and philosophies on Sterne. The result is a stimulating discussion of subjects, incidents, and characters that points all readers—beginners and experts alike—backwards and forwards into new understandings, not merely of Sterne, but of reading in general. Among its many virtues is the book's accessibility, conveying the confidence prompted by years of study, without die tedious drag of scholarly minutiae. The first three chapters, subtitled "Literary and Historical Context," survey pertinent topics in a brief and pungent twenty-two pages. Chapter 1 on "milieu" talks about national politics—the Bloodless Revolution, the hostilities between England and France after the exile of James u that led to the battle at Namur in 1695, and the final Stuart rebellion of 1745—and local life in and around York during Sterne's career. But the point of the chapter is the multifaceted character of cultural and literary influence. In chapter 2, New explains the importance of Tristram Shandy as a challenge to rationalism, arguing that "awareness of self-implication" in the world's irrationality is the "best lesson" we can learn from REVIEWS 115 Steme (p. 11). The third chapter, on critical evaluations of Sterne's "metanovel," challenges established views of Sterne by invoking Nietzsche as the guide for the final six chapters, subtitled "A Reading," in which New takes up Nietzsche's description of Steme as "the most liberated spirit of all time" (p. 26). In introducing this concept, New suggests that if truth is a woman, as Steme implied, then men had better learn to dance; indeed, New describes the reading he embarks on as "a dance with Sterne to the music of Nietzsche." Like any good dancer, New guides with a light touch, avoiding heavy footnotes and aptly tracing patterns for his readers to follow...

EMG and cardiovascular responses to emotionally provocative photographs and text.

Previous studies on the psychophysiology of human emotion have repeatedly shown general and occasionally specific facial EMG (mu v) and covert cardiovascular response relationships to emotionally provocative photographs. Less clear are the relationships between psychophysiological response indices measured during the silent reading of emotionally charged versus emotionally neutral text. In this study, 12 adult subjects were presented two emotionally loaded color and black-and-white photographs and two brief newspaper articles, one emotionally charged and the other emotionally neutral in content. Each independent stimulus was presented for 1 min., preceded by a rest according to a multiple baseline-reversal design. Subjects evaluated each pictorial and textual stimulus condition according to adjective dimensions on 7-point rating scales. Mean values for corrugator supercilii EMG (mu v), upper trapezius EMG (mu v), surface temperature (degrees F), and heart rate (bpm) measured by finger photoplethysmography were measured during each rest and test period. Significant increases in the subjects' mean corrugator supercilii EMG (mu v) measures were observed during all color and black-and-white photograph presentations for both emotional and neutral content. As predicted, the subjects' mean corrugator supercilii EMG (mu v) measures increased significantly while silently reading text with an obvious unpleasant emotional tone. A significant positive relationship was observed between the subjects' mean ratings and mean corrugator EMG (mu v) difference values for the emotionally loaded color photographs.

The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive

RECENT YEARS HAVE BROUGHT remarkable developments in electronic storage, management, and analysis of texts. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this technology for the scholarship and teaching of literature. Textual studies is the most fundamental area of literary studies, the subdiscipline upon which all else is based. The new technology revolutionizes textual studies. In doing so, it will eventually bring about profound changes in the way we think about and practise the study and teaching of literature in general. The changes depend upon a simple fact: book and print technology no longer establish key limiting conditions of textuality. For literary studies, the consequences of this shift in our textual condition appear first and most glaringly in theory of texts and editorial practise. The technology of the book has developed over many centuries. During this period textual and editorial scholars were important agents who helped to shape, exploit, and modify this technology. Tracing the evolution of codex-based models for critical editing will supply one with a comprehensive survey of the history of the book and its technology: for it was the critical editor and textual scholar

Review: The Textual Condition

Review: The Textual Condition

The Textual Condition

The Textual Condition

The emblematic structure ofPericles

Abstract Pericles is an odd play, and the corrupt state of the text may be partly to blame. But the textual ‘badness’ of Pericles has infected critical judgements, so that the theories of its misfortunes at the hands of collaborators, pirates, plagiarists, and memorial maulers are often used simply to confirm its apparently poor literary quality. That it was excluded from the First Folio may only acknowledge its doubtful textual condition; yet this earliest editorial judgement does not, any more than the assessments of modern critics, contradict the fact of its great success on stage during Shakespeare's lifetime.1 The disparity between audiences and editors is an index of the fundamental debate which vexes all discussions of the play: Is Pericles authentically Shakespearian, and must it be certified as such before critical studies of it are warranted? It has, unfortunately, been all too easy to be distracted by its questionable status and so neglect its literary merits.

Literary France: The Making of a Culture (review)

308Philosophy and Literature emphasis on the " 'textualizing' ofhistory" (pp. 20-21). As Mark Cousins points out in his essay on historical investigation, "there is a level of irreducible theoretical decision widiin historicalwriting" (p. 128). Itis diis dieoretical dimension that envelops the writing of history in a question of mediation that belies scientistic aims for pure transparence. Arguing the case for a poststructuralist Marxism, Tony Bennett observes similarly that "in its more scientistic formulations , Marxism has typically represented its own relation to reality as one of pure transparency, diereby denying its own discursivity and textuality." There is an "essentializing orientation" behind much Marxist thought, an assumption that literary or social texts can be explained by "referring such texts to the conditions of production obtaining at the moment of dieir origin" (pp. 67, 69). It is precisely the possibility of such transparent access to moments of origin mat poststructuralist tiiought problematizes. Such questioning, however, does not make the thinking of, say, Derrida "ahistorical," as new historicists often argue. Emphasizing the textual conditions of history-making need not mean reducing the historical world to a mere text. Derrida is clear on this issue: "it was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of the text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library" (p. 31). Gayatri Spivak amplifies this point by observing that instead of claiming that diere is nothing outside die text, Derrida instead is affirming that "die so-called 'outside' of the verbal text is articulated with it in a web or network (that is 'socio-cultural,' or 'politico-economic,' or yet 'psychosexual ,' depending on our practical/theoretical focus)" (p. 31). The new historicists have not "rediscovered history" for the simple reason diat, as Rodolphe Gasché argues, "history was never lost." He continues—and I conclude—"If post-structuralism means anything at all ... it does so by stressing the need to think towards the conditions of possibility and the law that rules the difference between such concepts as structure and genesis, or aesdietics and history." Such thinking might lead us "not to rediscover history, but to discover it altogether for die first time" (pp. 159—60). Pennsylvania State UniversityR. D. Ackerman Literary France: The Making ofa Culture, by Priscilla Parkhurst Clark; xv & 274 pp. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1987, $28.50. This could not have been an easy book to compose. It obviously demanded more dian a generalist's knowledge of die history of French institutions, since literature touches them all; it required specific investigation into several major Reviews309 figures (Mallarmé, the quiet prime mover in die literary scene of the turn of die century, deserved perhaps more space); it imposed the necessity for a synthesis whose herculean proportions would have been clearer had the editors permitted Clark to include a bibliography; and, since it was written for that mythical being, the "general audience," it had to be at once limpid and vigorous in style. That Priscilla Clark has met all ofthese requirements speaks eloquendy to the accomplishment that is Literary France. Startingwith the seventeenth century, when a necessary componentofFrench literary life—a national consciousness—comes to the fore, Clark traces die development of the circumstances mat created die unique character of French literary life (which she helpfully compares to the American, German, and English scenes): patronage, which remained a key factor until the marketplace assumed supreme importance in the nineteenth century; honnêteté; the ennoblement , in effect, of French writers (which explains their considerable prestige even today); and, towering above all, the Académie Française, which commands such symbolic attention in Clark's vision of French culture that hardly a page goes by without a reference to it. To think of die Académie Française is to conjure up images of encrusted tradition and ofreactions to it as well. It therefore stands for the creative tension (Clark's favorite word) between the collectivity and the individual in France; that is, Classicism and Romanticism still slug it out every day on the banks of the Seine. Once she has established the political and sociological background, Clark focuses on three exemplary public writers: Voltaire, the philosophe; Hugo, the prophet; and Sartre, theintellectual. Clarkis especially...

The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published here in full are Ralph Waldo Emerson's nine poetry notebooks, the single greatest source of information about his creative habits in poetry. Emerson kept rough drafts, revised versions, and fair copies of hundreds of poems in these notebooks, so that the genesis and development of poems both famous and obscure can be traced closely. notebooks have been remarkably little consulted, primarily because their unedited textual condition makes them difficult to use. This edition makes them accessible to scholars by presenting a faithful transcription of each notebook, a detailed analysis of the history of each poem, an introduction, and a cross-referenced index.For this edition, the editors have followed the high standards of textual practice developed for Harvard University Press's edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That editorial approach makes possible a logical, clear presentation of material that Emerson often jotted down in segments or with multiple erasures and insertions.Because it allow scholars to examine as never before the many facets of Emerson the poet, The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson will be a major impetus to study of the man considered by many to be America's greates thinker.

Text declamation as a determinant of melodic form in the Old Roman eighth-mode tracts

This essay presents a close examination of the Gregorian eighth-mode tracts in Old Roman transmission. Its main objective will be to show that the apparent diversity of the genre as a whole is due largely to conditioned variation, and that within subsets characterised by identical textual conditions, melodic shape is uniform, or thrifty, to a degree that is as remarkable as it is unexpected. Particular attention will be paid to the regular and, in some cases, predictable ways in which the accentuation, phrasing and syntax of the text determine melodic form. The essay will take up the subject of text expression in its classic formulation by Dominicus Johner and show how he was prevented from arriving at a satisfactory result by the very terms in which he framed the question. Finally and incidentally, some comparative observations will be made about the counterparts of the Old Roman tracts in Frankish transmission (i.e. Gregorian chant in the narrow sense) with a view to showing the aesthetic superiority of the Old Roman versions in certain respects.

Sentential structure and the perceptual span in normal reading development.

An eye-voice span paradigm was adopted to determine whether children use different aspects of sentence structure to facilitate decoding early in the course of reading development. Eighty-four Grade 1 and Grade 2 children, representing four levels of early reading competence, and 15 skilled adult subjects read from four textual conditions; materials varied in the extent to which the texts were semantically and/or syntactically constrained. The more precocious the young reader, the longer his reported span. The better readers' and the adults' advantage was greater the more linguistically constrained the reading material. These data support a continuous model of reading development and are compatible with an interactive definition of early reading behavior.

Rest and Violence in the Poem of Erra

THE POEM ABOUT THE GOD ERRA MUST CLEARLY BE RECKONED ONE OF THE MAJOR TEXTS of Mesopotamian religious literature, whether gauged by its content and literary artistry or by the evidence of its ancient popularity. Not less than thirty-six copies were recovered from at least five sites of the first millennium wac.-a larger number, as L. Cagni points out, than even the copies known to the Gilgameg Epic from the same period.2 Despite its importance, the Erra poem has generally been neglected in modern writing about Mesopotamian religion and the religions of the ancient Near East. Part of the reason has been its textual condition, for although work on the poem has proceeded for over one hundred years, ever since George Smith published portions of it in 1875,3 only in the last decade or so have enough lines been recovered for intelligible editions to appear in Italian, French, and English.4

The Lure of the Demonic: James and Durrenmatt

IT MAY NOT be possible to resolve in our time the that makes James's The Turn of the Screw present quite different meanings to different readers. For this ambiguity may turn out to be a product, not of absolute textual conditions, but of the conflicting, and indeed competing, senses of reality that characterize a period of philosophical transition. One can imagine a composition of these, an alteration in the philosophic (moral, epistemological) landscape, that may lead to a surer, more generally agreed upon, reading of the text. But it is also imaginable that philosophic differences will persist, and with them the critical dissension that will make possible new collections of essays that disagree with each other.' On the face of it the story is concerned with the governess' battle against an objective evil that is infecting the character of the children, Miles and Flora. Some readers' acceptance of the literal text is hampered by several assumptions of romantic origin and hue: the essential innocence of children; the corruptness of authority, whether political or educational; the untrustworthiness of traditionalist attitudes toward wrongdoing-the last reinforced by a more recent tendency to suppose that concern with saving others is a gross imposition unless it is material salvation that is offered. Interlaced with these is the habit of

A Lost Manuscript of Eusebius's Demonstratio Evangelica Found

The textual condition of the Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius is unfortunately very defective. The only existing manuscripts appear to be copies of the great Paris codex 469, and the beginning and end of this manuscript are now missing.