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what if there is no crisis?

In order not to hijack the comments thread at The Valve, I'm writing a longish post below in response to CR's comments. (See also this post chez Acephalous.)

Do editions matter?

Is creating an edition important scholarly work that has an impact on the culture at large? Here's a test. Go to any "big-box" bookseller and look in their "classics," "literature", or "African-American studies" sections. I guarantee you that 9 times out of 10, Vincent Carretta's edition of Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative will be there. It's gone through two editions and many, many printings.

Do editions influence our understanding of literature and literary history? Yes. The four best-selling novels of the first half of the eighteenth century were Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Love in Excess, and Pamela (the latter of which blew the doors off, in terms of sales, what publishers had ever expected to sell on the fiction market). One of these four novels was written by a woman. One of these four novels was not available in a modern edition until the 1990s. Guess which one? Without Love in Excess on the syllabus, students of genre have an inaccurate understanding of how the novel developed.

Is literary scholarship that is dependent upon historical research boring and esoteric?

Vin Carretta's work on Olaudah Equiano's birthplace has the potential to change dramatically the landscape of African-American studies. Because I am not an expert in the field, I make no predictions over whether it will or not. Equiano's Interesting Narrative has long been considered the first slave narrative. It is a foundational text of the African-American literary tradition. The debate about whether, as Eqiuano claims, he was really born in Africa (and so really provides the only first-person account in existence of what it was like to endure the middle passage) is extremely important, as any elementary school student would be able to perceive. If you are looking for an example of nitpicky, esoteric work, this is not it.

Textual Studies vs. Theory?

The claims of a divide between those who want to nitpick over insignificant textual details and those who want to make grander claims about history, culture, literature, or theory were undone in the 1980s by Jerome McGann (in A Critique of Modern Textual Critism) and D. F. McKenzie (in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts). Most recently, the work of Roger Chartier is an eloquent mixture of theory, history, and textual studies. See, for example, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer and The Order of Books.

Are any scholars publishing work that is accessible to "non-initiates"?

I'll name three works, all available in paperback, all making a splash among scholars, all selling well to "non-initiates," and all reviewed in the mainstream press:

There's always a risk in citing particular examples to disagree with someone who refuses to cite particular examples of their own. That risk is the response of "Oh, well that's not what I'm talking about." If that's the case, fine, I'll repeat my question: What are you talking about?

Posted by on September 19, 2005 10:39 AM |

Comments

A material example: Haywood's mentioned for all of three pages (260-62) in Michael McKeon's 560-page The Origins of the English Novel. (McKeon's Marxism unnerves me after a while, but it's an important book.) Were I to read it alone, however, whatever I formulated about popular sentiment for the early novel (and whatever theoretical work I built upon that) would further verify McKeon's claims by further burying the factual beneath his impressive Marxist edifice.

Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | September 19, 2005 12:46 PM

Given that much of medieval literature is still not available in undergraduate-friendly texts (translations, modernized spelling, or heavily glossed editions) I'd say editions matter *very* much. Like your 18th century example, I can point to Christine de Pizan, who was about as famous among courtly/literary circles, in both France and England, as a 15th century writer can get, and one of the first writers ever to imagine that women might have something to say for themselves in response to misogyny, and yet a modern English translation of the City of Ladies didn't come out until 1970s or 80s (I forget exactly) and the modern French translation only came out this decade! But she's a favorite of my students and a perfect end to my mediavel women readers and writers course, which begins with all the misogynist texts to which she responds.

Our students, btw, can give the lie to many of CR's claims (I read most but not all of the comments over at the valve). When I give my students a selection of different scholarly articles with different approaches, they tend to prefer the new historicist ones. They tell me that they feel like they really learned something and thus have a fuller sense of where the literary text is coming from. My students, anyway, would probably like something called "Prostitution, Imagination, and Romanticism" (the title, perhaps made up, that CR cited).

If our students aren't the perfect example of "uninitiates," I don't know who is.

Posted by: TF [TypeKey Profile Page] | September 19, 2005 3:51 PM