Week 4: Introductory Comments on Textual Scholarship and Canonicity

With this week's readings I'm inviting you to begin thinking about literary texts in some ways that you may not have been asked to consider them before. That is, I'm inviting you to consider them as objects of "material"production rather than as idealized icons of abstract value. First, D. C. Greetham's essay will introduce you to some of the issues and controversies of textual scholarship. Textual scholarship has, for the most part, been a "curatorial" enterprise. Like museum curators, textual scholars have taken it as their duty to maintain and preserve the literary texts of the canon, the definition of which they have taken as self-evident, or at least have left to others. But even as I write the preceding sentence, a quibble is forming: of course, the act of curating is itself an act of production, though it has traditionally not been acknowledged as such by the textual scholars.

In reading Greetham's essay you may be surprised by how much variation is possible between different extant versions of a literary text, and by how much silent liberty some textual scholars have taken in their efforts to present us with great literary texts from the past. Textual scholars routinely modernize the spelling of pre-modern texts, for example. Even when there is a relatively direct correspondence between the meanings of words in their original pre-modern moment and their meanings today, to modernize the spellings of words in a literary text lends a sense of transhistorical universality to the work. This sort of assumption that spelling is unimportant is consistent with the theoretical assumptions of New Criticism, with its insistence that the aesthetic effect of the poem could not be contained by its historical moment or its conditions of production (including, in New Criticism's most radical formulation, even the author's intention). But editors continue to produce these modern-spelling texts for classroom use even today, in this era supposedly enlightened by New Historicism. I'd prefer to use original-spelling texts, myself, and, in fact, when I teach sixteenth and seventeenth century literature I often teach from reproductions of first-edition texts, photocopied from the microfilms of the Early English Text series. This makes it more difficult, perhaps, for modern readers to read the poems; but, why should it not be difficult? Well, to answer that question myself, a New Critic would say that the aesthetic experience, not the historical oddness, is the real goal of literary pedagogy. But I disagree.

As you'll see in reading Greetham, textual scholars have routinely made other questionable assumptions, including using an "intentionalist" framework for determining the best choice among competing possible texts; this notwithstanding the New Critical skepticism about intentionality that I mentioned above. In the late 1980s, however, some textual scholars--notably Elizabeth Eisenstein, G. Thomas Tanselle, Jerome McGann and Steven Urkowitz began to question the idealist New Critical assumptions that had dominated textual scholarship and to produce texts and arguments for how to edit texts that took more careful account of the social, economic and historical conditions--that is to say, the material conditions--of the production and transmission of literary texts.

I could provide some striking examples (along the lines of the example that Greetham gives about whether D. H. Lawrence wrote "whimper" or "whisper" in the last line of "Sons and Lovers) " to demonstrate how much difference a word or a comma can make. But, I'll save those for the follow-up discussion, if the situation presents itself.

In the other essays for this week, the issue of canonicity is taken up from various perspectives. Robert Scholes provides a richly detailed and thoughtful survey of the history and theoretical issues of the canon. John Guillory gives a detailed critical-historical account of one instance of canonical intervention: T. S. Eliot's devaluing of Milton and re-valuing of Donne at the beginning of the twentieth century. I've also included Eliot's famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," to give you a sense of Eliot's style and strategy.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literary critics had valued Milton’s poetry very highly, while the poetry of John Donne was considered a sort of minor curiosity; Donne's poems are very intellectual and feature striking imagery, but they are never "pretty" in the way the nineteenth century readers expected poetry to be. In a reaction against this association of the poetic with "ornament" the New Critics, particularly Eliot and Leavis, devalued Milton’s work in favor of Donne’s. For a short time Donne seemed likely to displace Milton as the third poet in the triumvirate of canonical greats—Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. The debate focused on aspects of Donne’s and Milton’s poetry which could be seen as coded with romantic or post-romantic aesthetic values: Milton’s poetry was seen as too intellectual, as characterized by what Eliot called a “dissociation of sensibility.” Poets such as Shakespeare and Donne, Eliot argued, could think and feel at the same time, and get both experiences into their poems. By contrast, in Eliot’s view, Milton (and most of the poets who followed him) tended to write either poetry of the intellect or poetry of the emotions, but not poetry which combined the two.

. Under New Criticism, literature has been viewed as a universal human experience, an experience which should speak to that which is most deeply human in each reader. However, since most of the authors and teachers of literature have been middle-class white males, it is not surprising that the “universal” experience of literature has been defined in ways which are particularly familiar to middle-class white male readers. If minority, working-class, or female students have failed to respond to literary texts in the ways their teachers did, there was a problem, it was assumed, with the students—not with the text or with the teacher. By contrast, recent critical theory points to ways of teaching literature which at once enable a more sophisticated critical understanding of the broad range of literary experience and attempt to engage and account for the experience of marginalized social groups in relation to the cultural values thought to be enshrined in the canonical tradition.

Some Things to Consider from Scholes' Essay:

(1) Consider the relationship between "Literature" and modernity in terms of Scholes' discussion of such modern occurences as the demise of oral culture, the progress of science, the rise of democracy, etc.

(2) Consider the relationship between the literary canon and the school and university curriculum

(3) Consider the positions taken by Barbara Hernstein Smith, Charles Altieri, and John Guillory in the debate about the literary canon and consider possible implications for studying literature resulting from each.