Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Script act theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is no discourse so obscure, no tale so odd or remark so incoherent that it cannot be given a meaning.
Paul ValéryComplexity is not a crime, but carry it to the point of murkiness and nothing is plain. A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting itself the pestilence that it is, moves all about as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark.
Marianne MooreIt is the function of scholarship to clarify, not simplify.
James B. MeriwetherIn order for developers of new electronic representations of print literature, be they computer technicians or textual scholars, to know what to do and what to create, there needs to be a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the nature of script acts. By script acts I do not mean just those acts involved in writing or creating scripts; I mean every sort of act conducted in relation to written and printed texts, including every act of reproduction and every act of reading. I hope this mapping of an inclusive view of acts relative to scripts contributes a provocative initial approach both to script acts and to electronic access and text representations to which other scholars will contribute ideas and practice. One implication of the mapping attempted here is that no single copy represents a work in the same way that any other copy represents it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Gutenberg to GoogleElectronic Representations of Literary Texts, pp. 40 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
- 2
- Cited by