3 - The dialectics of bibliography now
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
In the first two lectures I briefly contrasted two concepts of ‘text’. One is the text as authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically definable. The other is the text as always incomplete, and therefore open, unstable, subject to a perpetual re-making by its readers, performers, or audience.
To stress the first is to confirm the usual assumptions of historical scholarship: it seeks, as objectively as possible, to recover, from the physical evidence of a text, its significance for all those who first made it. To do that, I have argued, we must have some concept of authorial meaning, consider carefully the expressive functions of the text's modes of transmission, and account for its reception by an audience or readership. As a locatable, describable, attributable, datable, and explicable object, the text as a recorded form is, pre-eminently, a bibliographical fact. Its relation to all other versions, and their relation, in turn, to all other recorded texts, are, again, pre-eminently, bibliographical facts. No other discipline – and certainly neither history nor criticism – commands the range of textual phenomena, or the technical scholarship, to deal fully with their production, distribution, and consumption. By commanding the one term common to all inquiry – the textual object itself – bibliography can be an essential means by which we recover the past.
As a way of further exemplifying one part of that argument – the relation of form to meaning in printed books – I should like to consider the cases of John Locke and James Joyce.
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- Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts , pp. 55 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999