Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print

Byron Hawk

Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

Rev. of Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann, and Neil Fraistat, eds. Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2002.

In her response to the section, "Shoptalk—Working Conditions and Marginal Gains," Rachel Blau DuPlessis agrees that "textuality is rich with the situational, accidental, contingent, and relational" (86), but worries that genetic criticism still carries with it its own problematics. She concurs: "An editor (whatever the ideology of his or her production) is not making an iconic or static thing when an edition is created, but entering into and engaging in a process of transmission that is (in principle) ceaseless. . . . Transmission, like translation, involves acts of intervention. . . . Every choice is motivated and belongs in certain ways to its own time, technology and regimes" (87). Her analogy is the performance of a musical score. The sheet music (text) may remain a static entity, but its deployment in new regimes of reason and unreason enact and embody that text in new contexts that create new assemblages, new performances. DuPlessis speculates, "Perhaps the new technology leads us to a biography of works, rather than to the biography of an author" (90). For me, this biography of works is extending in electronic journals to the biography of forms of textuality and their development. Editing an online journal is fundamentally different than editing a print journal precisely because it deploys texts in a different kind of environment and puts those texts into vastly different assemblages. (One example of which is this multi-journal issue).

But since Reimagining Textuality focuses more specifically on edited editions, DuPlessis' cautionary notes should be heralded. She notes three key issues/problems (92):

1. This kind of genetic criticism—the attempt to acknowledge all the variants of the context in which a text is produced—will only be produced for a certain audience and will therefore be centered on certain (kinds of) texts. Canonical works will generally warrant this kind of attention and analysis over lesser known/followed works. (However, media texts such as films may become popular enough that they may be opened up to such scholarship.)
2. What authors/texts can benefit from this kind of genetic criticism? What happens to authors who don't produce as many drafts or revisions, or whose contexts of production are difficult to access? (Not to mention what happens when people write on word processors and don't save drafts—like most of my students. Should this kind of criticism make its way to contemporary authors, new issues of technology's role in the production of the text will surely arise.)
3. Genetic criticism desires "diplomatic" or democratic readings/texts that show all perspectives/possibilities, but economic/material/pragmatic conditions make this task difficult. Not all critics/places have the re/sources for this extensive kind of criticism. (Hypertext will in some way alleviate this problem, but it too is becoming more complex as programs and coding gets farther away from the average writer, user, and editor.)

For DuPlessis, the editor's primary goal is to produce a text that will be read, and all of these potential problems can get in the way of that fundamental goal.

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