Shillingsburg on some functions of textual criticism.
Peter Shillingsburg teaches and researches at De Montfort University in England, formerly of the University of North Texas.
Whoo, this is dense, and he’s reading – not much buffer talk. My synopsis is going to be incomplete and choppy.
Claims to be neither a computer scientist nor a humanities computing expert (the bulk of the attendees at this Breadth of Text conference.) He is one of the most prominent text analysts of the current scholastic age. “My field represents the problem, and your fields represent the solutions,” he says.
Question being addressed: what is it about what he does [we do] professionally that actually matters? Higher education isn’t aiming to create better citizens these days, so much as serving as “tertiary education” after which one learns how to live. Given the present [rather elitist] state of higher education, what is it that textual critics do that really matters?
It seems that preparation for career is at least more pressing, if not more important, than preparation for life. We work at a time when scepticism about what the university does is high, except insofar as it teaches money-making.
Teaching is said to be the second oldest profession in the world, at its height in the now-destroyed Library of Alexandria. Because texts are multiplied for dissemination, wear out and need to be replaced, copying texts is important – and highly imperfect (see also parlor games of telephone). Proofreading, then, is the first function of textual criticism, and otherwise excellent scholars seem to be terrible at it (editors, binders etc. of scholarly editions not excepted).
Then there’s the task of restoring integrity to texts that have fallen afoul of their original versions. Here [he implies] we need collaboration – among editors, philologists, historians. Shillingsburg proceeds to give us some rather egregious examples: one is the relationship between two Victorian-novel protagonists. Early in the novel, between 1850s (?) and 1989, they go up some stairs “hand in hand,” which was thought to foretell the development of their relationship. But the manuscript actually says that Henry went up the stairs hat in hand. This sorta changes the entire relationship, as portrayed.
What does one do when a text, as it exists, doesn’t seem to make any sense – but for which no alternative (manuscript, for example) exists? Some editors have deleted phrases or changed words, based on their own common-sense judgment. Who’s to do better? And what about editing texts by genius authors who use[d] words we have not yet learned (sprinkt for sprinkled)? There was a time when such things were “corrected” by well-meaning but erroneous folk.
Is it okay for a university to set up shop and do the best it can with what it has? Without a hard “standard” for editing ambiguous texts? [vz: this standard, even if it exists, is often meaningless!] What does “integrity” of a text mean?
The task of the textual critic, and importance of textual criticism, is [in] validating and maintenance task preliminary to actual criticism. Textual integrity is a foundational myth. There are indeed wrong ways to edit texts; but is there only one right way to edit them? The questions should be why the text has acquired its particular forms, who has made it so and under what cultural circumstances? [vz: I'm paraphrasing like crazy here.]
Textual criticism insists that any text will do – but that every text will do only that which it is capable of doing. It doesn’t necessarily represent “what the author thought,” for example. The task of the textual critic is to help students and teachers to know which text of a work they’re using, and to show how multiple/unstable/created texts change our perceptions of the work. A textual critic is proofreader, amender, identifier of the salient features of a work, who lets readers know what particular text of the work they have in hand, and what its particular characteristics are.
“Of him that is appointed to teach, the first business is to learn, an unintermitted attendance to reading must qualify him to be heard with profit….For such service he can be fitted only by laborious study, and study therefore is the business of his life; the business which he cannot neglect without breaking a virtual contact with the community. Ignorance in other men may be censured as idleness, in an academick it must be abhored as treachery.” –Samuel Johnson
Let’s not allow Johnson’s stirring words to mislead us regarding what academics can/cannot, should/should not do. What we do is, at the end of the day, criticism and not fact; inference and not truth. It is because of this inherent uncertainty, however, that our commitment to accuracy and precision should be greater. Ignorance is the academic’s most intimate familiar, never to be banished – only used to learn more about how much we have yet to do.