Tanselle 1992

Tanselle, Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

The Nature of Texts

Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" -- contemplating where time and art lie and how they endure

"do we ever know where a poem is? Can the artifacts that constitute our evidence for the existence of a poem provide us -- as the urn does -- with a means for ordering the randomness of life?" (12)

"do not manuscripts and printed books possess the same apssivity as othe rinanimate objects, and may not their texts -- however unfinished or incorrect their producers might consider them -- offer the same satisfying remoteness that works of visual art do? If so, what is the relation between the reading of the various documentary texts of a poem and the experiencing of the work, or are they all separate works? Such questions, like the cold pastoral of the urn itself, tease us out of thought, for they reflect the insoluble enigmas of aesthetics. And they raise issues that textual critics must not fail to confront." (13)

"Literature poses particularly perplexing aesthetic questions, for the corporeal reality of literary works has been, and remains, a matter of dispute." (13)

if we see a literary work as a "communication from the past," then "its location in space and time is the most basic of considerations: one must be able to distinguish the work itself from attempts to reproduce it." (13)

"Equating a reproduction with the work it aims to copy is incoherent, for an interest in works is a historical interest, and copies are the products of later historical moments. A reproduction may of course be regarded as a work in its own right, but the historical focus has then shifted. Artifacts can be viewed both as works in themselves and as evidence for reconstructing other works, but this dual possibility in no way lessens the conceptual gap between the two historical approaches to artifacts." (14)

medium of literature is word; "Although the communication of literary works requires such vehicles as sound waves or the combination of ink and paper, the works do not depend on those vehicles for their existence: it has often been pointed out that a literary work is not lost through the destruction of every handwritten, printed, and recorded copy of it, so long as the text remains in someone's memory." (17)

"literary works do not exist on paper or in sounds. Whatever concept of authorship one subscribes to, the act of reading or listening to receive a message from the past entails the effor to discover, through the text (or texts) one is presented with, the work that lies behind." (18)

"Because a literary work can be transmitted only indirectly, by processes that may alter it, no responsible description, interpretation, or evalutaiton of a literary work as a product of a past moment can avoid considering the relative reliability of the available texts and the nature of the connections among them." (18)

in altering texts, "the issue ... is whether historical reconstruction or curretn effectiveness of operation should take precedence, when the two do not seem to coincide" (19)

"all artifacts -- all tangible things that we have inherited from the human past, whether regarded as debris or as testimony to the human spirit -- present us with the alternatives of preservation or alteration (which includes destruction, and thus with textual problems. Textual criticism -- the textual way of thinking -- adjudicates between the competing claims of a basic dilemma: the feeling, on the one hand, that all artifacts, by their survival, deserve our respect, either because they put us in touch with what has gone before or because we feel a social obligation to pass along intact what we have received; and, on the other, the realization that they may fail to represent, for a variety of reasons, what their producers intended or what we feel we need, and that without correction or repair they may be misleading guides to the past, and without innovative change they may seem unsatisfying." (21)

works that survive in artifacts vs works that survive in instructions for performance

"Any work -- whether tangible, like a painting, or intangible, like a poem -- will produce somewhat different responses whenever we encounter it, for in each interval between encounters the unruly forces of time will have altered the work (or its physical embodiment), the present context of the work, and our own attitudes." (25)

alter a painting, and you alter the work; alter paper with poem on it, and you haven't change the work, just the document

one can take ahistorical approach of choosing to ignore historical dimension of work that comes to us from the past, but "we are still binding ourselves to history by equating the work with that one form of it, which is necessarily a past form. We can be liberated from history in our aesthetic experience -- if that is our desire -- only if we feel as free to alter works of the past as to create new works of our own." (31)

"Paradoxically, those who are most extreme in regarding works of literature as 'verbal icons' or 'linguistic moments' -- those most likely, that is, to think that they have freed themselves of historical constraints -- are in fact tying themselves most tightly to the accidents of history as embedded in artifacts. Conversely, those most emphatic in holding that the meaning of literature emerges from a knowledge of its historical context -- those most likely, that is, to believe themselves scrupulous in the use of historical evidence -- are in fact hindering their progress toward their goal if they do not recognize that artifacts may be less reliable witnesses to the past than their own imaginative reconstructions." (34)

"It is often said that textual criticism is a fundamental branch of scholarship because the textual critic must provide an accurate text before the literary critic can profitably begin to analyze it. But any text that a textual critic produces is itself the product of literary criticism, reflecting a particular aesthetic position and thus a particular approach to what textual 'correctness' consists of." (35)

"Anyone accepting a text uncritically -- without making such decisions -- is focusing not on a work but only on the text of a document." (35)

"The process of reading (and thus of criticism) therefore begins with the decision whether or not to be concerned with history." (35)

"despite the usefulness of the reproduction and transcription of the texts of documents, the attempt to reconstruct the texts of works is a more profound historical activity." (38)

blossoms (works) and stems (documents) analogy