McKenzie 1986

The book as an expressive form

Walter Greg: "What the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his" (qtd on 1)

using C. S. Peirce (Ross Atkinson), could argue signs in book for a bibliographer are merely:

• iconic: representative, referential -- textual, descriptive and enumerative bibliography treat signs as miniature portraits of the whole
• or indexical: point at something else; causal; printing acts like this for analytic bibliography -- the signs point to an order of printing, etc.
• Atkinson's model doesn't account for history

as soon as one is "required to explain signs in a book, ... they assume a symbolic status" (2)

we need history now more than ever -- with the rise of history of the book, all bibliography is becoming historical bibliography (3) (Greg's definition above now too limited)

new principle/definition: "bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception" (4)

• "bibliographers should be concerned to show that forms effect meaning" (4)
• not only technical but social processes of text's transmission (4)
• what McKenzie's really doing: turning bibliography into history of the book

bibliography: "the study of the sociology of texts" (5)

broad definition of texts; includes maps, prints, music; "verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data" (5)

etymology of "text": weaving, materials woven together; "the primary sense is one which defines a process of material construction. It creates an object, but is not peculiar to any one substance or any one form" (6)

etymology of "sociology": bringing social component, human interactions and motives, back into study of textual transmission; "alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and persent" (7)

bibliography's connection with New Criticism; "scientific" status of bibliography; confined the book, put it in a vacuum (7-8)

• has impeded bibliography as a discipline; neglected human agency

interested in looking at the non-verbal elements of the book as expressive

historians of the book can never avoid author-audience dynamic

"each reading is peculiar to its occasion, each can be at least partially recovered from the physical forms of the text, and the differences i nreadings constitute an informative history. What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade." (10)

Wimsatt and Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy"

• ironically begins with a misquoting of Congreve, which McKenzie skillfully unpacks to show that Congreve was saying exactly the opposite of what W/B want him to say
• typography, punctuation, accidentals all play a role
• "By reading one form of Congreve's text (1700/1710), we may with some authority affirm certain readings as his. By reading other forms of it (1946), w can chart meanings that later readers made from it under different historical imperatives." (13)
• W/B may misrepresent, but "their misreading has become an historical document in its own right" (13)

"The history of material objects as symbolic forms functions, therefore, in two ways. It can falsify certain readings; and it can demonstrate new ones." (13)

"In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from the most minute feature of the material form of the book to questions of authorial, literary and social context. These all bear in turn on the ways in which texts are then re-read, re-edited, re-designed, re-printed, and re-published. If a history of readings is made possible only by a comparative history of books, it is equally true that a history of books will have no point if it fails to account for the meanings they later come to make." (14)

Congreve in context of Jonson; McKenzie puts some historical flesh on the bones of his reading

"if the fine detail of typography and layout, the material signs which constitute a text, do signify in the ways I have tried to suggest, it must follow that any history of the book -- subject as books are to typographic and material change -- must be a history of misreadings. This is not so strange as it might sound. Every society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at all, at some point, every printer redesigns them." (16)

• e.g. typography of W/B's 1946 reading is typical of that period

"If a poem is only what its individual readers make it in their activity of constructing meaning from it, then a good poem will be the one which most compels its own destruction in the service of its readers' new construction. When the specification of meaning is one with its discovery in the critical practice of writing, the generative force of texts is most active." (17)

in other words, New Criticism contained folded within it the forces of its own destruction