Shillingsburg 2006

Shillingsburg, Peter. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

"This book addresses the proposition that the electronic representation of print literature to be undertaken in the twenty-first century will significantly alterr what we understand textuality to be." (3)

new editions as "reincarnating" texts (14)

textual difference akin to John Searle's distinction between "sentence" (iterability) and "utterance" (noniterability -- each repetition of an utterance is itself a new utterance) (17)

"To summarize, we can say that the lexical part of a text, its sentence in Seattle's terms, is iterable, though subject to error in iteration. As a script act, however, text is not iterable because script acts, like utterance in Seattle's terms, are 'agented acts' with specific historical and temporal contexts that constitute or indicate the things that go without saying in specific utterances and that point to or even determine the meaning of the words. A text is more than its linguistic components of letters, spaces, and punctuation, for it includes the bibliographic codes as well, and all the clues identifying its agent of being and its contexts of generation. A text seems to change and develop through history, even when neither the physical nor the linguistic text has changed, thus making it very difficult to know just exactly what parts of the work are being lost in the editing." (18)