PMLA 121 1

PMLA 121.1 Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (Jan 2006)

• Essays to read: Price, Des Forges, Hutchison, McCoy, McDonald, Piper (in Piper 2009), Brown, Lerer

Price Reading Matter

• clear rhetorical positioning of book history for literary scholars
• 10 ..."Book history" has come to stand for materialist resistance to theory, to idealism, even to ideas.
• ... Bibliographers' failure to account for the specificity of the literary is all the more striking given how often their raw materials are borrowed from a canon established by literature departments. In 1932, W.W. Greg declared, "Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted; therefore bibliography, the study of books, is essentially the science of the transmission of literary documents."
  • in "Bibliography - An Apologia" -- too literary (he elsewhere corrects)
• 10 Intervention: What if, instead of asking what book history can do for literary criticism, we ask what literary theory can do for book history?
  • l/u Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book"
• 11 ...the question that this issue tries to address: how to reconcile reading with seeing, and linguistic structures with bibliographic objects.
• 12 ...if the book has been invisible (or intangible) to most twentieth-century literary critics, it isn't simply because we aren't trained to analyze material culture; it's also because a commonsense Cartesianism teaches us to filter out the look, the feel, the smell of the printed page.
• 13 In its fascination with the mundane, the material, and the social, the realist novel might appear to provide the easiest testing ground for book history.
  • easiest how? She contrasts with autobiography
• 15 Scholars are now less likely to think of manuscript being displaced by print than to conceive of both as competitors carrying out complementary roles (and freighted with different connotations) at any give time and place.
  • following Febvre & Martin 1958
  • she says same for orality and writing
• 15 The word idea in our title represents a bid to situate the study of material culture as a player in theoretical debates rather than as a bolt-hole from which to wait them out.

Hutchison Breaking the Book Known as Q

• the interpretive significance of the 1609 quarto page break for Sonnet 55
• 34 Implicitly, and perhaps insidiously, Vendler's sonnets argue that material form recapitulates poetic form.
• ...this essay argues for a reading practice that is attentive to both the materiality of the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets and the effect of that materiality on the early modern scene of reading
• 35 1609 Q is unusual in breaking up sonnets between pages, given evidence of other sonnet sequences from late C16-early C17
• 39 If we are to read Q's breaks as carrying meaning - to recognize them as being worthy of literary attention - we must first suspend the nagging questions of intentionality that Auden's horror raises: "yes but did Shakespeare mean for those breaks to be there?"
• 46 To open up writing would be then (as Roland Barthes famously suggested) to suspend this fixation on authorial intention and return again...to the text itself.
• [The payoff: the type of analysis this framework allows in Sonnet 55] ...this reference to the flimsiness and vulnerability of paper forces us to confront the material presentation of this poem, to think of this vulnerability in terms of the very paper on which 55 is printed. After line 8, Q readers must turn over the page, thus taking fragile paper in their hands. here the thematic that Booth identifies is underscored both by the material presentation of the poem...and its staging of a physical reader-text interaction.... Through this touch, metaphoric paper materializes.
• 62 Not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice, a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not... Espousing instead an approach to the materiality of Shake-speares Sonnets that would take seriously the matter of Q's page breaks, this essay has understood the page and the page break to be units of meaning with urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the book and the idea of literature.

McCoy Race and the Paratextual Condition

• 156 pushing on Genette who describes paratext as subordinate to text and "an undisputed territory" saying that, in African American context, paratext is neither: "its marginal spaces and places have functioned centrally as a zone transacting ever-changing modes of white domination and of resistance to that domination."
• 157 [her key texts (Douglass's narrative and James Allen's photography exhibition of lynchings, Without Sanctuary)] demonstrate how the paratexts has been deployed to transact white power, and both texts demonstrate what is gained and lost when the paratext is deployed to resist that power.
• In the Western tradition, authors are seen as possessing a self-generating autonomy similar to that of the liberal subject. Most white authors presumed that autonomy in their act of writing, and readers presumed it of them. For the writer of African descent, however -- especially the fugitive autobiographer -- there was no such luxury.
  • interesting potential intersection with the representation of liberal subjectivity in novels, cf Armstrong 2005
• [Example: white abolitionist intro to Douglass saying it's "slavery as it is"] The paratext crafted by white prefacers and editors, however, reduces fugitive author to fugitive reporter, a construction that accommodates Thomas Jefferson's distasteful declaration that "never yet could I find a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration." In this way, serving neither the text nor its author, the paratext serves something else: an indirect white supremacy, different from the brutality against which white abolitionists fought but one that interferes with the fugitive writer's authorial primacy nonetheless.
• 158 ...Arguing for a practical and theoretical link between the bookish realm of paratextuality and the larger political realm of racialized power is not easy. Doing so, after all, requires attention to that which the culture at large determines is marginal, minor, and beyond the reach of interpretation.... It also demands more intense exploration of how white power might be transacted through such inconsequential spaces
  • would be interesting to look at the paratextual positionings of Heathcliff's "darkness" in Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
• 159 [Edward P. Jones's The Known World, character keeps his free papers on his body] The Known World thus imagines a scene where, like the text presented to the world as a book, the liberal subject exists largely as an effect of paratextuality. Jones imagines an earlier version of a familiar contemporary scene wherein those hailed as subjects go about their daily lives within a prefatory, citational haze of paratext to their selves[.]
  • This paratextual representation of liberal subjecthood is problematized and can result in bodily harm in, say, Armadale (Collins, 1866). Paratext/text, documentation/body might also be a problem in Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)
• 160 l/u James Snead, "On Repetition in Black Culture"
• 166 ...the Intersection of race and paratextuality offers ample fodder for arists and critics interested in the increasingly complicated issues of identity, space, power, and authorship confronting all people in the C21. The very old language of the book -- especially that of its margins -- and the very old knowledge of bibliographers can be invaluable for understanding these issues.

Lerer Falling Asleep over the History of the Book

• Relation between libraries and canonicity
• 231 [Referring to McDonald's essay] ...the intellectual source of much current book history may, in the end, be not just the traditions of bibliography and textual criticism but also the textual thematics of Derrida and the ways in which late C20 theoretical writing often manipulated the visual organization of words on the page[.]
• [citing Piroux essay] ...literature uses language not to communicate transparently but rather to reflect on the estranged or etiolated quality of making meaning through signs.
• 231 Many years ago, John Guillory argued that canons are not so much collections of texts as assemblies of values...No signle work, in such a scheme, is canonical; rather works take on canonical status as part of a literary system. While I believe that such a view of canonicity still holds, I think that an attention to the history of the book itself may qualify the [232] claim.... Books are objects...and canonization is as much a process of selecting space as of selecting value. How can we fit the range of literature on a shelf? The physical, artifactual nature of the book has made the canonizing of the literary work into an act of space management.
  • Libraries are the spaces for our literature. But there is no absolute, essential way of cataloging books.... The Cotton Library becomes a repository of English textual history, spatially organized around the heads of an empire. What is the history of the book and the idea of literature embedded in such a plan? It may be many things, but to me it is a profoundly Vergilian project: one that makes the literary text the voice of an imperial politics[.]
    • I wonder if that's too literal, though... a metonym of stable signification, rather, a heuristic, rather than a politics. A bookishness.
• 232-3 I like his analysis of Mathiessen's 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse starting with Bradstreet invoking the Aeneid and ending with Lowell's "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid": "Mathiessen's volume has an idea of literature as a history of the book - in this case, the Aeneid. ...Is all literature really just falling asleep over the Aeneid?"
• 233 Anthologies are forms of canon making. And in their structure they embed narratives of reading, taste, and power.
• ...the history of reading may be a history not of books themselves but of excerpts.
• 234 The space of fiction has long been a space of sleep and dreaming.