McKenzie 1986

D.F. McKenzie. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Pub. 1986. Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

• transition to historical bibliography
• 12 ...Greg's [in Bibliography - An Apologia] definition of the theoretical basis of bibliography is too limited. As long as we continue to think of it as confined to the study of the non-symbolic functions of signs, the risk it runs is relegation.
  • the original Greg quote: "...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."
  • see also McGann 1991 for a more trenchant critique of Greg and Tanselle
• ...[bibliography is] the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmissino of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and - I must add - their creative regeneration by readers
  • more on human and institutional classification on 62
• dialectic between forms of bibliography highlighting how historical change inheres in text
• 12-3 [Forms effect meaning:] The principle I wish to suggest as basic is simply this: bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception. So stated, it will not seem very surprising. What the word 'texts' also allows, however, is the extension of present practice to include all forms of texts, not merely books or Greg's signs on pieces of parchment paper. It [13] also frankly accepts that bibliographers should be concerned to show that forms effect meaning. Beyond that, it allows us to describe not only the technical but the social processes of their transmission. In those quite specific ways, it accounts for non-book texts, their physical forms, textual versions, technical transmission, institutional control, their perceived meanings, and social effects. It accounts for a history of the book and, indeed, of all printed forms including all textual ephemera as a record of cultural change. whether in mass civilization or minority culture. For any history of the book which excluded study of the social, economic, and political motivations of the publishing, the reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, would degenerate into a feebly digressive book list and never rise to a readable history. But such a phrase also accommodates what in recent critical theory is often called text production, and it therefore opens up the application of the discipline to the service of that field too.
  • 61 how "physical forms indicate meaning"
  • and as Brake 2001 rightly critiques, book history has been too book-centric (and, I'd add, too first-edition centric)
• "secret collusion" of New Criticism and New Bibliography, even though they ostensibly didn't get along, they rely on one another (and as McGann discusses have the same epistemological model of the self-sufficient text)
• 13 ontological tension in the etymology of "text," product of weaving and wearing, determinative and performative at the same time
• project of historical bibliography/sociology of texts is to move away from seeing editing as the core of the bibliographic intellectual project
• the printing press offers a clear (seeming) ontological connection between text and author
  • history of the book as reading against the ontological containment of the book and the teleological sense of book tech as getting better
  • 31-2 counter tradition: book as a dark mirror, getting further away from the author
  • a tension that exists in the ontological basis of this field
• 19-29 critique of Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy
  • critiquing the idea that you can recover intentionality or that it is necessary for critics to do so
  • intentionality is far more complex than they allow and the epistemological/ontological bases they reason from far less stable
  • literary text narrowly defined in Wimsatt/Beardsley vs Mckenzie's wider typology of texts
  • non-functional, "thick" with symptoms of meaning
  • there's no meaning outside of the text and it's not reducible (Cleanth Brooks, "heresy of paraphrase"), it's imminent within itself
  • McKenzie: the rhetoric of C17 authorial modesty is missed by their approach
• 61-2 bibliography, collection, bibliographical control (see also Mussell 2012)
  • Ultimately, any discrete bibliography of subject, person, or collection merely contributes to an ideal of that universal bibliographical control. It thereby enables the discovery of any possible relationship there might be between any one text and any other text - whenever, wherever, and in whatever form. In other words, bibliography is the means by which we establish the uniqueness of any single text as well as the means by which we are able to uncover all its inter-textual dimensions.
  • Thirdly, it impartially accepts the construction of new texts and their forms. The conflation of versions, or the writing of new books out of [62] old ones, is the most obvious case. But the construction of systems, such as archives, libraries, and data-banks, is another. In every case, the elements from which they are constructed are bibliographical objects. A test case would be the sale and dispersal of, say, the library of a C17 scholar: we become acutely aware at such moments of a library's status as a text or a meta-text, and of its biographical and intellectual meaning.