A Response to “Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit,” from Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web
Textual editing, according to Jerome McGann, is not conventionally considered to be a theoretical activity. Rather, developing scholarly editions is often thought of as a contextualization, reframement, or enhanced replication of a text — editorial activities described by McGann as the adherence to “factive obligations” (81). For McGann, more creative possibilities open up when one considers editing as a theoretical pursuit, especially within the context of electronic scholarly editing. In “Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit,” he argues that electronic textual editing helps to overcome what could be conceived of as the conflict between scholarly editing as the construction of a reliable and comprehensive version and scholarly editing as a theoretical practice of productive deformation.
To support his argument, McGann details the creation of The Rosetti Archive. He cites the challenges faced and failures of the endeavour, and suggests that “In the end, not despite but because of these events, one grows to realize how to imagine what you don’t know” (82). This imagining of the unknown is in part due to the poiesis or purposeful construction inherent to electronic edition creation. Rather than theory-as-speculation (as with critical theory), McGann proposes that theoretical editing is theory-as-building or theory-as-imagining. In doing so, he urges the reader to consider the creation of electronic textual editions as embodiments of theoretical arguments.
The relevance of McGann’s work to my own research inquiry stems from this conception of the creation of digital artifacts as theoretical embodiments. Rather than the uncritical selection or development of open scholarship platforms and outputs, McGann suggests that the development of digital artifacts is an opportunity to hypothesize, and to put resultant theories into motion. In doing so, one can develop a much more significant sense of what is possible; or, to put it in McGann’s words, to explore theory “through concrete acts of imagining” (83).
Work cited
McGann, Jerome. 2001. “Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit.” Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web, 75–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
