Scholarly Research: the Four Main Branches

Scholarly Research: The Four Main Branches

Scholarship can be related to the art of literary interpretation in one of two ways:

as a limit of interpretation: in establishing accurate texts and gathering historical information about an author and such things as her readings and her reading public, the scholar establishes a permissible horizon of interpretative activity. A critic cannot, for example, claim the influence of one author on another if scholars have established that the latter author never read or even knew of the former; nor can a critic nominate a real person providing the basis for a fictional character unless there exists a scholarly (historical) basis for that claim. The history of literary criticism is filled with examples of scholarly whistle-blowing, as historians destroy overly exuberant critical interpretations that just don't get the facts right.
as a basis of interpretation: in their historical and textual studies, scholars provide important, new data for critical interpretation.

Each of the four branches is divided into four subsections: 1) definition and a brief history of the approach--the story of its origins as a scholarly method; 2) an explanation of the method--examining evidence; 3) examples of the method--most of these occur in classroom discussion, but some famous illustrations are listed below; 4) strengths and limitations of the method. Each of the four branches ends with a brief statement on how this field of scholarship relates to recent developments in critical theory (the subject of the second half of this course).

I. Textual Criticism: this school of research has two related but distinct methods: textual bibliography (establishing a reliable or authoritative edition of a text) and critical bibliography (interpreting variants in multiple versions of the text).

A. Textual Bibliography

1. Textual bibliography aims to establish an authoritative or "standard" edition of a text and often must choose from or mediate among a number of competing textual versions. Arguably the first great undertaking of this sort was the great deal of hermeneutic study of the Bible in the 19th century; the most famous and influential early literary example is surely the attempt to establish an authoritative Shakespeare from the maze of often conflicting Folio, quarto, and "bad" quarto versions. See W.W. Greg's classic "The Rationale Of Copy-Text." Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-51): 19-36. For a revisionary approach that charts a path for textual criticism in the age of hypermedia, consult Jerome McGann, The Rationale of HyperText.

2. Say you have competing versions of a text, all with significant variants: 1) the author's manuscript copy; 2) the first published version; 3) a version from a "collected works" edition the author compiled later in her life (this one becomes the basis for most reprints of the text during the course of its history of publication); 4) a copy of #3 with further handwritten revisions by the author herself. If you were an editor, which version would you use as the basis ("copy-text") of your edition? These are the kinds of decisions a textual scholar must make--and there's no easy or one ruling rationale.

3. See the Arden and Variorum Shakespeare editions; the Cornell Wordsworth editions; or just about any Norton Critical Edition, which explains choice of copy text (students should get used to consulting the "Note on the Text" sections of an edition) and usually list variants. Also see the lively debate among scholars concerning the difference between the 1818 and 1831 Frankensteins.

4. The obvious strength of textual bibliography lies in its painstaking examination of texts and in its attempt to establish a reliable reading edition. Textual scholars really know the ins and outs of a given text and the author's method of composition. A possible complaint that can be lodged is the contemporary proliferation of competing editions and strident claims of new "ur" texts or texts that have a greater claim to some standard of "authenticity" or "intentionality" than the one traditionally available to the reading public. See the still raging debate about The Prelude: 1805 or 1850 (among others)?

B. Critical Bibliography

1. Critical bibliography: primarily concerns the critical interpretation of textual variants: how does our knowledge of the author's revisions inform our understanding of the work she has written?

2. Many modern editions provide collations of the different stages of an author's composition and/or publication of her work. Let's say a critic is very closely reading the imagery of a passage in support of some thesis: checking the underlying variants, in which the author is constructing and revising that imagery, might provide the critic with important clues for understanding the meaning of that passage. Of course, revision is often not just some private process between the author and text. Revision can also reflect the advice of valued friends or even collaborators, the pressure of reviewers and publishers, and the changing tastes of the reading public

3. We will discuss in class two famed examples: Wordsworth's radical revision of his poem "There Was a Boy" and Dickens' revised ending for Great Expectations. Students might also want to consult the text that shows underlying MS material for Eliot's The Wasteland, which shows Ezra Pound's fascinating revisions of the poem. Many scholars are realizing that hypermedia, with its ability to organize texts vertically through links and other digital devices, provides a great, new media for organizing and critically displaying multi-text versions of literary works and their variants. For an example of such a project, see the Romantic Circles edition of Shelley's "A Devil's Walk." Other exemplary hypertextual sites:

· The Blake Archive

· Lyrical Ballads

Relation to Critical Theory: Textual criticism intersects several areas of contemporary critical theory. Its focus on multiple versions of a text and ultimate uncertainty concerning the establishment of an unimpeachable copy text supports deconstruction’s claim that no final or authoritative text or interpretation exists (instead we have the familiar “undecidability” or “indeterminacy”). Yet for some scholars the focus of textual criticism on evolving (or devolving) versions of a text suggests an interest in the very entity Derrida and Foucault seek to banish: the guiding hand of the author. Many e-texts now address the problem that has most vexed textual scholars: how to organize a text with significant and multiple variants. Hypertext allows a “dynamic collation” of textual variants: see for example the Romantic Circle’s edition of Lyrical Ballads.

II. Authorship/Attribution

I. Definition and history: It is not always obvious who wrote a work of literature. Often, with the very oldest works, tradition is the only source we can turn to answer the authorship question. The authorship of The Odyssey is attributed to Homer, but no one can tell, in fact, who wrote it, or even who he was, as the story dates back to the time of oral tradition, before written records. For some works, such as Beowulf, we have no information on its author (or multiple authorship) at all. Tradition is all we have to go by for some ancient texts, but hardly a reliable indicator of authorship. While most readers today may be very interested in knowing who wrote something, this hasn't always been the case. Before the Renaissance people often didn't care about authorship, and many pieces were written without a byline or anonymously. Before such things as copyright laws, fledgling publishing firms ranged widely in their search for popular works and freely assigned authorship to whomever they thought would aid in sales of the work. Even now, some authors use pseudonyms in order to protect their job or family or some other aspect of their life due to scandal or misunderstanding. Some authors worry about getting typecast as a writer of a particular type of work, such as current authors who write science fiction or erotica under a pen name. Anne Rice is a contemporary example. Until the twentieth century, many women wrote under another name, or published under the name of a husband or friend out of necessity. And some authors, such as the person we now refer to as Pseudo-Longinus, may use the name of a famous or otherwise established writer in order to add credence to his own words or to steal the words of another and publish them under his own name. Whenever these knots arise, Authorship and Attribution studies seek to untangle them.

II. Evidence: scholars avail themselves of many different kinds of evidence in tracking down the authorship of a work. Generally speaking, external sources provide a more reliable and objective means of verification than arguments based on such internal evidence as stylistic registers and diction.

A. External sources

1. Lost Manuscripts
Sometimes the only known copies of a work are unacknowledged or are signed incorrectly. When this mystery happens, we may never know who actually wrote something unless another copy of the work turns up, maybe a later (or earlier) edition with a by-line, or even under another title. Brittian's Ida was attributed to Edmund Spenser despite the fact that he died twenty-one years before its publication, and only when a more complete edition was found in a collection under the title "Venus and Anchises" was there considered enough evidence to conclusively point to a Spenser imitator, Phineas Fletcher, as the true author. (Altick) But while lost manuscripts can sometimes produce miracles, they are not always easily uncovered, and sometimes they simply do not exist.

2. Records
More recently, we have publisher records and journals, and copyright registration, to assist us in finding authorship, but even then, in the case of work under pseudonyms, it isn't always easy to really tell who wrote what. Sometimes the author has a good reason to obscure his identity, in order to avoid being identified with a genre, or to protect himself or his family due to content. (For a believable illustration, check the movie The Front, with Woody Allen's character selling television scripts under his own name in the 1950s, actually written by blacklisted authors.)

3. By-line
The by-line of the text is, on the average, the most reliable means we have to determine authorship, especially now that authorship is so important to a writing career. Now, writers have great incentive to make their names known, and we rely upon cultural standards of honesty to prevent purposeful mis-attribution to other writers, but that does not mean it doesn't happen sometimes. Pieces are sometimes ghost-written by an author in the name of someone who is paying him for the work, and there is always the possibility of plagiarism.

B. Internal Evidence
There are some methods, ranging from plausible and elegant to completely crackers, of looking at the actual text and trying to figure out who wrote it from there.

1. Negative attribution.
It is easier to prove that someone could not have written a work than it is that he did. If someone is reputed to have authored a work in the eighteenth century, and a copy is found dating back to 1680, then it is obvious that he could not have written it. What did the author know when he wrote, what did he read, whom did he talk to? What were the common idioms of his age; how did people write?

b. Positive attribution.
Most of these strategies involve comparing the questioned work to others that are more certainly authored by the writer in question and looking for similarities. Much like an art expert with extensive experience studying the work of a particular artist can come to identify his work, there are some scholars who have spent so much time studying a particular writer that they can gain a linguistic and syntactic understanding of his writing. However, writers tend to change styles more often than artists, and for whatever reasons it is easier to fool a literary scholar on these issues. Thus was created the study of stylometry, which is devoted to the numerical and statistical analysis of the contents of a work, and is used to compare known works by an author to works that are in question. Because such analysis are essentially mathematical, and can be carried out by a computer, they help to exclude the possibility of bias on the part of the researcher. These techniques range from comparing word and sentence lengths to noting commonly-used turns of phrase and word choice. However, it is always possible to mimic the style of another writer, and all numerical measures of style are able to be easily fooled by a writer with an eye out for them. (Baker)

III. Examples.
A. Example of Attribution Question: Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?
Everyone has heard by now of the debate as to whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays that are attributed to him and that have his name on the First folio edition of them. Some say that his grasp of various languages that feature in his plays would not have been possible in a man of his time, with his background. Not believing him possibly to have been capable, there are sizable numbers of learned people who propose, instead, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere as being more likely candidates for authorship of his plays.
Leaving behind the question as to whether these arguments are valid, they have been a focus for authorship studies, becoming probably the only serious attribution question to receive its own report on Frontline. (Shakespeare Oxford Society) Authorship studies, it must be noted, have yet to disprove that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him, yet that this fact doesn't necessarily indicate that he did.

B. Example Thisted & Efron Test. (http://www2.localaccess.com/marlowe/authorship.htm)
This test, a statistical analysis taken from studies of species counts in biology, is one of the more interesting methods to probe authorship. In brief, the idea is to count the number of new words that appear, on the average, in each of Shakespeare's plays. In general, the first play you look at will have the most, the second will have a considerable number of additional words, the third still more words but less than the second, and so on. Then, once all the known works are out of the way, look at the one in question and see if it follows the trend.

IV. Pros & Cons
Authorship and attribution studies focus on knowledge of the author, which can provide needed context to some works. Some texts are enhanced by knowing their source. As a tale of the Holocaust, the Diary of Anne Frank gains much of its terrible poignancy from our knowledge that the author was a victim of Nazi atrocities. However, undue emphasis on authorship can distract from a textual understanding. People have a habit of judging from author first, text second. A recently-discovered sonnet signed "William Shakespeare" gathered a blizzard of attention for the signed name alone, despite the poor quality of the work (Altick). Formalists would argue that the worth of a text should be present regardless of the author, and thus downplay the motivating spirit of much attribution research.

References

Altick, Richard D. and John J. Fenstermaker. The Art of Literary Research,
4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1993.

Baker, John. "Why Computer Authorship Studies Continue to be Inconclusive."
2002. http://www2.localaccess.com/marlowe/authorship.htm (11 Dec. 2002).

Kathman, David and Terry Ross. "Shakespeare Authorship." 2002.
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/ (11 Dec. 2002).

Shakespeare Oxford Society. "Shakespeare Oxford Society Home Page." 2002.
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/ (10 Dec. 2002).

"Authorship Attribution." 2002.
http://www.ikdi.net/authorship-attribution.html (10 Dec. 2002).

--Written by John William Harris

Relation to Critical Theory: see John Harris’s wise words about the limitations of this branch of scholarship under his “Pro and Cons.” Attribution studies tends to be a rather specialized field of study, but such research shares the New Historicist interest in really understanding the material and economic factors shaping the literary marketplace and publishing houses.

III. Source Study

1. Source study establishes the presence of an earlier literary work in the text being studied. This presence can range from the highly specific (a brief, direct quotation from the earlier work, known as an allusion) to the more general and speculative (for example, arguing that an earlier writer’s religious vision influenced that of his follower).

2. Two methods

· Internal evidence: establishes relation between two texts through a strong pattern of resemblances.

· External evidence: establishes that the author read the previous author (often crucial to prove that a resemblance is indeed a borrowing and not just a coincidence; if the latter, the critic is making a comparative analysis, not one dealing with source and influence). In this method, one looks beyond the text into such things as correspondence, library lists, reading lists (see, for example, “Mary Shelley’s Gothic Readings.”)

3. Examples:

A. Study the passage below from Charlotte Bronte’s novel Villette (1853), and note especially its concluding contrast of the terms “sense” and “sensibility.” What would one need to document to establish that Bronte’s use of these terms alludes to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811)?

His reception immediately explained that he was known to Mrs. Bretton.

She recognised him; she greeted him, and yet she was fluttered,

surprised, taken unawares. Her look and manner were even

expostulatory; and in reply to these, rather than her words, he said,

--"I could not help it, madam: I found it impossible to leave the

country without seeing with my own eyes how she settled."

"But you will unsettle her."

"I hope not. And how is papa's little Polly?"

This question he addressed to Paulina, as he sat down and placed her

gently on the ground before him.

"How is Polly's papa?" was the reply, as she leaned on his knee, and

gazed up into his face.

It was not a noisy, not a wordy scene: for that I was thankful; but it

was a scene of feeling too brimful, and which, because the cup did not

foam up high or furiously overflow, only oppressed one the more. On

all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain

or ridicule comes to the weary spectator's relief; whereas I have ever

felt most burdensome that sort of sensibility which bends of its own

will, a giant slave under the sway of good sense.

B. Consider the two passages below: would you argue that there is a good case for supposing that Wordsworth is echoing Milton in his use of the phrase “warning voice”? How does Wordsworth change the meaning of the original phrase?

O! For that warning voice, which he who saw
Th' Apocalyps, heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be reveng'd on men,
Wo to the inhabitants on Earth! that now, [ 5 ]
While time was, our first-Parents had bin warnd
The coming of thir secret foe, and scap'd
Haply so scap'd his mortal snare . . . (From Paradise Lost IV 1-8)

Ah! is there one who ever has been young,

Nor needs a warning voice to tame the pride

Of intellect and virtue's self-esteem?

One is there, though the wisest and the best

Of all mankind, who covets not at times

Union that cannot be;--who would not give

If so he might, to duty and to truth

The eagerness of infantine desire?

A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That, musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being. (From The Prelude II. 19-33)

[For a supporting passage in which Wordsworth internalizes the apocalyptic imagery of Milton, see the following passage.

For another Wordsworthian allusion to Milton, see the following.

The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. (From The Prelude I. 15-19)

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way. (From Paradise Lost XII 646-49)

4. The strength of source study is that it underscores the importance of literary tradition and intertextuality: writers do not write in vacuums; they live in a world of other texts which shape and at times impinge upon their own literary expression. Two possible problems: 1) beware the hypnosis of the single source; 2) be sure not to just establish the allusion or borrowing but to discuss what the later writer makes of the earlier writer or text.

Gothic Literature Read by the Romantic Writers

Relation to Critical Theory: see Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, in which Bloom argues that every writer is involved in a kind of Oedipal struggle with a powerfully influential predecessor, a kind of “pen envy” (note the male emphasis: some feminist critics have come up with an entirely different theory of how woman writers work within traditions). Only through a misreading of the previous poets can an author clear the imaginative space need to create his own works. A perfect example of this “misreading” can be found in Arthur Henry Hallam’s misreading of Keats as a mere “poet of sensation” to clear an imaginative space for his friend Alfred Tennyson (a space later occupied as well by the PRB). See Dan Geddes good review of Bloom’s theory.

IV. Reception and Reputation

1. These branches of scholarship are concerned, respectively, with contemporary and subsequent receptions of a literary work. Reputation studies chart the up and downs (and sometimes ups again) of an author’s standing among critics and readers and is closely tied to the issue of canon-formation. Both studies in reception and reputation are of interest for what they say about the work of literature concerned, but they are arguably of even greater interest in what they reveal about the forces of the literary marketplace of their day and time. Often a writer who once faded into obscurity, say for ideological or gender reasons, reemerges as the ideological ground shifts, allowing for dramatic narratives of the critic as reviver of some lazarus-poet.

2. To study the way a work was received upon its first publication, scholars look to three key areas: 1) its popular reception (such things as the number of copies printed and sold, the number of editions printed, popular adaptations made); 2) critical reception (a look at the reviews of the day in literary magazines and journals, with a keen eye toward their philosophical and political orientation); 3) contemporary and later authors’ reactions (what other authors have to say about the work).

3. Examples:

· The largely negative reception of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening → its dominant position in the canon today

· Alexander Pope’s editing of King Lear (and the story of Thomas Bowdler)

· After alarmingly negative reviews, M.G. Lewis obligingly removes all the offending passages from his gothic novel The Monk in its fourth edition. (See how some readers coped with the problem of reading this notorious novel.)

· The new critics’ elevation of an obscure Mississippi author to canonical status: William Faulkner

· The originality of the Lyrical Ballads

· See David Chandler’s essay on “Southey's ‘German Sublimity’ and Coleridge's ‘Dutch Attempt.’”

4. Reception and reputation studies provide crucial information about the relationship of an author to his or her literary marketplace; indeed, they are often more illuminating about competing critical voices of that marketplace than about the text in question. (this section needs development).

Reception and Reputation studies underscore a major issue in literary theory today, the issue of canonicity. Such studies reveal the always fluid and changing nature of canons (with an emphasis on the plural) and make clear a key idea: canons are not received but constructed, and they reflect the dominant ideologies of their historical periods (and how we today construct our understanding of those periods).

Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form—
Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones—
I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song. “Prospectus” to The Recluse (1814)