Teoksen synty ei ole tekstinsä funktio

Tekstuaalitieteellisen tekijätutkimuksen suuntia

• Teemu Manninen Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74801

Abstract

The Genesis of a Work Is Not a Function of It’s Text . The Study of Authorship in Textual Scholarship

This article provides a short introduction to how authorship has been studied within the many fields of textual scholarship (from bibliography, codicology, diplomatics and paleography to textual criticism, genetic critique and book history). The main aim is to explain the difference between criticism and scholarship to a Finnish audience, and to describe the differing tasks, objects and methodologies of textual study – highlighting the fact that questions of authorship are approached and construed slightly differently in textual scholarship. A central point is that whereas mainstream literary study is often founded on an analytic, hermeneutic imperative (the need to interpret literary works and place them within the hermeneutic horizons of genres, periods and literary institutions), textual scholarship is driven by a synthetic archival responsibility (the need to measure, order, edit, store and manage literary artefacts, documents and information, and to theorize the role of the archive in modern societies).

Four areas of textual authorship studies come into closer focus. Firstly, the article explains the background of genetic criticism in Pierre Macherey’s and Michel Foucault’s theoretical opening gestures, and explicates the notion that "the genesis of a work is not a function of its text" (Louis Hay). Then it takes up Jerome J. McGann’s argument with the theory of final intentions in critical editing, and his notion of social collaboration and literature as a social act as the defining aspect of authorship. This is followed by an explication of the reasons behind Don McKenzie’s enlargement of bibliographical study into the sociology of texts (the study of the social, material and economic conditions of textual transmission), and comparing them to Rachel Malik’s suggestion that scholars ought to study the "horizon of the publishable". Finally the article examines the way in which recent scholars of early modern manuscript culture have revealed the "malleable" (Arthur Marotti) nature of manuscript texts and the social con¬ceptions of authorship which prevailed in scribal publication. The conclusion contrasts these with our modern conceptions of literary works which themselves are related to the conditions imposed by print publication.