0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project  (Page 6/6)

So far, this is familiar ground. We all recognize, in particular, the thorough re-conceptualization-into-individuality of “author” and “authorship” around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. An earlier concept of an author standing as an authority and guarantor of his work without this necessarily entailing the literatim identity of the texts of that work shifted to precisely such a literatim identity of author and work. What I believe has been less carefully observed and assessed is the subsequent development of the notions of “author” and “authorship” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What could interest us here especially are the shifts in self-awareness of the authors. Charles Dickens as the author of David Copperfield is not essentially different in his self-awareness from Goethe as the author of Wilhelm Meister , or even Faust . Goethe and Dickens were, in their authorship, very much aware of themselves as public figures; and their texts and works stood in for their image. Nor, might we say, does Henry James fundamentally differ, particularly taking into account his late self-fashioning by way of his monumental New York Edition. There is, however, a notable undercurrent to Henry James's writing. Whenever he went public with his texts (and for many of them he did so repeatedly), he always changed them, in some cases indeed to excessive degrees. This means, I suggest, that Henry James is an especially prominent figure among authors around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century recognizing variability and dynamics as essentially of the nature of texts. What we have been told, or believe to have recognized, is that authorship from a time about a hundred years ago became an increasingly private matter and concern, exercised no longer so much to the end of publishing the consummate finished work of art but as an end in itself. Yet perhaps even just the rate at which published works proliferated over that century should cast doubt on such rationalization.

Could it not be, instead, that authors, in their sense of authorship, and in their self-awareness, have been, by now more than a century, ahead of us literary critics, textual critics and editors? Through re-assessing “authorship,” and themselves in their occupation as authors, they have (re-)discovered fluidity of writing and texting as a main force, dynamic and variable, in and of the writings and texts they create. (Did I cite the title of Finnegans Wake above? For the full seventeen years or so of its gestation, it was named "Work-in-Progress.")

The way textual critics and editors of the modern period are beginning to respond to such internalizing-into-authorship of the very ontology of texts is by devising multi-text editorial formats. Thus they meet the Homer Multitext project on essentially the same ground. The Homer Multitext project, in theoretical and conceptual as well as in editorial terms, has clearly a model potential at large for literary and textual scholarship-to-come. This is true, too, with regard to its structuring as a born-digital product—a “scholarly edition,” yet one in a distinctly futuristic shape-of-things-to-come—comprising a multi-faceted, indeed multi-textualized, commentary environment. I can see that critiquing this side of the complex project, were I to attempt to do adequate justice to it, would require a second round of exploration on a par with this first one. On this twenty-eighth of February 2010, instead, I give way to the deadline for submission of a response. Yet see my recent essay, "Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition," at this time of writing still free downloadable at (External Link) .