The aesthetics of textual criticism revisited

Abstract

The textual critic of literature must be able to see a work in its aesthetic nature to recover it, and the concepts of the autonomy of the individual work and its corollary, the ideal intrinsic unity of that work, help give editors the necessary vision. Yet acceptance of the involvement of these aesthetic concepts has not been unanimous among editors but has rather occasioned a considerable body of critical theory. This dissertation makes three studies of the debate, beginning with James Thorpe's "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism," which originally enunciated most of the important issues. Unfortunately, like many pioneer efforts this great essay is flawed seriously, for Thorpe seeks to minimize the role of criticism and internal context in editing. In his theory, publication and not the constitution of the text determines completeness and thus authority, and external evidence about publication history becomes the most valuable evidence of all. By contrast, G. Thomas Tanselle has produced a substantial corpus of theoretical writings defending the role of criticism in editing and openly embracing the editorial use of organic unity as a conceptual tool. He develops the rationale for this tool most explicitly in dealing with the problem of multiple authorial versions, but the concept comes into play throughout his theory. Ultimately, this commitment to unity rests on the internal-external distinction, the more basic of the two concepts. Yet this distinction breaks down partly in the case of literary conventions, which are textually both integral and inorganic. Meter is perhaps the most interesting of these elements, for it is clearly not only aesthetic in nature but also autonomous and unified. The third study examines this prosodic phenomenon, and the critical and historical basis of its apperception, in the context of the current scholarly reappraisal of Chaucer's "heroic" line. It becomes clear that once textual critics understand the precise aesthetic nature of meter, their reconstruction of it will become more rigorous and productive.