Untitled - witz cultural

I01RECONFIGURINGTHE TEXTture in terms of the unitary text of modern scholarship certainly fictionalizes-andfalsifies-their intertextual relations.Modern scholar\ editions and manuscripts combine both uniquenessand multiplicity, but they do so in different ways. A modern edition of Plato,Vergil, or Augustine begins by assuming the existence of a unique, unitarytext, but it is produced in the first place because it can disseminate that textin a number of identical copies. In contrast, each ancient or medieval manuscript,which embodies only one of many potential variations of "a text,"exists as a unique object. A new conception oftext is needed by scholars tryingto determine not some probably mythical and certainly long-lost mastertext but the ways individual readers actually encountered Plato, Vergil, orAugustine in a manuscript culture. In fact, we must abandon the notion of aunitary text and replace it with conceptions of a dispersed text. We must do,in other words, what some art historians working with analogous medievalproblems have done-take the conception of a unique type embodied in asingle object andreplace itwith a conception of a type as a complex setofvariants.For example, tryingto determine the thematic, iconological, and compositionalantecedents of early-fourteenth-century ivory Madonnas, RobertSuckale and other recent students ofthe Court Style have abandoned linearderivations and the notion of a unitary type. Instead, they emphasize thatsculptors chose among several sets of fundamental forms or "groundplans"as points of departure. Some sort of change in basic attitudes toward the creationsof manuscript culfure seems necessary.The capacity ofhypertext to link all the versions or variants of a particulartext might offer a means of somewhat redressing the balance betweenuniqueness and variation in preprint texts. Ofcourse, even in hypertext presentations,both modern printing conventions and scholarly apparatus willstill infringe on attempts to recreate the experience of encountering thesetexts, and nothing can restore the uniqueness and corollary aura of the individual manuscript. Nonetheless, as the work of Peter Robinson shows, hypertextoffers the possibility ofpresenting a text as a dispersed field ofvariantsand not as a falsely unitary entity. High-resolution screens and other technologicalcapacities also increasingly permit a means of presenting all the individual manuscripts. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has already put onlinedetailed, large-scale images of some of its most precious illuminated manuscripts.An acquaintance with hypertext systems might by itself sufficientlychange assumptions about textuality to free students of preprint texts fromsome of their biases.