Untitled - witz cultural

A Third Convergence: Hypertextour conceptions oftext and textuality. The dispersed textualandTheories of scholarty Editing -All forms of hypertext, even the most rudimentary, changeiry characteristic of this information technology therefore callsinto question some of the most basic assumptions about thenature of text and scholarly textual editing. The appearance of the digitalword has the major cultural effect of permitting us, for the first time in centuries,easily to perceive the degree to which we have become so accustomedto the qualities and cultural effects of the book that we unconsciously transferthem to the productions of oral and manuscript cultures. We so tend totake print and print-based culture for granted that, as the ;'argon has it, wehave "naturalized" the book by assuming that habits of mind and manners ofworking associated with it have naturally and inevitably always existed. Eisenstein,Mcluhan, Kernan, and other students of the cultural implications ofprint technology have demonstrated the ways in which the printed bookformed and informed our intellectual history. They point out, for example,that a great part ofthese cultural effects derive from book technology's creationof multiple copies of essentiallythe same text. Multiple copies of a fixedtext in turn produce scholarship and education as we know it by permittingreaders in different times and places to consult and refer to the "same" text.Historians of print technology also point out that economic factors associatedwith book production led to the development of both copyright and relatednotions of creativity and originality. My reason for once again going over thisfamiliar ground lies in the fact that all these factors combine to make a single,singular unitary text an almost unspoken cultural ideal. They provide, inother words, the cultural model and justification for scholarly textual editingas we have known it.It is particularly ironic or simple poetic justice-take your pick-thatdigital technology so calls into question the assumptions of print-associatededitorial theory that it forces us to reconceive editing texts originally producedfor print as well as those created within earlier information regimes.Print technology's emphasis on the unitary text prompted the notion of asingle perfect version of all texts at precisely the cultural moment that thepresence of multiple print editions undercut that emphasis-something notmuch recognized, if at all, until the arrival of digitality. As the work of famesThorpe, George Bornstein, ferome J. McGann, and others has urged, anypublication during an author's lifetime that in some manner received his orher approval-if only to the extent that the author later chose not to correctchanges made by an editor or printer-isan authentic edition. Looking atthe works of authors such as Ruskin and Yeats, who radically rewrote and