Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812237773 ISBN 13: 9780812237771

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work.

Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to philology and textual criticism. As Genetic Criticism demonstrates, the chief concern is not the "final" text but the reconstruction and analysis of the writing process. Geneticists find endless richness in what they call the "avant-texte": a critical gathering of a writer's notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence. Together, the essays in this volume reveal how genetic criticism cooperates with such forms of literary study as narratology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociocriticism, deconstruction, and gender theory.

Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.

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Jed Deppman teaches comparative literature and English at Oberlin College and has written on Flaubert, Valery, Joyce, Dickinson, and other writers. Daniel Ferrer is Director of Research at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language and coeditor of Poststructuralist Joyce, Pourquoi la critique genetique? Methodes, theories, and the ongoing "Finnegans Wake" Notebooks at Buffalo project. Michael Groden is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of "Ulysses" in Progress, general editor of The James Joyce Archive, and coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

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Introduction
Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden

"Nothing is more beautiful than a beautiful manuscript draft. . . . A complete poem would be the poem of a Poem starting from its fertilized embryo—and its successive states, unexpected interpolations, and approximations. That's real Genesis."—Paul Valéry (Cahiers 15:480-81; Cahiers/Notebooks, "Poetry" 2:219)

"Manuscripts have something new to tell us: it is high time we learned to make them speak."—Louis Hay, "History or Genesis?" (Drafts 207)

The eleven essays in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes represent a French literary critical movement called critique génétique, or "genetic criticism." As the volume's editors, we faced an embarrassment of riches when we made our selections, for thirty years of activity had produced a wealth of essays and a variety of strains in the movement. To indicate its diversity, we chose general, theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors, and, since we also wished to emphasize the movement's foundations rather than its latest developments, we included many that belong to its early years. Even with these essays, however, we aimed to represent a range of issues that French genetic critics currently tend to deal with, the problems they see, the approaches and models they apply, and the observations and conclusions they make when they look at and listen to manuscripts. None of the essays has previously been translated, yet some have already become classics in France. Since interest in the materiality of texts is now strong in the English-speaking world, we think that Genetic Criticism has the potential to open up new perspectives and broaden the audience for genetic criticism.

This introduction outlines the development of French genetic criticism in relation to its intellectual and institutional contexts. It also presents some of genetic criticism's main approaches and theoretical terms and describes the important role played by the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM) in its development.

In 1977, Louis Hay considered French genetic criticism to be a "new field of research" and wrote that among the "fairy Godmothers" present at its birth the most powerful was "the spirit of paradox" ("La Critique génétique" 227; see page [Hay p. 4] below). A quarter of a century later, genetic criticism remains paradoxical. It aims to restore a temporal dimension to the study of literature, but it cannot be identified with or derived from traditional literary history or New Historicism. It includes features of reception criticism but is mainly concerned with how texts are produced. Unlike Pierre Bourdieu's sociological dismissals of literary phenomena or psychocriticism's reductively psychoanalytic accounts of them, it remains deeply aware of the text's aesthetic dimensions, and yet it is ever ready to accommodate the agency of sociological forces or psychoanalytic drives into its accounts. It grows out of a structuralist and poststructuralist notion of "text" as an infinite play of signs, but it accepts a teleological model of textuality and constantly confronts the question of authorship. Like old-fashioned philology or textual criticism, it examines tangible documents such as writers' notes, drafts, and proof corrections, but its real object is something much more abstract—not the existing documents but the movement of writing that must be inferred from them. Then, too, it remains concrete, for it never posits an ideal text beyond those documents but rather strives to reconstruct, from all available evidence, the chain of events in a writing process.

As a literary theory and practice, genetic criticism is a true child of the French structuralist movement that bloomed in the 1960s and 1970s, and yet it has not only survived Roland Barthes' death, Tzvetan Todorov's retreat into ethics, and Gérard Genette's passage from narratology to general aesthetics, it is only now reaching maturity. It cooperates closely with many different forms of literary study—narratology, linguistic analysis, psychoanalytic approaches of various kinds, sociocriticism, deconstruction, gender theory, etc.—but at the same time refuses to see itself as what René Wellek and Austin Warren once called the "preliminary labours" of criticism and scholarship (57). It is a form of criticism of its own.

Even Hay's claim that it is "high time" to make manuscripts speak is paradoxical, for critics have known for a long time that manuscripts are worth looking at. Joseph Spence speculated in 1730 that it would be useful "for a poet, to compare in those parts what was written first, with the successive alterations; to learn his turns and arts in versification; and to consider the reasons why such and such an alteration was made" (qtd. Gibson vii), and Samuel Johnson remarked in 1779 that "it is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradual growth and expansion, and to observe how they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental hints, and sometimes slowly improved by steady meditation" (Selected Poetry and Prose 407). In the nineteenth century the genetic outlook grew more complex, as we see in Madame de Staël's 1800 claim that since "each correction supposes a mass of ideas which decide the mind often without our knowing it . . . one could compose a treatise on style based on the manuscripts of great writers" or in Friedrich Schlegel's 1804 assertion that "one can only claim to have real understanding of a work, or of a thought, when one can reconstitute its becoming and its composition. This intimate comprehension . . . constitutes the very object and essence of criticism" (see page [Hay p. 5] below).

Surely the best-known of all pre-twentieth-century pronouncements of this kind comes from Edgar Allan Poe's 1846 "The Philosophy of Composition," which Charles Baudelaire translated a decade later as "Genèse d'un poème" [Genesis of a poem] and which stands as one of the foundational texts of French genetic criticism. Poe calls for an author "who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion" (743) and then methodically fulfills his own request for a reconstruction of the poetic process by analyzing "The Raven." Working from the premise that an artist's first task is always to choose the desired effect, he explains how he settled on such elements as the poem's length, its tone of sadness, the central detail of the raven, the versification, the setting, and the word "nevermore" in the refrain. Crucially, Poe counters the assumption that poets "compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition" (743) by describing his own writing process as mechanical and devoid of problems or complications. In contrast to the inspirational and organic conceptions of literary creation that were popular with the Romantics, Poe's account is a pure example of what Almuth Grésillon later called "constructivism" (108), i.e., the view that poets are like craftsmen or skilled workers who learn rules and know when and how to break them.

By the middle of the twentieth century, critics often shared Donald A. Stauffer's opinion that manuscripts are valuable only in relation to the finished work: "What light . . . does the composition of a poem throw upon its meaning and its beauty? What difficulties in a finished poem may be explained, what pointless ambiguities dispelled, what purposeful ambiguities sharpened, by references found in its earlier states?" (Poets at Work 43-44). Very few, thought most mid-century critics, for they agreed with T.S. Eliot that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812237773
• ISBN 13: 9780812237771
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Herausgeber: Deppman Jed, Ferrer Daniel, Groden Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland