Interesting... I'm trying to imagine what a full-on, annotated, scholarly variorum edition of even a single poem would look like, bringing every retrievable concurrent, adjacent, and potentially contributory factor to bear in this way. Sort of internet sized, probably... I see the Treaty of Amiens was signed on 25th March 1802: could some version of "morphic resonance" or "six degrees of separation" link Napoleon to Mr. Ollif's dung? (Shakespeare got there first, of course: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away"...)
Apart from the fact that scholarly, annotated editions are already pretty distracting, when the footnotes outweigh the text, I'm wondering how anyone would retain their sanity, confronted with such an overwhelming sense of intertextuality? We could be entering into Borges territory here, and creating a 1:1 scale map. Help!
thanks, mike. i think one implication of what i wrote might be the inverse -- not to propose a kind of total context, but to abandon context altogether. the Borgesian chaos of this thought experiment should act as a check on scholarship which proposes too tidy a relationship between text and context. i've been thinking recently about the poverty of typical historicist readings of -- for example -- Shakespeare. Queen Elizabeth is ageing and has no heirs. Shakespeare writes Midsummer Night's Dream. So what? It's so feeble and clumsy as an interpretative mode!
Agreed! The most literary fun I ever had was at A-level, and to be encouraged to engage our untutored, anachronistic gears with a poem, just to see what might happen. That interpretive buzz *is* literature, surely, however ill-informed, crazy, or off the mark, and why the writing and reading of "literary works" has been privileged over other harmless pastimes like stamp-collecting.
Although, as an outsider, I suspect "so what?" may also be a very dangerous question for any scholar to contemplate...
Interesting... I'm trying to imagine what a full-on, annotated, scholarly variorum edition of even a single poem would look like, bringing every retrievable concurrent, adjacent, and potentially contributory factor to bear in this way. Sort of internet sized, probably... I see the Treaty of Amiens was signed on 25th March 1802: could some version of "morphic resonance" or "six degrees of separation" link Napoleon to Mr. Ollif's dung? (Shakespeare got there first, of course: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away"...)
Apart from the fact that scholarly, annotated editions are already pretty distracting, when the footnotes outweigh the text, I'm wondering how anyone would retain their sanity, confronted with such an overwhelming sense of intertextuality? We could be entering into Borges territory here, and creating a 1:1 scale map. Help!
Mike
thanks, mike. i think one implication of what i wrote might be the inverse -- not to propose a kind of total context, but to abandon context altogether. the Borgesian chaos of this thought experiment should act as a check on scholarship which proposes too tidy a relationship between text and context. i've been thinking recently about the poverty of typical historicist readings of -- for example -- Shakespeare. Queen Elizabeth is ageing and has no heirs. Shakespeare writes Midsummer Night's Dream. So what? It's so feeble and clumsy as an interpretative mode!
Agreed! The most literary fun I ever had was at A-level, and to be encouraged to engage our untutored, anachronistic gears with a poem, just to see what might happen. That interpretive buzz *is* literature, surely, however ill-informed, crazy, or off the mark, and why the writing and reading of "literary works" has been privileged over other harmless pastimes like stamp-collecting.
Although, as an outsider, I suspect "so what?" may also be a very dangerous question for any scholar to contemplate...
Mike