Matthew Driscoll, The Words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology, Old and New
Fa una storia della New Philology nel paragrafo "The 'New' Philology" (coi saggi chiave originari, soprattutto intorno alla nota 5 del PDF), e poi cita come è stata accolta e che critiche le sono state fatte (e risponde alle critiche). Poi discute (in una parte che non ho letto), di come l'Arnamagnaean Institute ha avuto un ruolo in questa corrente critica. Riporto qui il passaggio in cui cita i 'precedenti'/'precursori' della New Philology: "To the former of these accusations, that there is nothing new in the new philology, it can only be said that, like any other movement, trend or school, the new philology did not spring fully formed ex nihilo. One of its more obvious antecedents is Paul Zumthor’s Essai du poétique médiévale from 1972, which introduced the concept of mouvance, the mobilité essentielle du texte médiéval,[11] without which Cerquiglini’s ideas would have been unthinkable. Another is to be found in developments within Anglo-American bibliography, culminating, for some, in Don McKenzie’s 1985 Panizzi lectures, published the following year as Bibliography and the sociology of texts, which argued that since any history of the book must take into account the social, economic and political motivations of publishing, the reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, it is more useful to describe bibliography as the study of the sociology of texts; sociology because it deals with the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission and consumption.[12] Others might point to Jerome McGann’s book A critique of modern textual criticism from 1983, which also proposed a sociological, rather than an intentionalist, approach, arguing that literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products.[13] Nor should we underestimate the influence of French (and French-inspired) work in histoire du livre,[14] work in the German-speaking world in the 80s on the history of transmission, Überlieferungsgeschichte,[15] and the extensive work in orality and literacy on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 70s and 80s[16]—in fact pretty much everything that went on in literary and cultural studies from the late 60s onwards, subsumed under the general heading post-structuralism, which, among other things, de-emphasised or denied outright the importance of the author, focusing instead on the inevitably collaborative nature of literary production, dissemination and reception and the cultural, historical and ideological forces at work in these processes". I riferimenti bibliografici precisi a questi saggi sono nell'articolo di Driscoll, che è disponibile full text online. Conclusioni: "So rather than mere electronic versions of printed texts what we ought possibly to be thinking of are interactive text archives, where the user determines to a much greater extent the nature and scope of the content and how that content is presented. I hasten to add that I am not suggesting that we relax our scholarly rigour or compromise our philological principles, only that we recognise that people may want to use our texts in ways other than those we ourselves have envisaged".
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